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Access Our
Best Book Club
Books of 2025!
What books did your book club love talking about last year? See how they compare to the titles our subscribers say were their favorites for book group discussions in 2024.
| Book | % of Respondents | |
| 1 | The Women by Kristin Hannah (2024) | 13.92% |
| 2 | The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon (2023) | 7.72% |
| 3 | James by Percival Everett (2024) | 7.59% |
| 4 | Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt (2022) | 4.43% |
| 5 | Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (2022) | 3.54% |
| 6 | Horse by Geraldine Brooks (2022) | 3.29% |
| 7 | The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese (2023) | 2.41% |
| 8 | The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride (2023) | 2.28% |
| 9 | West With Giraffes by Lynda Rutledge (2021) | 2.15% |
| 10 | The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters (2023) | 2.03% |
The above information is based on a 2025 survey of BookBrowse email subscribers. Only subscribers were eligible to take part so as to prevent the ratings being skewed by enthusiastic fan bases. Respondents were asked to name up to three favorites that they discussed in a book group setting in 2024.
This year, we welcome four new arrivals to our top ten most popular book club books, three of which go straight to the top of the list: The Women by Kristin Hannah, The Frozen River by Ariel Lawhon, and James by Percival Everett. All three of these historical novels were named BookBrowse Top 20 Books of 2024, and Lawhon's novel was our Award Winner in Fiction. The fourth new book to make the list is The Berry Pickers by Amanda Peters, which we recently discussed in our online book club.
Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt, our 2022 Award Winner in the Debut category, held its place at #4, while the rest of the books on the list stayed but shifted in the rankings.
As always, the above rankings only represent the tip of the iceberg and don't adequately reflect the variety of books named by participants. Like last year, the list displays a strong cross-section of current titles that we've in some way featured on BookBrowse.
Popular books that nearly made the top ten include (in order of ranking):
Scroll down for more info on the Top 10!
Hardcover Feb 2024. 480 pages
Published by St. Martin's Press
Based on years of research and guidance from real-life Vietnam War nurses, The Women vividly describes the horrors of war and the beauty of friendship and forgiveness while honoring the women whose service in Vietnam has been largely ignored. (Jordan Lynch)
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Paperback Nov 2024. 448 pages
Published by Vintage
Martha's stories of attending births and delivering babies are some of the best scenes, allowing Lawhon to demonstrate her talent for capturing dramatic events while also developing full, well-rounded characters, even when they only appear for a few pages. The Frozen River is Martha Ballard's story, developed down to the finest details in a way that A Midwife's Tale, given its purpose as a work of academic literature and its source's brevity, could not be. For fans of historical fiction, the novel is an excellent path to A Midwife's Tale and other stories, historical or fictional, set in the late 18th century. (Maria Katsulos)
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Hardcover Mar 2024. 320 pages
Published by Doubleday
Jim's voice, along with the voices of the other enslaved people he knows and meets on his journey, is one of constant code switching. The ignorance-feigning language of minstrelsy also hearkens back to Erasure's book-within-a-book called My Pafology, which is written with a white audience in mind, employing the stereotypical language this audience would expect to hear from a streetwise Black criminal. Slavery's violence is unflinchingly captured in all of its horror, but also in its absurdity. Like the author supposedly standing up for Black voices in American Fiction, there are white savior types in James held up for satirical ridicule. Readers of some of Everett's other work may find themselves yearning for the stranger qualities of books like Erasure and Dr. No. James is a straightforward novel with few frills. However, it features some excellent surprises and the build up to and execution of the final act are expertly done. (Lisa Butts)
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Paperback Mar 2025. 368 pages
Published by Ecco
Winner of the 2022 BookBrowse Debut Award
Septuagenarian Tova Sullivan has lived in Sowell Bay since childhood, in the home her father built by hand after immigrating from Sweden. She began cleaning the aquarium at night following her husband's passing, five years before the story opens, to keep busy. One night she discovers Marcellus stuck in a tangle of electrical cables and rescues him, and an unlikely friendship ensues. The book combines realism with the supernatural; certainly an octopus capable of intervening in human affairs is an unlikely beast. But while Marcellus's actions are critical to the plot's ultimate resolution, it's the novel's underlying themes of grief, loneliness and change that propel it along. (Kim Kovacs)
