15 Most Rated Books For November Book Club

If you are searching for the best books for your November book club in 2025, this list will help. These discussion-worthy book club choices are really popular picks among reading groups. I picked books that are easy to discuss, not too long, and have topics you can unpack with your group. So if you need book club books that are actually worth reading in November 2025, this list gives you solid options with a mix of historical fiction, thrillers and literary fictions.

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Best Book Club Books to Read in November 2025

The Women by Kristin Hannah

The Women is about a young woman named Frankie who joins the Army as a nurse during the Vietnam War. She thinks war is something brave and honorable, but when she arrives, she realizes it is chaotic, bloody, and confusing. She sees young soldiers hurt, friendships formed and destroyed, and she has to grow up fast. When she returns home, America feels divided, angry, and almost in denial about the war. Frankie is lost between the person she used to be, and who she became in Vietnam. The book shows how women in war are often forgotten, even when they are the bravest. Also check out 47 Book Club Questions For The Women by Kristin Hannah


A #1 bestseller on The New York Times, USA Today, Washington Post, and Los Angeles Times!

From the celebrated author of The Nightingale and The Four Winds comes Kristin Hannah’s The Women―at once an intimate portrait of coming of age in a dangerous time and an epic tale of a nation divided.

Women can be heroes. When twenty-year-old nursing student Frances “Frankie” McGrath hears these words, it is a revelation. Raised in the sun-drenched, idyllic world of Southern California and sheltered by her conservative parents, she has always prided herself on doing the right thing. But in 1965, the world is changing, and she suddenly dares to imagine a different future for herself. When her brother ships out to serve in Vietnam, she joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows his path.

As green and inexperienced as the men sent to Vietnam to fight, Frankie is over-whelmed by the chaos and destruction of war. Each day is a gamble of life and death, hope and betrayal; friendships run deep and can be shattered in an instant. In war, she meets―and becomes one of―the lucky, the brave, the broken, and the lost.

But war is just the beginning for Frankie and her veteran friends. The real battle lies in coming home to a changed and divided America, to angry protesters, and to a country that wants to forget Vietnam.

The Women is the story of one woman gone to war, but it shines a light on all women who put themselves in harm’s way and whose sacrifice and commitment to their country has too often been forgotten. A novel about deep friendships and bold patriotism, The Women is a richly drawn story with a memorable heroine whose idealism and courage under fire will come to define an era.

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A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman

A Man Called Ove begins with Ove being very lonely, angry, and ready to give up on life. He doesn’t like change and he doesn’t like people. His neighbors think he is difficult. But when a new family moves in, they slowly break down his walls by accident. Through small events and funny situations, Ove begins to connect again with people around him. We see that Ove was not born rude. He is hurt, and he is grieving. As we learn about his past, we understand his heart. This is a story about how one small community brings a man back to life. Also read : 14 Book Club Questions For A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman


Meet Ove. He’s a curmudgeon, the kind of man who points at people he dislikes as if they were burglars caught outside his bedroom window. He has staunch principles, strict routines, and a short fuse. People call him the bitter neighbor from hell, but must Ove be bitter just because he doesn’t walk around with a smile plastered to his face all the time?

Behind the cranky exterior there is a story and a sadness. So when one November morning a chatty young couple with two chatty young daughters move in next door and accidentally flatten Ove’s mailbox, it is the lead-in to a comical and heartwarming tale of unkempt cats, unexpected friendship, and the ancient art of backing up a U-Haul. All of which will change one cranky old man and a local residents’ association to their very foundations.

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The Midnight Library by Matt Haig

The Midnight Library follows a woman named Nora who feels like she made all the wrong choices in life. She believes she has wasted her potential and she feels hopeless. Then she finds herself in a magical library between life and death. Every book in this library shows a different version of her life based on one different decision. She can step into these lives and try them. She learns that even the life that looks “perfect” from outside has problems she did not see before. The story teaches that the best life is not perfect, but the one where you choose to stay. Check out : 42 The Midnight Library Book Club Questions and Snack Ideas


Between life and death there is a library.

When Nora Seed finds herself in the Midnight Library, she has a chance to make things right. Up until now, her life has been full of misery and regret. She feels she has let everyone down, including herself. But things are about to change.

The books in the Midnight Library enable Nora to live as if she had done things differently. With the help of an old friend, she can now undo every one of her regrets as she tries to work out her perfect life. But things aren’t always what she imagined they’d be, and soon her choices place the library and herself in extreme danger.

Before time runs out, she must answer the ultimate question: what is the best way to live?

