Club Book

Kate Quinn is one of the best known – and bestselling – authors writing today in the realm of historical fiction. Standouts include her four-book Empress of Rome series, two novels set during the Renaissance, and a co-authored standalone that focuses on the lives of women during the French Revolution. Recently, Quinn has brought her “compelling blend of historical fiction, mystery, and women’s fic...

Over the last decade, thriller novelist Mary Kubica has established herself as a mainstay of the genre. The Good Girl , her 2014 breakout about an amnesiac kidnapping victim, became an Indie Next List pick and put Kubica in contention for the Goodreads Choice Award. It is currently being adapted for television – and won’t be the only of Kubica’s seven books to make it to the screen. Netflix recent...

Rita Woods is the author behind Remembrance , one of the most celebrated historical fiction debuts in years. Woods’ opus straddles literary genres and historical epochs. In this book, “Remembrance” is a hallowed refuge for escaped slaves which exists outside the normal bounds of time and space. The most unusual stop on the Underground Railroad, Remembrance owes its existence to generations of wome...

Qian Julie Wang is an Ivy League trained litigator and managing partner of New York City’s prestigious Gottlieb & Wang LLP – a law firm specializing in advocacy for immigrants and people of color. As an undocumented child of struggling Chinese émigrés, Wang had ample reasons to believe her future would not be so bright. During her formative years, the family’s “illegal” status took a toll on e...

Angeline Boulley is a member of the Sault Ste. Marie Tribe of Chippewa Indians, and former director of the Office of Indian Education at the US. Department of Education. Her upbringing and first-hand knowledge of Native life inform Boulley’s blockbuster YA debut Firekeeper’s Daughter . The instant #1 New York Times bestseller centers around Daunis Fontaine, a biracial Anishinaabe teenager describe...

Mystery phenom Rachell Howzell Hall is the pen behind the four-volume Elouise “Lou” Norton series. Readers and critics laud Hall’s intrepid and memorable lead as “a strong and likeable African American detective… with few equals” ( Library Journal ). Hall’s hometown of Los Angeles serves as the backdrop for the series – as well as most of her standalone works. These include book club favorite And...

Ian Manuel is a name well known to legal and criminal justice reform advocates. Sentenced to life without the possibility of parole for a crime committed at the age of 13, Manuel languished in prison for 26 years. Thanks to a coalition of supporters, including renowned activist Bryan Stevenson and the woman shot by Manuel in 1990, Manuel received a fair resentencing from the Florida Court of Appea...

Michelle Zauner is a darling of the modern indie music scene, better known by fans under her solo project alias Japanese Breakfast. Zauner’s family moved to the United States from South Korea when she was just months old. She spent her formative years as one of only a handful of Asian American students in her Eugene, Oregon neighborhood and school. The young songwriter grappled with her own “sense...

Lawrence Wright is an acclaimed journalist, screenwriter and novelist. His impressive ten nonfiction titles to date include The Looming Tower: Al-Qaeda and the Road to 9/11 , winner of the Pulitzer Prize for General Nonfiction. Wright also executive produced a 10-episode miniseries adapted from this 2006 exposé (starring Alec Baldwin and Jeff Daniels) for Hulu in 2018. His explosive follow-up, Goi...

Food Network favorite Abby Jimenez is an award-winning pastry chef, and the owner of the world-famous Nadia Cakes cupcakery and custom cake studio. A self-taught baker, Jimenez won Food Network’s competitive Cupcake Wars in 2012. She parlayed her successes into her Minnesota-based small business, which now boasts outlets in Maple Grove, Woodbury, and Palmdale, California. Jimenez is also a USA Tod...

Therese Anne Fowler is a perennial favorite among historical fiction readers. She is perhaps best known for Z: A Novel of Zelda Fitzgerald (2014). Z showcases the incredible life and historic times of Zelda Sayre, the reckless Southern belle who married and inspired literary superstar F. Scott Fitzgerald. Amazon Studios turned the book into a period drama, Z: The Beginning of Everything , starring...

Robert Kolker is an established and esteemed investegative reporter. Long known in journalism circles for his exposés in New York Magazine and Bloomgberg News, Kolker became one of the nation’s most read nonfiction writers (almost overnight) after the April 2020 publication of Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family. Now a #1 New York Times bestseller, Hidden Valley Road centers...