Paperback Aug 2024. 560 pages
Published by Harper Perennial
Barbara Kingsolver’s novel Demon Copperhead is a captivating coming-of-age tale set in rural Virginia. The novel is a contemporary retelling of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, spanning the late 1990s to the present day. Kingsolver achieves the impossible, creating a narrative that stands up to its source material and, by some measures, may even surpass it. Although Kingsolver incorporates many clever nods to the original, readers need not be familiar with David Copperfield to fully appreciate Demon Copperhead. Those who do know the Dickens novel, though, will likely get a kick out of how Kingsolver adapts the plot to a new time, place and set of social circumstances. (Kim Kovacs)
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Paperback Jan 2024. 464 pages
Published by Penguin Books
Winner of the 2022 BookBrowse Fiction Award
Geraldine Brooks creates a powerful backstory for 19th-century thoroughbred racehorse Lexington, weaving a rich tapestry of historical and current-day narratives that aptly reflect how the legacy of slavery still ripples through America. The historic underpinnings of the work are as spellbinding as the characters. Whether Brooks is chronicling the history of thoroughbred racing, exploring the impact of the Civil War on African American jockeys, or detailing the nuances of American equestrian art, it is all equally engrossing. (Jane McCormack)
Paperback May 6, 2025. 768 pages
Published by Hachette Books
Winner: 2023 BookBrowse Fiction Award
Verghese sustains this massive story with numerous enigmatic and vividly drawn characters like Big Ammachi, Digby, a Swedish physician named Rune who runs a colony for lepers, Philipose and his love Elsie, who is born to be an artist of staggering genius if only the world will let her. However, running like a riptide beneath the waters of the Malabar Coast, the Condition strikes the family in new, unbidden and heartbreaking ways. It will reach a crescendo with Mariamma, Big Ammachi's granddaughter, who becomes a neurosurgeon to unlock the secrets of this affliction, only to face the secrets "that can bind them together or bring them to their knees when revealed." (Peggy Kurkowski)
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Paperback Jul 29, 2025. 432 pages
Published by Riverhead Books
The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store by James McBride takes place in Pottstown, Pennsylvania, primarily within the confines of a real-life settlement called Chicken Hill, during the racially contentious 1930s. Chicken Hill's population was largely Jewish and Black, and included Irish, Italian, and Greek immigrants. It was a place where all types of people, united by impoverished circumstances, "pretty much got along," as McBride explains in an interview with NPR, which inspired him to recreate the congenial relationships between his characters. The Heaven & Earth Grocery Store shows readers that it is possible to connect with people who are radically different from you without relinquishing the things unique to your own experience. Love bursts from the pages of McBride's novel, shining its golden light on the miracles we can accomplish as a community. (Abby Edgecumbe)
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Feb 2021. 372 pages
Published by Lake Union Publishing
Woodrow Wilson Nickel, age 105, feels his life ebbing away. But when he learns giraffes are going extinct, he finds himself recalling the unforgettable experience he cannot take to his grave.
It's 1938. The Great Depression lingers. Hitler is threatening Europe, and world-weary Americans long for wonder. They find it in two giraffes who miraculously survive a hurricane while crossing the Atlantic. What follows is a twelve-day road trip in a custom truck to deliver Southern California's first giraffes to the San Diego Zoo. Behind the wheel is the young Dust Bowl rowdy Woodrow.
Part adventure, part historical saga, and part coming-of-age love story, West with Giraffes explores what it means to be changed by the grace of animals, the kindness of strangers, the passing of time, and a story told before it's too late.
Oct 2023. 320 pages
Published by Catapult
July 1962. A Mi'kmaq family from Nova Scotia arrives in Maine to pick blueberries for the summer. Weeks later, four-year-old Ruthie, the family's youngest child, vanishes. She is last seen by her six-year-old brother, Joe, sitting on a favorite rock at the edge of a berry field. Joe will remain distraught by his sister's disappearance for years to come.
In Maine, a young girl named Norma grows up as the only child of an affluent family. Her father is emotionally distant, her mother frustratingly overprotective. Norma is often troubled by recurring dreams and visions that seem more like memories than imagination. As she grows older, Norma slowly comes to realize there is something her parents aren't telling her. Unwilling to abandon her intuition, she will spend decades trying to uncover this family secret.
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