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All the Light We Cannot See by Anthony Doer

All the Light We Cannot See is set during World War II and follows two young people on opposite sides of the war. Marie-Laure is a blind French girl who escapes Paris with her father, and they may be holding a valuable museum jewel. Werner is a German orphan who becomes skilled at fixing radios and is forced to serve the Nazi military. As war moves closer, their lives slowly move toward each other. The book shows how two children are caught in a world filled with danger and control, but they still try to find goodness and light, even in the darkest time.


Marie-Laure lives in Paris near the Museum of Natural History, where her father works. When she is twelve, the Nazis occupy Paris and father and daughter flee to the walled citadel of Saint-Malo, where Marie-Laure’s reclusive great uncle lives in a tall house by the sea. With them they carry what might be the museum’s most valuable and dangerous jewel.

In a mining town in Germany, Werner Pfennig, an orphan, grows up with his younger sister, enchanted by a crude radio they find that brings them news and stories from places they have never seen or imagined. Werner becomes an expert at building and fixing these crucial new instruments and is enlisted to use his talent to track down the resistance. Deftly interweaving the lives of Marie-Laure and Werner, Doerr illuminates the ways, against all odds, people try to be good to one another.

From the highly acclaimed, multiple award-winning Anthony Doerr, the stunningly beautiful instant New York Times bestseller about a blind French girl and a German boy whose paths collide in occupied France as both try to survive the devastation of World War II.

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Remarkably Bright Creatures by Shelby Van Pelt

Remarkably Bright Creatures is about a woman named Tova who cleans at an aquarium after losing both her husband and her son. She feels like her life is quiet and empty now. She doesn’t talk much about her sadness. In the aquarium, she meets a giant Pacific octopus named Marcellus. Surprisingly, Marcellus is very smart, and he understands more than people think. Their strange friendship slowly helps Tova face her grief and ask questions about her son’s disappearance. The book shows that healing can come from unexpected places and that connection can arrive in very unusual forms. Also read : 26 Remarkably Bright Creatures Book Club Questions and Snack Ideas


Remarkably Bright Creatures, an exploration of friendship, reckoning, and hope, tracing a widow’s unlikely connection with a giant Pacific octopus.

After Tova Sullivan’s husband died, she began working the night shift at the Sowell Bay Aquarium, mopping floors and tidying up. Keeping busy has always helped her cope, which she’s been doing since her eighteen-year-old son, Erik, mysteriously vanished on a boat in Puget Sound over thirty years ago.

Tova becomes acquainted with curmudgeonly Marcellus, a giant Pacific octopus living at the aquarium. Marcellus knows more than anyone can imagine but wouldn’t dream of lifting one of his eight arms for his human captors–until he forms a remarkable friendship with Tova.

Ever the detective, Marcellus deduces what happened the night Tova’s son disappeared. And now Marcellus must use every trick his old invertebrate body can muster to unearth the truth for her before it’s too late.

Shelby Van Pelt’s debut novel is a gentle reminder that sometimes taking a hard look at the past can help uncover a future that once felt impossible.

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Broken Country by Clare Leslie Hall

Broken Country follows a woman named Beth who lives a quiet life with her husband. But her past becomes active again when an old love suddenly returns to her village. This man was someone she cared about deeply when she was young, and seeing him again opens old feelings. At the same time, there is tension in the village, and a violent event causes more chaos. Beth must decide between the person she once wanted to be and the person she has become. This is a story about lost love, regret, and dangerous choices.


Beth and her gentle, kind husband Frank are happily married, but their relationship relies on the past staying buried. But when Beth’s brother-in-law shoots a dog going after their sheep, Beth doesn’t realize that the gunshot will alter the course of their lives. For the dog belonged to none other than Gabriel Wolfe, the man Beth loved as a teenager—the man who broke her heart years ago. Gabriel has returned to the village with his young son Leo, a boy who reminds Beth very much of her own son, who died in a tragic accident.

As Beth is pulled back into Gabriel’s life, tensions around the village rise and dangerous secrets and jealousies from the past resurface, this time with deadly consequences. Beth is forced to make a choice between the woman she once was, and the woman she has become.

A sweeping love story with the pace and twists of a thriller, Broken Country is a novel of simmering passion, impossible choices, and explosive consequences that toggles between the past and present to explore the far-reaching legacy of first love.

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How to Read a Book by Monica Wood

How to Read a Book follows three people whose lives cross because of a book. Violet is a young woman who is released from prison, but she carries guilt for the accident she caused. Harriet is an older teacher who ran the prison book club and now feels lonely and unsure of her purpose. Frank is a grieving husband who lost his wife and now works in a bookstore. These three meet by accident, and slowly books help them open up to each other. This novel shows how reading brings comfort and connection, and how second chances can start quietly.


