It's been a challenging year on a number of levels and we hope you've managed to keep your book club going strong as we all rethink and rework the way we live our daily lives. The end of the year is a great time to take stock of your book group and make plans for the future. In this roundup, we recommend a dozen books for your book group in 2021, all of which are newly released in paperback or will be available in paperback soon.

The list features books by award-winning and tremendously popular authors like Elizabeth Strout's Olive, Again and Ann Patchett's The Dutch House, along with some debut novels such as The Yellow Bird Sings by Jennifer Rosner. We also have two young adult recommendations, two mysteries and a good splash of historical fiction; and for nonfiction fans we suggest Richard Askwith's captivating biography of World War II-era horse racing phenom Lata Brandisová, and Anne Gardiner Perkin's biography of the ground-breaking first cohort of women to join Yale in 1969.

All 12 books earned five stars from BookBrowse reviewers, so you can't go wrong whatever you choose. Also, we invite you to check out the selections from our Anti-Racist Reading List which includes books from the past two years that should foster dialogue on current events.

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With the ongoing global health crisis continuing to impact day-to-day life, drifting away to another place and time through an absorbing work of historical fiction sounds more appealing than ever. To that end, here we recommend six historical novels that have recently been released in paperback for your own reading pleasure, or to read with your book club.

Each book comes with a reading guide and all of them profile compelling female protagonists, some of whom are historical figures, others are ordinary folk reacting to significant historical events.

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It's always exciting to encounter a debut novel that you really love. It's a great experience to be there from the beginning and then follow an author over the course of their career, watching their voice evolve and seeing how they might choose to experiment with different genres or themes in their writing. Reading a debut with your book club can be especially fun because you get to have this experience together. You might even talk about where you see the author going in the future, or what you'd like them to write next.

Here are five debut novels that have recently been released in paperback, all of which received glowing reviews on BookBrowse. We have reading guides available for each and we're discussing two of them in our own online book club so you can compare and contrast your club's thoughts with ours.

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Recent protests against race-based police violence have influenced many in the United States to begin educating themselves on how to be antiracist. These events may also inspire book clubs to hold valuable discussions about fighting systemic racism and to consciously read more books from Black authors.

But with all of the reading lists flooding the internet right now, it can be difficult to know where to begin. So we've put together some focused lists for different types of reading that you can use as a starting point for antiracism discussions and actions in your book club.

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Kathleen recently wrote saying, "My book group is at a stalemate during the COVID-19 pandemic because it's hard for our members to get the next book. We read in print and most of us prefer to borrow books from the library, but we can't at the moment because the library building is closed. How can we keep our book club going?"

Step one is to temporarily move your in-person book club online. Our previous post, Safe Book Club Ideas in the Time of Social Distancing offers tips on this (and it's much easier to do than you might think!)

Step two is to find creative ways to keep discussing, even though you might not have access to the library. Here are 15 suggestions which will be particularly relevant to groups that normally borrow print books from the library, but most could be used at any time by any book club that's looking for ideas to keep their group fresh.

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Reading nonfiction is a great way to step outside of your own life and consider things from another perspective. A good nonfiction book like the ones below can expand your horizons or cause you to rethink beliefs you've held forever. You might learn something you never even knew you were curious about--genealogical testing, the economy or women's suffrage.

One of these books is Solitary by Albert Woodfox. Those of us struggling with the current shelter in place rules caused by the COVID-19 pandemic might wish to reflect on Woodfox's extraordinary memoir (which won BookBrowse's 2019 BookBrowse Debut Author Award), in which he describes how he spent more than four decades in solitary confinement - in a 6-foot by 9-foot cell, 23 hours a day, in the notorious Angola prison in Louisiana - for a crime he did not commit. It is estimated that there are more than 80,000 prisoners in solitary confinement in the USA at this time, despite the United Nations Special Rapporteur on torture concluding that solitary confinement beyond 15 days constitutes cruel and inhumane punishment.

Discussing nonfiction can be a particularly worthwhile adventure when you're in a book club with a good group of people committed to both challenging and supporting one another. You'll probably all have different opinions, and different backgrounds that informed those opinions, and it can be both fun and constructive to talk through the weighty issues that come up when discussing a powerful memoir, a book about a culture you're not a part of, or a sociopolitical issue you've never experienced personally.

We personally recommend all five of these books; all are recently released in paperback and all but one has a discussion guide. Most importantly, each should spark interesting and spirited discussion.

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