Not sure what to read next? Here is a list of some of the most popular book club choices from the last 10 years, complete with the publishers’ descriptions.
2006
Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert
In her early 30’s, Elizabeth Gilbert had everything a modern American woman was supposed to want, but instead of feeling fulfilled and happy, she was consumed by confusion and panic. This is the story of how left everything behind and set out to explore three different aspects of her nature in three different cultures: pleasure in Italy, devotion in India, and balance between divine transcendence and worldly enjoyment in Bali.
The Road by Cormac McCarthy
This post-apocalyptic novel is about a father and his son walking to the coast through a burned America, not knowing what awaits them there. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape except ash in the wind, the sky is dark, snow falls gray, and it’s cold enough to crack stones.
Water for Elephants by Sara Gruen
Jacob Janowski, penniless and orphaned, ends up on a train that’s home to the Benzini Brothers Most Spectacular Show on Earth. While caring for the circus animals, he meets Marlena, a beautiful equestrian star who is married to the brutal animal trainer, August. He also meets Rosie, an untrainable elephant who supposed to be the traveling show’s great hope.
The Book Thief by Markus Zusak
In 1939, Liesel Meminger is a foster child who makes a meager living outside of Munich by stealing books. With the help of her foster father, she learns how to read and shares her books with neighbors during bombing raids, as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement.
2007
A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini
Laila and Mariam, born a generation apart and with very different ideas about family and love, are brought together by war, loss, and fate. As they endure the ever-escalating dangers around them, they form a bond that make them both mother-daughter and sisters to each other that alters the course of their own lives and of the next generation.
The Shack by Wm. Paul Young
Missy, Mackenzie Allen Phillip’s youngest daughter, has been abducted during a family vacation. Evidence that she may have been brutally murdered is found in an abandoned shack deep in the Oregon wilderness. Mack receives a suspicious note four years later, supposedly from God, that invites him to return to that shack for a weekend. He arrives one wintry afternoon, and what he finds changes his life forever.
2008
The Hunger Games by Suzanne Collins
In the ruins of North America lies the nation of Panem, a shining Capitol surrounded by twelve outlying districts. The Capitol is harsh and cruel and keeps the districts in line by forcing them all to send one boy and one girl between the ages of twelve and eighteen to participate in the annual Hunger Games, a fight to the death on live TV. Sixteen-year-old Katniss Everdeen regards it as a death sentence when she is forced to represent her district in the Games. Survival, for her, is second nature though. But if she is to win, she will have to start making choices that weigh survival against humanity and life against love.
2009
Little Bee by Chris Cleave
The lives of a 16-year-old Nigerian orphan and a well-off British woman collide in this page-turning #1 New York Times bestseller. Overall, a very funny book with some sad and serious scenes here and there.
The Help by Kathryn Stockett
Aibileen is a black maid in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, who’s always taken orders quietly, but lately she’s unable to hold her bitterness back. Her friend Minny has never held her tongue, but now must somehow keep secrets about her employer. White socialite Skeeter just graduated college, but without a husband, she’s considered a failure. Together, these seemingly different women join together to write a tell-all book about work as a black maid in the South, that could forever alter their destinies and the life of their small town.
2010
Room by Emma Donoghue
To five-year-old-Jack, Room is the world. It’s where he was born, and where he and his Ma eat, sleep, and play. At night, his Ma shuts him safely in the wardrobe, where he is meant to be asleep when Old Nick visits. Room is home to Jack, but to Ma, it’s the prison where she has been held for seven years. Through her fierce love for her son, she has created a life for him in this 11-by-11-foot space. But with Jack’s curiosity building alongside her own desperation, she knows that Room cannot contain either much longer.
Unbroken by Laura Hillenbrand
In childhood, Louis Zamperini was incorrigible. As a teenager, he channeled his defiance into running, a talent that had led him to the Berlin Olympics. When World War II began, he became an airman, embarking on a journey that led to a doomed flight on a May afternoon in 1943. When his Army Air Forces bomber crashed into the Pacific Ocean, against all odds, Zamperini survived, adrift on a foundering life raft. Driven to the limits of endurance, Zamperini answers desperation with ingenuity; suffering with hope, resolve, and humor; and brutality with rebellion. His fate, whether triumph or tragedy, would be suspended on the fraying wire of his will.
