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50 Best Uplifting, Feel-Good Books to Read
Sometimes, you just want a feel-good book that will lift up your sprits. Lately, I’ve definitely been leaning hard toward happier, more life-affirming books and even if they may toe the line at being a bit saccharine at times. I guess I just really think it’s good for you to clear your mind and enjoy these wonderful, uplifting novels every once in a while.
This is a list of the 50 Best Uplifting & Life-Affirming “Feel-Good” Books to Read! This list covers books released at any time, but there’s a slight preference for newer titles. I hope you enjoy them, and if you have one that you personally love that’s not on this list, please drop a comment below!
The Flatshare
Beth O’Leary
What It’s About: Tiffy and Leon share a flat
Tiffy and Leon share a bed
Tiffy and Leon have never met…
Tiffy Moore needs a cheap flat, and fast. Leon Twomey works nights and needs cash. Their friends think they’re crazy, but it’s the perfect solution: Leon occupies the one-bed flat while Tiffy’s at work in the day, and she has the run of the place the rest of the time…
Publication Date: April 10, 2019
4.10 out of 5 on Goodreads
romance contemporary chick lit
Writers & Lovers
Lily King
What It’s About: Following the breakout success of her critically acclaimed and award-winning novel Euphoria, Lily King returns with an unforgettable portrait of an artist as a young woman.
Blindsided by her mother’s sudden death, and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan…
Publication Date: March 3, 2020
4.08 out of 5 on Goodreads
contemporary literary fiction romance
The House in the Cerulean Sea
TJ Klune
What It’s About: A magical island. A dangerous task. A burning secret. Linus Baker leads a quiet, solitary life. At forty, he lives in a tiny house with a devious cat and his old records. As a Case Worker at the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, he spends his days overseeing the well-being of children in government-sanctioned orphanages…
Publication Date: March 16, 2020
4.53 out of 5 on Goodreads
fantasy lgbtq lgbt
The Midnight Library
Matt Haig
What It’s About: The New York Times bestselling WORLDWIDE phenomenon
Winner of the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction | A Good Morning America Book Club Pick
“A feel-good book guaranteed to lift your spirits.”—The Washington Post
The dazzling reader-favorite about the choices that go into a life well lived, from the acclaimed author of How To Stop Time and The Comfort Book..
Publication Date: August 13, 2020
4.15 out of 5 on Goodreads
fantasy book club contemporary
The Giver of Stars
Jojo Moyes
What It’s About: From the author of Me Before You, set in Depression-era America, a breathtaking story of five extraordinary women and their remarkable journey through the mountains of Kentucky and beyond.
Alice Wright marries handsome American Bennett Van Cleve hoping to escape her stifling life in England.
Publication Date: October 3, 2019
4.27 out of 5 on Goodreads
historical fiction book club audiobook
Where the Heart Is
Billie Letts
What It’s About: Talk about unlucky sevens. An hour ago, seventeen-year-old, seven months pregnant Novalee Nation was heading for California with her boyfriend. Now she finds herself stranded at a Wal-Mart in Sequoyah, Oklahoma, with just $7.77 in change. But Novalee is about to discover hidden treasures in this small Southwest town–a group of down-to-earth, deeply caring people willing to help a homeless, jobless girl living secretly in a Wal-Mart…
Publication Date: January 1, 1995
4.02 out of 5 on Goodreads
chick lit romance books i own
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
Ann Brashares
What It’s About: Carmen got the jeans at a thrift shop. They didn’t look all that great: they were worn, dirty, and speckled with bleach. On the night before she and her friends part for the summer, Carmen decides to toss them.
But Tibby says they’re great. She’d love to have them. Lena and Bridget also think they’re fabulous…
Publication Date: September 11, 2001
3.80 out of 5 on Goodreads
chick lit books i own contemporary
Anxious People
Fredrik Backman
What It’s About: A poignant, charming novel about a crime that never took place, a would-be bank robber who disappears into thin air, and eight extremely anxious strangers who find they have more in common than they ever imagined
Looking at real estate isn’t usually a life-or-death situation, but an apartment open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes a group of strangers hostage.
