Show up to your next book club meeting with these 12 reading recommendations

Sometimes you finish a book and just have to talk about it with someone else. If your book club is looking for its next conversation-sparking title we have a dozen for you! These fiction and nonfiction titles were all recommended by NPR staff and critics for the latest installment of Books We Love, our annual year-end books guide. Books We Love allows you to browse 12 years-worth of book club recommendations and filter them by genre to find the title that’s perfect for you and your reading buddies. Here are a few to get you started:

Catalina by Karla Cornejo Villavicencio

Catalina Ituralde is that elusive, cool, shrewdly intelligent, cultured friend who has somehow managed to be unapologetically herself. She is main-character energy. Her senior year at Harvard, Catalina wants to date fellow student Nathaniel Wheeler, work on the literary magazine and write a killer thesis. What happens after graduation is uncertain. As a DREAMer raised in Queens, she’s navigating her undocumented status, her relationship with her grandparents and her place in a world that isn’t built for her. Catalina is a melding of unflinching personal insights and insecurities with an analytical exploration into the politics of feminism, colonialism, race, class and gender. As author Karla Cornejo Villavicencio puts it – out of all the abandoned girls, Catalina could be the valedictorian. — Christina Cala, senior producer, Code Switch

Circle of Hope: A Reckoning with Love, Power, and Justice in an American Church by Eliza Griswold

Eliza Griswold likens her style of immersion journalism to hitchhiking: You might think you’re headed to Vermont, only to find yourself lost in Las Vegas. Something of the sort happens in her nonfiction book *Circle of Hope*. She spots the hipsters and spiritual refugees who make up Philadelphia’s Circle of Hope church, and she embeds with its four pastors, expecting to tell a story about modern Christians emulating Jesus’ earliest followers. But the story takes a sharp left turn as the church confronts the COVID-19 pandemic and its own racial missteps. It’s not a happy ending – the Circle, in the end, is broken. But animated by Griswold’s sharp eye and deep empathy for the church’s idealistic but flawed leaders, the book is more than worth the journey. — Daniel Burke, senior editor, Religion and Spirituality

Colored Television by Danzy Senna

Danzy Senna has earned a stellar reputation for her discerning reflections on the experience of being Black and biracial in an aspirationally post-racial America. Her exhilarating, satirical fourth novel, Colored Television, is one of the sharpest, most viscerally entertaining novels I’ve read in years. Jane is a literary novelist who’s sick of living in genteel, precarious poverty in the cold shadow of Hollywood’s dream factory. When her spectacularly esoteric, centuries-spanning saga of mixed-race history (a “mulatto War and Peace“) doesn’t sell, she launches a perilous yet hilarious bid to become a TV writer instead. It’s a wild and poignant ride. — Carole V. Bell, culture critic and media and politics researcher

Grief Is for People by Sloane Crosley

I spent most of the last year mourning my mother and found few books that even got close to capturing my altered mental state. My brain kept rehashing the past and finding significance in the oddest things, and I so wanted to share that experience with the very person I was missing. In a slim 191 pages, Sloane Crosley nails it precisely as she details mourning her best friend, who died suddenly by suicide. While poignant and vulnerable, her memoir is also insightful and funny, especially as she recounts adventures with Russell and her attempts to track down and reclaim jewelry that was stolen from her apartment about a month before he died: a caper he would have enjoyed in the telling. I finished it feeling grateful for her friend’s life and even more appreciative of my mom’s. — Melissa Gray, senior producer, Weekend Edition

Holding It Together: How Women Became America’s Safety Net by Jessica Calarco

Maybe it’s the age I’m in – seeing friends and peers become parents while also caring for their own parents, seeing how it radically changes their lives, seeing the price of child care! – but this book hit home. Drawing on surveys and in-depth interviews, Holding It Together clearly lays out how the U.S. forces women to fill in as society’s support system through both written policy and cultural norms. Some of the interviews may ruin your day with how angry they make you. There is also a healthy dose of hope, as this book points us toward urgent institutional changes to pave a better path forward. — Erica Liao, senior digital analyst