2011
The Martian by Andy Weir
Astronaut Mark Watney became one of the first people to walk on Mars. Now, he’s sure he’ll be the first person to die there. After a dust storm nearly kills him and forces his crew to evacuate while thinking him dead, Mark finds himself stranded with no way to even signal Earth that he’s alive. Even if he could get word out, his supplies would be gone long before a rescue could arrive. However, an unforgiving environment, damaged machinery, or “human error” are much more likely to kill him before he’d starve to death. Drawing on his ingenuity, his engineering skills, and a refusal to quit, he confronts one seemingly insurmountable obstacle after the next.
2012
Me Before You by Jojo Moyes
Louis Clark is an ordinary woman with an ordinary life who has barely traveled farther than her small town. She takes a badly needed job working for ex–Master of the Universe Will Traynor, who is wheelchair bound after an accident. Will’s life had been anything but ordinary — big deals, extreme sports, worldwide travel — and now he’s pretty sure he cannot live the way he is. He’s bossy and moody, but Lou refuses to treat him with kid gloves, and soon his happiness means more to her than she expected. When she learns that Will has shocking plans of his own, she sets out to show him that life is still worth living.
Wild by Cheryl Strayed
At 22, Cheryl Strayed thought she had lost everything. Four years after the death of her mother, her family scattered, and her marriage destroyed, she made an impulsive decision: to hike the Pacific Crest Trail from the Mojave Desert to Washington State alone. She had no experience as a long-distance hiker, and the trail was little more than an idea, vague and outlandish and full of promise. But it was a promise of piecing back together a life that had come undone.
Gone Girl by Gillian Flynn
In North Carthage, Missouri, it is Nick and Amy Dunne’s fifth wedding anniversary. Presents are being wrapped and reservations are being made when Nick’s clever and beautiful wife disappears. Nick isn’t doing himself any favors with cringe-worthy daydreams about the slope and shape of his wife’s head, but passages from Amy’s diary reveal the alpha-girl perfectionist could have put anyone dangerously on edge. Under mounting pressure from the police, the media, and Amy’s fiercely doting parents, the town golden boy parades an endless series of lies, deceits, and inappropriate behavior. Nick is oddly evasive, and he’s definitely bitter, but is he really a killer?
2013
The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty
Imagine that your husband wrote you a letter, to be opened after his death. Imagine that the letter contains his deepest, darkest secret. A secret with the potential to destroy not just the life you built together, but the lives of others as well. Imagine that you stumble across that letter while your husband is still alive. Cecilia Fitzpatrick has achieved it all. She’s an incredibly successful businesswoman, a pillar of her small community, and a devoted wife and mother. But that letter is about to change everything, and not just for her: Rachel and Tess barely know Cecilia, or each other, but they too are about to feel the earth-shattering repercussions of her husband’s secret.
2014
All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doerr
Marie-Laure lives with her father in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where he works as the master of its thousands of locks. She goes blind when she is six, and her father builds a perfect miniature of their neighborhood so she can memorize it by touch and navigate her way home. When Marie-Laure is 12, the Nazis occupy Paris. She and her father flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where her reclusive great-uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. They take with them what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel. In a mining town in Germany, Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing radios, a talent that lands him at a brutal academy for Hitler Youth, then a special assignment to track the resistance. Becoming increasingly aware of the human cost of his intelligence, Werner travels through the heart of the war and, finally, into Saint-Malo, where his story and Marie-Laure’s converge.
2015
The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
Rachel takes the same commuter train every morning and night. Every day the train stops at the signal that allows her to watch the same couple each day. She’s even started to feel like she knows them. Their life seems perfect, but then she sees something shocking. It’s only for a minute, but it’s enough. Unable to keep it to herself, Rachel goes to the police. Soon she is deeply entangled not only in the investigation but in the lives of everyone involved.
2016
The Girls by Emma Cline
During the end of the 1960’s in northern California, a lonely and thoughtful teenager, Evie Boyd, sees a group of girls in the park, and is immediately caught by their freedom, their careless dress, their dangerous aura of abandon. Soon, Evie is drawn into the circle of a soon-to-be infamous cult and the man who is its charismatic leader. Hidden in the hills, their sprawling ranch is run down and eerie, but to Evie, it is thrilling and exotic, a place where she feels desperate to be accepted. As she spends more time away from her mother and her daily life, Evie does not realize she is coming closer and closer to unthinkable violence.