Publication Date: April 25, 2019
4.25 out of 5 on Goodreads
contemporary book club audiobook
A Man Called Ove
Fredrik Backman
What It’s About: A grumpy yet loveable man finds his solitary world turned on its head when a boisterous young family moves in next door.
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.
Publication Date: August 27, 2012
4.35 out of 5 on Goodreads
book club contemporary audiobook
The Help
Kathryn Stockett
What It’s About: The wildly popular New York Times bestseller and reading group favorite. Aibileen is a black maid in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, who’s always taken orders quietly, but lately she’s unable to hold her bitterness back. Her friend Minny has never held her tongue but now must somehow keep secrets about her employer that leave her speechless…
Publication Date: February 10, 2009
4.46 out of 5 on Goodreads
historical fiction book club books i own
The Rosie Project
Graeme Simsion
What It’s About: An international sensation, this hilarious, feel-good novel is narrated by an oddly charming and socially challenged genetics professor on an unusual quest: to find out if he is capable of true love.
Don Tillman, professor of genetics, has never been on a second date. He is a man who can count all his friends on the fingers of one hand, whose lifelong difficulty with social rituals has convinced him that he is simply not wired for romance.
Publication Date: January 30, 2013
4.02 out of 5 on Goodreads
romance book club contemporary
The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek
Kim Michele Richardson
What It’s About: The hardscrabble folks of Troublesome Creek have to scrap for everything–everything except books, that is. Thanks to Roosevelt’s Kentucky Pack Horse Library Project, Troublesome’s got its very own traveling librarian, Cussy Mary Carter.
Cussy’s not only a book woman, however, she’s also the last of her kind, her skin a shade of blue unlike most anyone else…
Publication Date: May 7, 2019
4.23 out of 5 on Goodreads
historical fiction book club audiobook
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
Gail Honeyman
What It’s About: Librarian’s note: An alternative cover edition can be found here. No one’s ever told Eleanor that life should be better than fine
Meet Eleanor Oliphant: she struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding unnecessary human contact, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy.
Publication Date: May 9, 2017
4.27 out of 5 on Goodreads
book club contemporary audiobook
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry
Gabrielle Zevin
What It’s About: As surprising as it is moving, The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry is an unforgettable tale of transformation and second chances, an irresistible affirmation of why we read, and why we love.
We are not quite novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works..
Publication Date: April 1, 2014
3.99 out of 5 on Goodreads
book club contemporary books about books
Evvie Drake Starts Over
Linda Holmes
What It’s About: In a sleepy seaside town in Maine, recently widowed Eveleth “Evvie” Drake rarely leaves her large, painfully empty house nearly a year after her husband’s death in a car crash. Everyone in town, even her best friend, Andy, thinks grief keeps her locked inside, and Evvie doesn’t correct them.
Meanwhile, in New York City, Dean Tenney, former Major League pitcher and Andy’s childhood best friend, is wrestling with what miserable athletes living out their worst nightmares call the “yips”: he can’t throw straight anymore, and, even worse, he can’t figure out why…”
Publication Date: June 25, 2019
3.84 out of 5 on Goodreads
romance contemporary chick lit
Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters
Mark Dunn
What It’s About: Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal pangram,* “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island’s Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop…
Publication Date: October 1, 2001
3.88 out of 5 on Goodreads
book club humor epistolary
The Little Book of Hygge: The Danish Way to Live Well
Meik Wiking
What It’s About: Denmark is often said to be the happiest country in the world. That’s down to one thing: hygge.
‘Hygge has been translated as everything from the art of creating intimacy to cosiness of the soul to taking pleasure from the presence of soothing things. My personal favourite is cocoa by candlelight…
Publication Date: September 1, 2016
3.75 out of 5 on Goodreads
non fiction self help lifestyle
The Last Lecture
Randy Pausch
What It’s About: A lot of professors give talks titled ‘The Last Lecture’. Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy?
When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn’t have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer…
Publication Date: April 8, 2008
4.24 out of 5 on Goodreads
non fiction memoir biography
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
Robin Sloan
What It’s About: The Great Recession has shuffled Clay Jannon away from life as a San Francisco web-design drone and into the aisles of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, but after a few days on the job, Clay discovers that the store is more curious than either its name or its gnomic owner might suggest. The customers are few, and they never seem to buy anything; instead, they “check out” large, obscure volumes from strange corners of the store.