Chart-topping historian H.W. Brands is one of the foremost American Studies scholars writing today – and also one of the most prolific. With nearly 40 published books to date, his work spans more than three decades of dedicated scholarship and nearly every epoch of American history. Brands’ areas of speciality include economic history and global policy, as well as biographies on presidents and oth...

Claire Lombardo is one of few first-time authors to see their debut novel chart immediately on the New York Times Bestseller List. The Most Fun We Ever Had follows the fortunes and factious relationships of four sisters over five decades. In this time-jumping narrative, the surprise re-emergence of a teenage son put up for adoption by one sister sparks a long overdue family reckoning. NPR praised...

Cameroonian-American novelist Imbolo Mbue burst onto the literary scene in 2016 with her debut novel Behold the Dreamers . Semi-autobiographical in nature, the book tracks a young Cameroonian couple as they struggle to re-establish themselves in New York City in spite of racial barriers and the economic upheavel of the Great Recession. Lauded by The New York Times as “a dissection of the American...

John Moe is one of Minnesota’s best-known radio and podcast personalities. The reporter and talk show host first cut his teeth in the Seattle radio market, before bringing his unique wit to the North Star State. He is best known for his work as a senior reporter and host of American Public Media enterprises including Weekend America , Marketplace Tech Report , and the uproarious radio variety show...

Lauren Fox is an acknowledged master of the family novel. Readers enjoyed their first taste of her achingly funny take on marriage, friendship, and domesticity in Still Life with Husband (2007) – a literary debut that The New York Times heralded as “the arrival of an immensely gifted writer.” Fox’s follow-ups, Friends Like Us (2012) and Days of Awe (2015), justified the praise. Her latest, out Feb...

Eduardo Porter is an economics reporter for The New York Times . His distinguished career in journalism has taken him to Mexico City, São Paulo, Tokyo, and many points in between. He currently co-hosts The Pie, a podcast on pandemic economics sponsored by the University of Chicago, which explores the financial and social ramifications of the ongoing COVID-19 pandemic. Porter is also the author of...

Megha Majumdar is the author behind A Burning , one of the most anticipated and best reviewed fiction debuts of 2020. Set in modern-day India, this propulsive narratives hinges around three characters on the margins of society: Jivan, a Muslim girl living in the slums of Kolkata (Calcutta); Lovely, a member of India’s intersex hijra community; and PT Sir, an opportunistic gym teacher turned right-...

David Treuer is a member of the Leech Lake band of Ojibwe, and one of the foremost chroniclers of the rich and diverse Native American experience – past and present. His writing straddles the barrier between fiction and nonfiction. Treuer’s four novels to date, including award-winning debut Little (1995) and book club favorite Prudence (2015), “mount a challenge to the whole idea of Indian identit...

Moroccan American novelist Laila Lalami uses fiction as a vehicle to showcase “overlooked” North African stories and experiences. Notable examples include her 2014 breakout The Moor’s Account , which reconstructs the journeys of the New World’s first explorer of color. It won the American Book Award and was a Pulitzer Prize finalist. Lalami’s follow-up, The Other Americans , centers around the mys...

Acclaimed journalist and climate advocate Dahr Jamail is the author of The End of Ice: Bearing Witness and Finding Meaning in the Path of Climate Disruption . Part travelogue and part research exposé, The End of Ice offers a sobering look at the “geographic front lines” – areas of the planet that are most immediately and visibly impacted by global warming. Front-line reporting is Jamail’s forte. H...

Nancy Pearl is America’s Librarian . As the head of the Washington Center for the Book, she pioneered the groundbreaking “If All of Seattle Read the Same Book” series in the late 1990s. The Library of Congress now estimates that upwards of 400 “community read” programs take place every year, and each owes a debt to Pearl’s replicable template. Nancy Pearl is also an acknowledged expert in readers...

Morgan Jerkins is the New York Times bestselling memoirist behind the popular 2018 essay collection This Will Be My Undoing: Living at the Intersection of Black, Female, and Feminist in (White) America . Her anticipated follow-up, Wandering in Strange Lands , hit shelves August 4. Subtitled ‘A Daughter of the Great Migration Reclaims Her Roots,’ Jerkins’ sophomore book is at once deeply personal a...

Brad Taylor is the pen behind the New York Times bestselling Pike Logan series. Now spanning fourteen installments, Taylor’s high-octane thrillers center around “the Taskforce” – a highly trained covert ops team answerable only to a select few at the highest rungs of government. Protagonist Pike Logan first burst onto the scene in 2011’s One Rough Man, which earned Taylor glowing comparisons to es...