12 Fantastic Book Club Reads Now in Paperback

King: A Life by Jonathan Eig 

This 2024 Pulitzer Prize-winning biography dives into Rev. Martin Luther King Jr.’s family history, childhood, accomplishments, private life, and more — hoping to create “a more intimate kind of biography,” Eig, who also wrote 2017’s Ali: A Life, about Muhammad Ali, told Library Journal. King’s life has been plumbed by countless other historians, of course, but this book may rise above those other bios. In The New York Times, Dwight Garner offered a glowing review, calling it “supple, penetrating, heartstring-pulling and compulsively readable.” 

Clytemnestra by Costanza Casati

This book had its own dramatic beginning: It was meant to be published in March of 2023, but its release was pushed to May of that year because the initial truckload of books burned in a fire. The “blazing novel,” as the publisher later billed it, offers a feminist spin on the story of ancient Greece’s legendary queen of Sparta, the matriarch of an epically dysfunctional (and cursed) family, who murdered her husband, Agamemnon, and later was killed by her children Electra and Orestes. Casati has a new novel that just came out January 14, Babylonia, an epic historical fantasy based on the myth of the Assyrian orphan-turned-queen Semiramis.

A Fever in the Heartland: The Ku Klux Klan’s Plot to Take Over America, and the Woman Who Stopped Them by Timothy Egan

A Pulitzer Prize-winner for his reporting at The New York Times, Egan focuses this deeply researched history on KKK supporters, including top politicians and officials, and corruption galore in the early 20th century. He singles out one particularly evil character, Sen. David Curtis ‘‘D.C.” Stephenson, who was eventually convicted of murder and other crimes. This title made lots of "best books of 2023" lists.

Let Us Descend by Jesmyn Ward 

The two-time National Book Award winner (for 2017’s Sing, Unburied, Sing and 2011’s Salvage the Bones) takes us inside the mind of Annis, a young woman — enslaved by the white man who fathered her — who is forced to walk from the Carolinas to a slave market in New Orleans. Annis is strengthened by stories of her warrior ancestors as she struggles to retain her sense of self through the pain and terror of her journey. This was another Oprah’s Book Club pick (she called the novel "a vital work for our culture”).

Wellness by Nathan Hill

Hill's brilliant novel is about a couple, Jack and Elizabeth, who meet in Chicago and fall wildly in love … then out of love when we revisit them as parents and at a point of middle-age exhaustion and disenchantment. It ends up being a thoughtful, often humorous, cultural critique and exploration of why we believe the things we do, why we love who and what we love and so much more. The Guardian put it well in calling it “a work of quiet genius.” Hill also wrote 2016's The Nix.

The Heaven and Earth Grocery Store by James McBride

McBride, the author of 2013’s National Book Award winner The Good Lord Bird, sets this Kirkus Prize-winning 2023 novel in the 1930s, in the fictional town of Chicken Hill, Pennsylvania, where Jewish and Black Americans live side by side. When a skeleton is found at the bottom of a well, the investigation that follows reopens local wounds and uncovers a long-held secret. Kirkus described it as a “boisterous hymn to community, mercy, and karmic justice.” Stephen Spielberg has reportedly snapped it up for a possible adaptation.

More: A Memoir of Open Marriage by Molly Roden Winter

Ever thought about having sex with someone outside of your primary relationship? How about having it with your romantic partner’s permission — and doing so while said partner is having his or her own extramarital sexual adventures? It’s way more complicated than it may sound, as Winter, a fiftysomething writer in Brooklyn, explains in this book, which became an instant New York Times bestseller a year ago. It has readers hot and/or bothered by her descriptions of life since she and her husband, Stewart, decided to forgo monogamy. There’s lots to talk about with your book club, to say the least.

North Woods by Daniel Mason

This 2023 novel, a must-read, executes its unique premise wonderfully. It’s the story of one house in western Massachusetts and its various inhabitants, from the precolonial era to modern times. The past ends up haunting (sometimes literally) the people who cycle through the home, including the twin daughters of an apple farmer and a man with mental illness who can perceive the ghosts that still live in his midst. Mason, who's a Stanford psychiatrist as well as an author, offers rich, evocative depictions of the changing wooded landscape, which evolves along with the humans it harbors.

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng 

The author’s novel The Garden of Evening Mists was on the short list for the 2012 Booker Prize, and The House of Doors made the Booker’s long list last year. Set in 1920s in Malaysia — where Eng is from — it features the famed writer William Somerset Maugham and some deep secrets between friends. “It’s about the power of stories, how they can transcend cultures and borders, transcend even time itself,” Eng said in an interview for the Booker Prize website.  

The Wager: A Tale of Shipwreck, Mutiny, and Murder by David Grann (available in paperback February 23)

Grann, the author of the gripping 2017 bestseller Killers of the Flower Moon, tackles another doozy of a tale in this 2023 bestseller about the 18th-century British warship that wrecked off the coast of Patagonia, leaving its men marooned on an island. Two separate groups of castaways managed to patch together boats and make it to safety — but each arrived with wildly conflicting tales, including accusations of murder and treachery. 

Editor's note: This article was originally published on March 31, 2023. It has been updated to include more recent paperback releases.