A charming, deeply moving novel about second chances, unlikely friendships, and the life-changing power of sharing stories.

Our Reasons meet us in the morning and whisper to us at night. Mine is an innocent, unsuspecting, eternally sixty-one-year-old woman named Lorraine Daigle…

Violet Powell, a twenty-two-year-old from rural Abbott Falls, Maine, is being released from prison after serving twenty-two months for a drunk-driving crash that killed a local kindergarten teacher. Harriet Larson, a retired English teacher who runs the prison book club, is facing the unsettling prospect of an empty nest. Frank Daigle, a retired machinist, hasn’t yet come to grips with the complications of his marriage to the woman Violet killed.

When the three encounter each other one morning in a bookstore in Portland—Violet to buy the novel she was reading in the prison book club before her release, Harriet to choose the next title for the women who remain, and Frank to dispatch his duties as the store handyman—their lives begin to intersect in transformative ways.

How to Read a Book  is an unsparingly honest and profoundly hopeful story about letting go of guilt, seizing second chances, and the power of books to change our lives. With the heart, wit, grace, and depth of understanding that has characterized her work, Monica Wood illuminates the decisions that define a life and the kindnesses that make life worth living.

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The Road by Cormac McCarthy

The Road is about a father and son who walk through a destroyed world after a terrible event. Everything is gray, burned, and empty. There is no safety, no society, and very little food. They cannot trust strangers because many people have turned violent. The father is focused on protecting his son, and the son wants to believe there are still good people left. Their journey is slow and frightening, but the love between them keeps them alive. This book is bleak, but it shows how even when the world is gone, love can still create meaning.


A searing, postapocalyptic novel destined to become Cormac McCarthy’s masterpiece.

A father and his son walk alone through burned America. Nothing moves in the ravaged landscape save the ash on the wind. It is cold enough to crack stones, and when the snow falls it is gray. The sky is dark. Their destination is the coast, although they don’t know what, if anything, awaits them there. They have nothing; just a pistol to defend themselves against the lawless bands that stalk the road, the clothes they are wearing, a cart of scavenged food—and each other.

The Road is the profoundly moving story of a journey. It boldly imagines a future in which no hope remains, but in which the father and his son, “each the other’s world entire,” are sustained by love. Awesome in the totality of its vision, it is an unflinching meditation on the worst and the best that we are capable of: ultimate destructiveness, desperate tenacity, and the tenderness that keeps two people alive in the face of total devastation.

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Eat, Pray, Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Eat Pray Love is a memoir about a woman who breaks her own life on purpose so she can rebuild it honestly. Elizabeth leaves her marriage, her job, and her home because she realizes she is miserable even though she has “everything.” She travels to three countries for one year. In Italy she learns pleasure and joy with food and language. In India she learns devotion and spirituality. In Bali she learns balance and love. This book is about listening to yourself instead of society, and learning that you are allowed to create your own version of happiness.


A celebrated writer’s irresistible, candid, and eloquent account of her pursuit of worldly pleasure, spiritual devotion, and what she really wanted out of life.

Around the time Elizabeth Gilbert turned thirty, she went through an early-onslaught midlife crisis. She had everything an educated, ambitious American woman was supposed to want—a husband, a house, a successful career. But instead of feeling happy and fulfilled, she was consumed with panic, grief, and confusion. She went through a divorce, a crushing depression, another failed love, and the eradication of everything she ever thought she was supposed to be.

To recover from all this, Gilbert took a radical step. In order to give herself the time and space to find out who she really was and what she really wanted, she got rid of her belongings, quit her job, and undertook a yearlong journey around the world—all alone. Eat, Pray, Love is the absorbing chronicle of that year. Her aim was to visit three places where she could examine one aspect of her own nature set against the backdrop of a culture that has traditionally done that one thing very well. In Rome, she studied the art of pleasure, learning to speak Italian and gaining the twenty-three happiest pounds of her life. India was for the art of devotion, and with the help of a native guru and a surprisingly wise cowboy from Texas, she embarked on four uninterrupted months of spiritual exploration. In Bali, she studied the art of balance between worldly enjoyment and divine transcendence. She became the pupil of an elderly medicine man and also fell in love the best way—unexpectedly.

An intensely articulate and moving memoir of self-discovery, Eat, Pray, Love is about what can happen when you claim responsibility for your own contentment and stop trying to live in imitation of society’s ideals. It is certain to touch anyone who has ever woken up to the unrelenting need for change.

