11 Oprah Book Club Picks You Won’t Be Able to Put Down

If you’re looking for amazing books from celebrity book club picks, here are some must-read choices from Oprah’s Book Club. Lately, I’ve been reading more celebrity book club selections to expand my reading list. I’ve already written a few posts about top Reese Witherspoon’s Book Club picks and top-rated thrillers. Now, I’ve chosen some great books from Oprah’s reading group. I’m excited to keep exploring her book club selections, especially books with strong female protagonists. So, if you’re looking for unputdownable books for 2025 or discussion-worthy books for book club, this list is perfect for you!

My Top Picks Of Oprah Book Club

Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver: Hilarious and heartbreaking story set in Appalachian mountains I really loved reading.
Finding Me by Viola Davis: A raw and unflinching memoir, it stands out as one of the most inspiring books I’ve ever read.

11 Unputdownable Oprah Book Club Picks

The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

What Makes This Book a Must-Read for 2025 : Spanning from 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water takes you to Kerala, India, where a family lives under the shadow of a mysterious problem. E each generation loses someone to drowning. From a 12-year-old girl marrying a man she’s never met to her journey as a matriarch, this story is a rich tapestry of love, loss, and resilience. If you are looking for a multigenerational drama to read in 2025, this Oprah is a great choice.

From the New York Times-bestselling author of Cutting for Stone comes a stunning and magisterial epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in Kerala, South India, following three generations of a family seeking the answers to a strange secret

Spanning the years 1900 to 1977, The Covenant of Water is set in Kerala, on India’s Malabar Coast, and follows three generations of a family that suffers a peculiar affliction: in every generation, at least one person dies by drowning—and in Kerala, water is everywhere. At the turn of the century, a twelve-year-old girl from Kerala’s Christian community, grieving the death of her father, is sent by boat to her wedding, where she will meet her forty-year-old husband for the first time. From this unforgettable new beginning, the young girl—and future matriarch, Big Ammachi—will witness unthinkable changes over the span of her extraordinary life, full of joy and triumph as well as hardship and loss, her faith and love the only constants.

A shimmering evocation of a bygone India and of the passage of time itself, The Covenant of Water is a hymn to progress in medicine and to human understanding, and a humbling testament to the hardships undergone by past generations for the sake of those alive today. Imbued with humor, deep emotion, and the essence of life, it is one of the most masterful literary novels published in recent years.

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Hello Beautiful by Ann Napolitano

What Makes This Book a Must-Read for 2025 : When William Waters escapes his loveless childhood, he finds comfort in Julia Padavano and her tight-knit family of sisters. You will love this novel’s emotional elements and realistic portrayal of love, healing, and forgiveness. Hello Beautiful is a book that celebrates the beauty of imperfection and the strength of unconditional love.

An emotionally layered and engrossing story of a family that asks: Can love make a broken person whole?

William Waters grew up in a house silenced by tragedy, where his parents could hardly bear to look at him, much less love him. So it’s a relief when his skill on the basketball court earns him a scholarship to college, far away from his childhood home. He soon meets Julia Padavano, a spirited and ambitious young woman who surprises William with her appreciation of his quiet steadiness. With Julia comes her family; she is inseparable from her three younger sisters: Sylvie, the dreamer, is happiest with her nose in a book and imagines a future different from the expected path of wife and mother; Cecelia, the family’s artist; and Emeline, who patiently takes care of all of them. Happily, the Padavanos fold Julia’s new boyfriend into their loving, chaotic household.

But then darkness from William’s past surfaces, jeopardizing not only Julia’s carefully orchestrated plans for their future, but the sisters’ unshakeable loyalty to one another. The result is a catastrophic family rift that changes their lives for generations. Will the loyalty that once rooted them be strong enough to draw them back together when it matters most?

Vibrating with tenderness, Hello Beautiful is a gorgeous, profoundly moving portrait of what’s possible when we choose to love someone not in spite of who they are, but because of it.

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Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver

What Makes This Book a Must-Read for 2025 : Set in Appalachia, Demon Copperhead is inspired by Dickens classics. We follow Demon, a boy born into poverty, navigating life’s harsh realities ; foster care, addiction, and heartbreak. The story is told in Demon’s point of view. If you are looking for a contemporary fiction that shines a light on systemic failures while celebrating the human spirit’s ability to endure, you should read this one. This book is a must-read for anyone who loves powerful, socially conscious storytelling with unforgettable characters. It’s also one of the unforgettable book I have ever read as a blogger.