Liars by Sarah Manguso

There’s something deliciously one-sided about Sarah Manguso’s Liars. It’s the story of the dissolution of a marriage, told from the eyes of a woman whose husband seems uninterested in husbanding. At first, it’s easy to brush off the slights as him just being a guy. But then the slights and put-downs and lies build, and it’s obvious to everyone outside of the relationship that this is unsustainable. It’s a story that’s been told a million times, but in Manguso’s hands, it’s terse and funny. The marriage is sour. You can wince, but you can’t look away. — Andrew Limbong, correspondent, Culture Desk and host, Book of the Day

The Mighty Red by Louise Erdrich

Louise Erdrich’s latest novel is set in North Dakota’s Red River Valley, and like a river, it gracefully winds through the landscape of Erdrich’s conscience: the toxic toll of large-scale farming (sugar beets, in this case), the inequities of capitalism, the sanctity of a good bookstore! Luckily, our guide is a Goth teen, Kismet, who comes of age before our eyes as she navigates tragedy and comedy, families both broken and bound by love, and, most importantly, two young men who profess to adore her. This is my favorite kind of book: one that can make you laugh and cry (and laugh again) in just a page, a paragraph or even one holy sentence. — Cory Turner, correspondent and senior editor, Education

Playground by Richard Powers

Richard Powers won the 2019 Pulitzer Prize for fiction for The Overstory, a book that helped many readers see trees in a different way. This novel does something similar with the world’s oceans and reefs. He weaves a story spanning decades, tracing a friendship and rivalry between childhood friends whose life paths veer in different directions. And he somehow manages to balance the sweep of subjects like colonialism, ecosystems and artificial intelligence with intimate details of humans playing games and cuttlefish putting on an underwater light show. — Ari Shapiro, host, All Things Considered

Rental House by Weike Wang

When you marry a person, do you also marry their family? That’s a question central to Rental House, Weike Wang’s smart and incisive novel about a married couple, Keru and Nate, and the fissures that appear in their relationship when their families (and some unexpected guests) join them on vacation. Keru’s parents are Chinese immigrants who believe that suffering is a necessary part of life; Nate’s rural, working-class family distrusts his academic inclinations. Is it any surprise that after two weeks of vacation, Keru and Nate are definitely not getting their security deposit back? — Bridget Bentz, web producer, Fresh Air

There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak

Turkish British writer Elif Shafak captivates with terrific storytelling, emphasizing that human arrogance and frailty can drive history. A page-turner, the novel starts with a single raindrop and follows it through centuries. Shafak involves us with a wide variety of protagonists from around the world; ancient Assyria is as transfixing as immigrant London in the 21st century. The author takes lessons from history to give us messages for the present. Iraq figures as home to vast civilizations, and as a place of conflict today. Whether categorized as Kurdish or Yazidi, one characters says, “We are the memory tribe.” — Martha Anne Toll, book critic and author of Three Muses

A Thousand Times Before by Asha Thanki

How are we shaped by those who came before us? A Thousand Times Before follows a magical tapestry passed down between three generations of women in one family, from pre-Partition Karachi to modern-day Brooklyn, which lets them inherit the memories of all the mothers and daughters before them and choose to influence their fate. An intricate and heartbreaking novel, it considers what we inherit and how history shapes us. It also beautifully captures the warmth of sisterhood and the bonds that women share. While reading, I paused between paragraphs to reflect on my own family and how each generation has responded to the one before. It’s a story that you want to share with your loved ones – I immediately thought of whom I would gift it to. — Nayantara Dutta, freelance writer

We’re Alone: Essays by Edwidge Danticat

Edwidge Danticat is agile when juggling duality. It’s a core feature of We’re Alone, her essay collection that strives for a “kind of aloneness/togetherness.” The title is a nod to both the isolation that life can make us feel and intimacy between reader and writer. And that duality governs so much of what Danticat confronts – displacement, gun violence, hurricanes, political tumult. Things that can end you, or make you anew. “Part of my job as a writer is to wrestle with mortality, both my own and that of others,” she writes. And yet Danticat’s observations feel more like a guide to living – a testament to what writers can offer in difficult times. — Tinbete Ermyas, editor, All Things Considered

This is just a fraction of the 350-plus titles we included in the latest installment of Books We Love. Click here to check out our recommended 2024 titles or browse nearly 4,000 books from the last 12 years.

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