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Still Alice by Lisa Genova

Still Alice follows a fifty year old Harvard professor who begins to forget simple things and slowly loses her memory. At first, she tries to pretend nothing is wrong, but the truth becomes clear: she has early onset Alzheimer’s disease. The book shows her mind slowly slipping away, and how painful it is to feel your identity changing while you are still young. Her family doesn’t always know what to say, but they try to support her. This book shows the terrifying fear of losing yourself, and the bittersweet beauty of trying to hold onto moments that matter.


Still Alice is a compelling debut novel about a 50-year-old woman’s sudden descent into early onset Alzheimer’s disease, written by first-time author Lisa Genova, who holds a Ph. D in neuroscience from Harvard University.

Alice Howland, happily married with three grown children and a house on the Cape, is a celebrated Harvard professor at the height of her career when she notices a forgetfulness creeping into her life. As confusion starts to cloud her thinking and her memory begins to fail her, she receives a devastating diagnosis: early onset Alzheimer’s disease. Fiercely independent, Alice struggles to maintain her lifestyle and live in the moment, even as her sense of self is being stripped away. In turns heartbreaking, inspiring and terrifying, Still Alice captures in remarkable detail what’s it’s like to literally lose your mind.

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The Husband’s Secret by Liane Moriarty

The Husband’s Secret starts with a woman named Cecilia finding a letter from her husband that she was not supposed to open until after his death. But she opens it while he is alive. The letter contains a dark secret that could destroy many lives and break families apart. The book follows several women who don’t know each other well, but their lives are tied together by this one hidden truth. The story asks how well we ever know the people we marry, and how one past action can continue to shape many lives long after it happened.


At the heart of The Husband’s Secret is a letter that’s not meant to be read

My darling Cecilia, if you’re reading this, then I’ve died…

Imagine that your husband wrote you a letter, to be opened after his death. Imagine, too, that the letter contains his deepest, darkest secret—something with the potential to destroy not just the life you built together, but the lives of others as well. Imagine, then, that you stumble across that letter while your husband is still very much 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. Her life is as orderly and spotless as her home. 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.

Acclaimed author Liane Moriarty has written a gripping, thought-provoking novel about how well it is really possible to know our spouses—and, ultimately, ourselves.

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Winter Solstice by Rosamunde Pilcher

Winter Solstice is about five strangers who all end up under one roof in Scotland during the Christmas season. Each person arrives with their own sadness, disappointment, or heartbreak. They do not expect anything special from this holiday. But while staying together in an old house in winter, something gentle happens between them. They talk, they help each other, and slowly warmth comes back to their lives. This is a slow, comforting book that shows how connection sometimes shows up when we are not looking for it. Winter can be dark, but this story shows quiet rebirth.


In Winter Solstice Rosamunde Pilcher brings her readers into the lives of five very different people….

Elfrida Phipps, once of London’s stage, moved to the English village of Dibton in hopes of making a new life for herself. Gradually she settled into the comfortable familiarity of village life — shopkeepers knowing her tastes, neighbors calling her by name — still she finds herself lonely.

Oscar Blundell gave up his life as a musician in order to marry Gloria. They have a beautiful daughter, Francesca, and it is only because of their little girl that Oscar views his sacrificed career as worthwhile.

Carrie returns from Australia at the end of an ill-fated affair with a married man to find her mother and aunt sharing a home and squabbling endlessly. With Christmas approaching, Carrie agrees to look after her aunt’s awkward and quiet teenage daughter, Lucy, so that her mother might enjoy a romantic fling in America.

Sam Howard is trying to pull his life back together after his wife has left him for another. He is without home and without roots, all he has is his job. Business takes him to northern Scotland, where he falls in love with the lush, craggy landscape and set his sights on a house.

It is the strange rippling effects of a tragedy that will bring these five characters together in a large, neglected estate house near the Scottish fishing town of Creagan.

It is in this house, on the shortest day of the year, that the lives of five people will come together and be forever changed. Rosamunde Pilcher’s long-awaited return to the page will warm the hearts of readers both old and new. Winter Solstice is a novel of love, loyalty and rebirth.

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Atmosphere by Taylor Jenkins Reid

Atmosphere follows Joan Goodwin, a smart professor who has always loved the stars. When she sees an ad for women scientists to join NASA in 1980, she suddenly wants more from her life. She becomes one of the women selected for astronaut training. In Houston, she meets other ambitious candidates, and this group becomes close through the challenges of training. Joan also finds love and a version of herself she did not know existed. But one mission changes everything in a single moment. 

