Sara of Picture Book & Stephanie of Parson Brown have loved hosting book club at HudCo this past year! Instead of picking one book per month this summer, we recommend this full list. Pick a few you want to read and we’ll all get together in the fall with cheese & CBD mocktails to discuss! All are available from Picture Book at the shop in HudCo, on Bookshop.org, and as audiobooks on Libro.fm.
1. The Guest
By Emma Cline
A deliciously fun and dark tale of a scammer wreaking havoc across the Hamptons after she is kicked out of her boyfriend’s mansion, from the bestselling author of The Girls.
My kind of summer read!
By Nana Kwame Adjei-Brenyah
Hunger Games for grown ups, critiquing the private prison system, by the author of Friday Black.
The Seven Deadly Sins and the Price Women Pay to Be Good
By Elise Loehnen
Our first non-fiction book club pick asks, why do women equate self-denial with being good?
4. The Postcard
By Anne Berest
Translated by Tina Kover
When an anonymous postcard is delivered, it launches an enthralling investigation into family secrets. It’s a poignant tale of a Jewish family devastated by the Holocaust and partly restored through the power of storytelling.
By Barbara Kingsolver
2023 Pulitzer Prize winner, and 2023 Women’s Prize for Women winner. "May be the best novel of 2022...Equal parts hilarious and heartbreaking, this is the story of an irrepressible boy nobody wants, but readers will love....You may be reminded of another orphaned boy slipping through the country's underbrush, just trying to stay out of trouble: Huck Finn. With Demon, Kingsolver has created an outcast equally reminiscent of Twain's masterpiece, speaking in the natural poetry of the American vernacular....Kingsolver's best demonstration yet of a novel's ability to simultaneously entertain and move and plead for reform."— Ron Charles, Washington Post
by Lorrie Moore
Lorrie Moore’s first novel since A Gate at the Stairs.
"[Moore] manages the impossible in her writing: every other sentence is a gut-punch or the funniest line you've ever read, and it coheres into some of the truest writing about life--for what is life if not constantly either hilarious or devastating, and often both? I Am Homeless If This Is Not My Home is a ghost story, a love story, a family elegy, and a search for answers both tangible and ephemeral: it's the world of Lorrie Moore, beckoning us back in." —LitHub, "Most Anticipated Books of 2023"
7. Family Lore
By Elizabeth Acevedo
Out August 1st
The story of one Dominican-American family told through the voices of its women as they await a gathering that will forever change their lives.
By Yu Miri
Translated by Morgan Giles
Out August 1st
From the National Book Award winning author, an extraordinary, ground-breaking, epic multi-generational novel about a Korean family living under Japanese occupation.
9. Horse
By Geraldine Brooks
Based on the remarkable true story of the record-breaking thoroughbred Lexington, Horse is a novel of art and science, love and obsession, and our unfinished reckoning with racism.
10. Two memoirs tie for the #10 spot:
By Hua Hsu
Stay True is a bracing memoir about growing up, and about moving through the world in search of meaning and belonging, written in the wake of his college roommate’s murder.
By Maggie Smith
The bestselling poet and author Maggie Smith offers a lush and heartrending memoir exploring coming of age in your middle age. Beginning with the disintegration of her marriage, begins with one woman's personal, particular heartbreak, but its circles widen into a reckoning with contemporary womanhood, traditional gender roles, and the power dynamics that persist even in many progressive homes.