Anyone will tell you the born of this world are marked from the get-out, win or lose.”

Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, this is the story of a boy born to a teenaged single mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival. In a plot that never pauses for breath, relayed in his own unsparing voice, he braves the modern perils of foster care, child labor, derelict schools, athletic success, addiction, disastrous loves, and crushing losses. Through all of it, he reckons with his own invisibility in a popular culture where even the superheroes have abandoned rural people in favor of cities.

Many generations ago, Charles Dickens wrote David Copperfield from his experience as a survivor of institutional poverty and its damages to children in his society. Those problems have yet to be solved. Dickens is not a prerequisite for readers of this novel, but he provided its inspiration. In transposing a Victorian epic novel to the contemporary American South, Barbara Kingsolver enlists Dickens’ anger and compassion, and above all, his faith in the transformative powers of a good story. Demon Copperhead speaks for a new generation of lost boys, and all those born into beautiful, cursed places they can’t imagine leaving behind.

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Finding Me by Viola Davis

What Makes This Book a Must-Read for 2025 : Viola Davis shares her story, from a difficult childhood in Rhode Island to becoming one of the most celebrated actors of our time. Finding Me is deeply personal, filled with honesty and emotion. It’s also one of the best audiobooks I have listened to. It’s a must-read for anyone looking for inspiration to stay true to themselves.

In my book, you will meet a little girl named Viola who ran from her past until she made a life-changing decision to stop running forever.

This is my story, from a crumbling apartment in Central Falls, Rhode Island, to the stage in New York City, and beyond. This is the path I took to finding my purpose but also my voice in a world that didn’t always see me.

As I wrote Finding Me, my eyes were open to the truth of how our stories are often not given close examination. We are forced to reinvent them to fit into a crazy, competitive, judgmental world. So I wrote this for anyone running through life untethered, desperate and clawing their way through murky memories, trying to get to some form of self-love. For anyone who needs reminding that a life worth living can only be born from radical honesty and the courage to shed facades and be . . . you.

Finding Me is a deep reflection, a promise, and a love letter of sorts to self. My hope is that my story will inspire you to light up your own life with creative expression and rediscover who you were before the world put a label on you.

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Vinegar Hill by A. Manette Ansay

What Makes This Book a Must-Read for 2025 : If you are looking for a good historical fiction novel for 2025 reading list, here is a good choice from Oprah’s book club. Vinegar Hill is a powerful story about family struggles, determination, and survival during tough times. In 1972, Ellen Grier moves with her family to her in-laws’ strict and unkind home in Wisconsin. Living under their harsh rules and rigid beliefs, Ellen must find the strength to stand up for herself and take back her independence

In a stark, troubling, yet ultimately triumphant celebration of self-determination, award-winning author A. Manette Ansay re-creates a stifling world of guilt and pain, and the tormented souls who inhabit it. It is 1972 when circumstance carries Ellen Grier and her family back to Holly’s Field, Wisconsin. Dutifully accompanying her newly unemployed husband, Ellen has brought her two children into the home of her in-laws on Vinegar Hill — a loveless house suffused with the settling dust of bitterness and routine — where calculated cruelty is a way of life preserved and perpetuated in the service of a rigid, exacting, and angry God. Behind a facade of false piety, there are sins and secrets in this place that could crush a vibrant young woman’s passionate spirit. And here Ellen must find the strength to endure, change, and grow in the all-pervading darkness that threatens to destroy everything she is and everyone she loves.

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The Poisonwood Bible by Barbara Kingsolver

What Makes This Book a Must-Read for 2025 : The Poisonwood Bible follows the Price family as they move to the Congo in 1959 under Nathan Price’s evangelical mission. Told through the voices of his wife and four daughters, it’s a powerful story of cultural collision, family strife, and personal growth. I also think it’s one of the most underrated books for your book club.

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it — from garden seeds to Scripture — is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of one family’s tragic undoing and remarkable reconstruction over the course of three decades in postcolonial Africa.

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An American Marriage by Tayari Jones

What Makes This Book a Must-Read for 2025 : Celestial and Roy’s lives change forever when Roy is wrongly sent to prison. Over time, they face even big challenges like distance, pain, and hard decisions. An American Marriage explores important themes like love, race, and loyalty. It’s an emotional and powerful story that’s perfect as 2025 book club read.

Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn’t commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding. As Roy’s time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. After five years, Roy’s conviction is suddenly overturned, and he returns to Atlanta ready to resume their life together.

This stirring love story is a profoundly insightful look into the hearts and minds of three people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control. An American Marriage is a masterpiece of storytelling, an intimate look deep into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward—with hope and pain—into the future.

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Becoming by Michelle Obama

What Makes This Book a Must-Read for 2025 : Michelle Obama invites you into her life, from her childhood on Chicago’s South Side to her time as First Lady. Becoming is filled with humor, and honesty. There are life lessons about resilience, family, and embracing one’s true self. If you want to read an inspiring memoir in 2025, you should grab this one.

In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America—the first African American to serve in that role—she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history, while also establishing herself as a powerful advocate for women and girls in the U.S. and around the world, dramatically changing the ways that families pursue healthier and more active lives, and standing with her husband as he led America through some of its most harrowing moments. Along the way, she showed us a few dance moves, crushed Carpool Karaoke, and raised two down-to-earth daughters under an unforgiving media glare.

In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her—from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world’s most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it—in her own words and on her own terms. Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations—and whose story inspires us to do the same.

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American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins

What Makes This Book a Must-Read for 2025 : Lydia and her son, Luca, flee Mexico after a cartel targets their family. Soon they are forced to join countless migrants seeking safety in the U.S. Lydia’s journey is filled with danger and sadness, but also resilience. American Dirt is a powerful story is a thought-provoking choice from Oprah book club that you should add to your 2025 TBR.

Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt, the #1 New York Times bestseller and Oprah Book Club pick that has sold over two million copies, is finally available in paperback.

Lydia lives in Acapulco. She has a son, Luca, the love of her life, and a wonderful husband who is a journalist. And while cracks are beginning to show in Acapulco because of the cartels, Lydia’s life is, by and large, fairly comfortable. But after her husband’s tell-all profile of the newest drug lord is published, none of their lives will ever be the same.

Forced to flee, Lydia and Luca find themselves joining the countless people trying to reach the United States. Lydia soon sees that everyone is running from something. But what exactly are they running to?

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Home by Marilynne Robinson

What Makes This Book a Must-Read for 2025 : Glory Boughton returns home to care for her dying father, only to be joined by her troubled brother, Jack. Through their reunion, the novel examines themes of forgiveness, belonging, and familial bonds. Home is a deeply satisfying read heartwarming historical fiction novels.

Home parallels the story told in Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead. It is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, and the passing of the generations, about love and death and faith.

Hundreds of thousands were enthralled by the luminous voice of John Ames in Gilead, Marilynne Robinson’s Pulitzer Prize–winning novel. Home is an entirely independent, deeply affecting novel that takes place concurrently in the same locale, this time in the household of Reverend Robert Boughton, Ames’s closest friend.

Glory Boughton, aged thirty-eight, has returned to Gilead to care for her dying father. Soon her brother, Jack—the prodigal son of the family, gone for twenty years—comes home too, looking for refuge and trying to make peace with a past littered with tormenting trouble and pain.

Jack is one of the great characters in recent literature. A bad boy from childhood, an alcoholic who cannot hold a job, he is perpetually at odds with his surroundings and with his traditionalist father, though he remains Boughton’s most beloved child. Brilliant, lovable, and wayward, Jack forges an intense bond with Glory and engages painfully with Ames, his godfather and namesake.

Home is a moving and healing book about families, family secrets, and the passing of the generations, about love and death and faith. It is Robinson’s greatest work, an unforgettable embodiment of the deepest and most universal emotions.

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Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan

What Makes This Book a Must-Read for 2025 : Set in 1985 Ireland, Small Things Like These follows coal merchant Bill Furlong as he uncovers a disturbing truth about the local convent. There is so much to love about Bill’s quiet heroism. It’s a short, beautifully written book that is perfect for those who appreciate stories of compassion and doing what’s right. It’s also a discussion-worthy short book club book too.

It is 1985 in a small Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal merchant and family man faces into his busiest season. Early one morning, while delivering an order to the local convent, Bill makes a discovery which forces him to confront both his past and the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church.

Already an international bestseller, Small Things Like These is a deeply affecting story of hope, quiet heroism, and empathy from one of our most critically lauded and iconic writers.

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11 Oprah Book Club Picks You Won’t Be Able to Put Down

My Top Picks Of Oprah Book Club

11 Unputdownable Oprah Book Club Picks