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Book Club Picks December 2025 |
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Isola
by Allegra Goodman
A young woman and her lover are marooned on an island, in this breathtaking saga, an epic story of love, faith, and defiance *This audiobook contains a PDF with a map and recommendations for further reading from the book.Heir to a fortune, Marguerite is destined for a life of prosperity and gentility. Then she is orphaned, and her guardian--an enigmatic and volatile man--spends her inheritance and insists she accompany him on an expedition to New France. Isolated and afraid, Marguerite befriends her guardian's servant and the two develop an intense attraction. But when their relationship is discovered, they are brutally punished and abandoned on a small island with no hope for rescue.Once a child of privilege who dressed in gowns and laced pearls in her hair, Marguerite finds herself at the mercy of nature. As the weather turns, blanketing the island in ice, she discovers a faith she'd never before needed.Inspired by the real life of a sixteenth-century heroine, Isola is the timeless story of a woman fighting for survival.
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Homeseeking: A GMA Book Club Pick
by Karissa Chen
An epic and intimate tale of one couple across sixty years as world events pull them together and apart, illuminating the Chinese diaspora and exploring what it means to find home far from your homeland--
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Havoc
by Christopher Bollen
A Los Angeles Times Book Prize FinalistA New York Times' Best Thriller of the YearIn the vein of The Bad Seed comes a twisty, atmospheric psychological suspense about a meddlesome elderly guest at a decadent luxury hotel who believes she has left her problematic past behind, until she decides to interfere in the lives of a young mother and her eight-year-old son, and finally meets her wicked match.The war between age and youth has never been so vicious.Eighty-one-year-old widow Maggie Burkhardt came to the Royal Karnak to escape. But not in quite the same way as most other guests who are relaxing at this threadbare luxury hotel on the banks of the Nile. Maggie, a compulsive fixer of other people's lives, may have found herself in hot water at her last hotel in Switzerland and just might have needed to get out of there fast... But here at the Royal Karnak, under the hot Saharan sun, she has a comfortable suite, a loyal confidante in the hotel manager, Ahmed, and a handful of sympathetic friends, similar long-termers who understand her still-vivid grief for her late husband, Peter. Here, she is merely the sweet old lady in Room 309.One morning, however, Maggie notices a new arrival at check-in: a mournful-looking young mother named Tess and her impish eight-year-old, Otto. Eager to help, Maggie invites them into her world. But it isn't long before Maggie realizes that in her longing to be a part of their family, she has let in an enemy much stronger than she bargained for. In scrawny, homely Otto, Maggie Burkhardt has finally met her match.A propulsive, addictively-readable breakout from the critically acclaimed author of A Beautiful Crime and The Lost Americans, Havoc is brilliant, twisty psychological suspense that will get under your skin like the most unforgettable Hitchcock classics.
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Broken Country (Reese's Book Club)
by Clare Leslie Hall
A REESE'S BOOK CLUB PICK A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall is an unforgettable story of love, loss, and the choices that shape our lives...but it's also a masterfully crafted mystery that will keep you guessing until the very last page. Seriously, that ending?! I did not see it coming. --Reese Witherspoon Stirring and mysterious...fires directly at the human heart and hits the mark. --Delia Owens, New York Times bestselling author of Where the Crawdads Sing A love triangle unearths dangerous, deadly secrets from the past in this thrilling tale perfect for fans of The Paper Palace and Where the Crawdads Sing.The farmer is dead. He is dead, and all anyone wants to know is who killed him. Beth and her gentle, kind husband Frank are happily married, but their relationship relies on the past staying buried. But when Beth's brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn't realize that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives. For the dog belonged to none other than Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager--the man who broke her heart years ago. Gabriel has returned to the village with his young son Leo, a boy who reminds Beth very much of her own son, who died in a tragic accident. As Beth is pulled back into Gabriel's life, tensions around the village rise and dangerous secrets and jealousies from the past resurface, this time with deadly consequences. Beth is forced to make a choice between the woman she once was, and the woman she has become. A sweeping love story with the pace and twists of a thriller, Broken Country is a novel of simmering passion, impossible choices, and explosive consequences that toggles between the past and present to explore the far-reaching legacy of first love.
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Scaffolding
by Lauren Elkin
A Best Book of the Year: Vanity Fair, The Boston Globe, The Week, The New Statesman A Must-Read: The New Yorker, The New York Times Book Review, The Guardian, Marie Claire, Frieze, Literary Hub, The Millions, BBC, Our Culture, i news Sexy, intelligent . . . biting, too. --Keziah Weir, Vanity Fair The debut novel by the acclaimed author of Flâneuse and Art Monsters, Lauren Elkin's Scaffolding is a story of Paris, desire, love, psychoanalysis, and the turbulent affairs of two couples across time. Paris, 2019. An apartment in Belleville. Following a miscarriage and a breakdown, Anna, a psychoanalyst, finds herself unable to return to work. Instead, she obsesses over a kitchen renovation and befriends a new neighbor--a younger woman called Clémentine who has just moved into the building and is part of a radical feminist collective. Paris, 1972. The same apartment in Belleville. Florence and Henry are renovating their kitchen. She is finishing her degree in psychology, dropping into feminist activities, and devotedly attending the groundbreaking, infamous seminars held by the renowned analyst Jacques Lacan. She is hoping to conceive their first child, though Henry isn't sure he's ready for fatherhood. Two couples, fifty years apart, face the challenges of marriage, fidelity, and pregnancy. They inhabit this same small space in separate but similar times--times charged with political upheaval and intellectual controversy. A novel in the key of Éric Rohmer, Lauren Elkin's Scaffolding is about the way our homes collect and hold our memories and our stories, about the bonds we create and the difficulty of ever fully severing them, about the ways all the people we've loved live on in us.
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