Joan Goodwin has been obsessed with the stars for as long as she can remember. Thoughtful and reserved, Joan is content with her life as a professor of physics and astronomy at Rice University and as aunt to her precocious niece, Frances. That is, until she comes across an advertisement seeking the first women scientists to join NASA’s space shuttle program. Suddenly, Joan burns to be one of the few people to go to space.

Selected from a pool of thousands of applicants in the summer of 1980, Joan begins training at Houston’s Johnson Space Center, alongside an exceptional group of fellow candidates: Top Gun pilot Hank Redmond and scientist John Griffin, who are kind and easygoing even when the stakes are highest; mission specialist Lydia Danes, who has worked too hard to play nice; warmhearted Donna Fitzgerald, who is navigating her own secrets; and Vanessa Ford, the magnetic and mysterious aeronautical engineer, who can fix any engine and fly any plane.

As the new astronauts become unlikely friends and prepare for their first flights, Joan finds a passion and a love she never imagined. In this new light, Joan begins to question everything she thinks she knows about her place in the observable universe.

Then, in December of 1984, on mission STS-LR9, it all changes in an instant.

Fast-paced, thrilling, and emotional, Atmosphere is Taylor Jenkins Reid at her best: transporting readers to iconic times and places, creating complex protagonists, and telling a passionate and soaring story about the transformative power of love—this time among the stars.

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Time of the Child by Niall Williams

Time of the Child is set in a small Irish town during one Christmas season. A doctor and his adult daughter live quiet, careful lives with routine and unspoken sadness. Then one day, a baby is left in their care. This unexpected child changes everything in their home and forces them to face the things they avoided for years. The book is gentle and slow, focused on how love can return in surprising ways. It shows that even when life feels closed, one new life can open the heart again. It’s about community, belonging, and small miracles.


From the author of This Is Happiness, a compassionate, life-affirming novel about the Christmas season that transforms the small Irish town of Faha.

Doctor Jack Troy was born and raised in Faha, but his responsibilities for the sick and his care for the dying mean he has always been set apart from the town. His eldest daughter, Ronnie, has grown up in her father’s shadow, and remains there, having missed one chance at love – and passed up another offer of marriage from an unsuitable man.

But in the Advent season of 1962, as the town readies itself for Christmas, Ronnie and Doctor Troy’s lives are turned upside down when a baby is left in their care. As the winter passes, father and daughter’s lives, the understanding of their family, and their role in their community are changed forever.

Set over the course of one December in the same village as Williams’ beloved This Is Happiness, Time of the Child is a tender return to Faha for readers who know its charms, and a heartwarming welcome to new readers entering for the very first time.

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The Irish Goodbye by Heather Aimee O’Neill

The Irish Goodbye follows three adult sisters who return to their childhood home for Thanksgiving. They share a tragic family history involving their brother’s death, but none of them have processed the grief honestly. Each sister carries her own private struggle, secret, and regret. Old pain rises again when they all gather under one roof. When hidden truth comes out at the dinner table, everything explodes. The book shows how siblings can love each other deeply and hurt each other deeply at the same time. This story is about forgiveness, guilt, and learning how to move forward.


In this debut, for fans of J. Courtney Sullivan and Mary Beth Keane, three adult sisters grapple with a shared tragedy over a Thanksgiving weekend spent in their childhood home, navigating complex relationships and old tensions.

It’s been years since the three Ryan sisters were all home together at their family’s beloved house on the eastern shore of Long Island. Two decades ago, their lives were upended by an accident on their brother Topher’s boat, a friend’s brother was killed, the lawsuit nearly bankrupted their parents, and Topher spiraled into a depression, eventually taking his life. Now the Ryan women are back for Thanksgiving, eager to reconnect, but each carrying a heavy secret. The eldest, Cait, still holding guilt for the role no one knows she played in the boat accident, rekindles a flame with her high school crush, Topher’s best friend and the brother of the boy who died. Middle sister Alice’s been thrown a curveball threatening the career she’s restarting and faces a difficult decision that may doom her marriage. And the youngest, Maggie, is finally taking the risk to bring the woman she loves home to her devoutly Catholic mother. Infusing everything is the grief for Topher that none of the Ryans have figured out how to carry together.

When Cait invites a guest to Thanksgiving dinner, old tensions boil over and new truths surface, nearly overpowering the flickering light of their family bond. Far more than a family holiday will be ruined unless the sisters can find a way to forgive themselves—and one another.

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