Publication Date: September 26, 2012
3.74 out of 5 on Goodreads
mystery fantasy book club
The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
Jonas Jonasson
What It’s About: It all starts on the one-hundredth birthday of Allan Karlsson. Sitting quietly in his room in an old people’s home, he is waiting for the party he-never-wanted-anyway to begin. The Mayor is going to be there. The press is going to be there. But, as it turns out, Allan is not… Slowly but surely Allan climbs out of his bedroom window, into the flowerbed (in his slippers) and makes his getaway.
Publication Date: September 9, 2009
3.82 out of 5 on Goodreads
humor book club contemporary
The Keeper of Lost Things
Ruth Hogan
What It’s About: A charming, clever, and quietly moving debut novel of endless possibilities and joyful discoveries that explores the promises we make and break, losing and finding ourselves, the objects that hold magic and meaning for our lives, and the surprising connections that bind us.
Lime green plastic flower-shaped hair bobbles—Found, on the playing field, Derrywood Park, 2nd September…
Publication Date: February 21, 2017
3.81 out of 5 on Goodreads
book club contemporary fantasy
Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things
Jenny Lawson
What It’s About: #1 New York Times Bestseller. In Furiously Happy, a humor memoir tinged with just enough tragedy and pathos to make it worthwhile, Jenny Lawson examines her own experience with severe depression and a host of other conditions, and explains how it has led her to live life to the fullest:
“I’ve often thought that people with severe depression have developed such a well for experiencing extreme emotion that they might be able to experience extreme joy in a way that ‘normal people’ also might never understand…
Publication Date: September 22, 2015
3.88 out of 5 on Goodreads
non fiction humor memoir
One Day in December
Josie Silver
What It’s About: A love story about what happens after you meet, or rather, don’t meet the one.
Laurie is pretty sure love at first sight doesn’t exist anywhere but the movies. But then, through a misted-up bus window one snowy December day, she sees a man who she knows instantly is the one. Their eyes meet, there’s a moment of pure magic…
Publication Date: October 18, 2018
3.93 out of 5 on Goodreads
romance contemporary chick lit
The Secret Life of Bees
Sue Monk Kidd
What It’s About: Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily’s fierce-hearted black “stand-in mother,” Rosaleen, insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily decides to spring them both free…
Publication Date: November 8, 2001
4.06 out of 5 on Goodreads
historical fiction book club books i own
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
Rachel Joyce
What It’s About: Meet Harold Fry, recently retired. He lives in a small English village with his wife, Maureen, who seems irritated by almost everything he does, even down to how he butters his toast. Little differentiates one day from the next. Then one morning the mail arrives, and within the stack of quotidian minutiae is a letter addressed to Harold in a shaky scrawl from a woman he hasn’t seen or heard from in twenty years…
Publication Date: March 15, 2012
3.91 out of 5 on Goodreads
book club contemporary audiobook
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society
Mary Ann Shaffer
What It’s About: “. . . I wonder how the book got to Guernsey? Perhaps there is some sort of secret homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers.”
January, 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject…
Publication Date: July 29, 2008
4.17 out of 5 on Goodreads
historical fiction book club historical
Where’d You Go Bernadette
Maria Semple
What It’s About: Bernadette Fox has vanished.
When her daughter Bee claims a family trip to Antarctica as a reward for perfect grades, Bernadette, a fiercely intelligent shut-in, throws herself into preparations for the trip. But worn down by years of trying to live the Seattle life she never wanted, Ms. Fox is on the brink of a meltdown.
Publication Date: August 14, 2012
3.89 out of 5 on Goodreads
book club humor contemporary
The Lido
Libby Page
What It’s About: A tender, joyous debut novel about a cub reporter and her eighty-six-year-old subject—and the unlikely and life-changing friendship that develops between them.
Kate is a twenty-six-year-old riddled with anxiety and panic attacks who works for a local paper in Brixton, London, covering forgettably small stories…
Publication Date: April 19, 2018
3.88 out of 5 on Goodreads
contemporary book club contemporary fiction
The Sugar Queen
Sarah Addison Allen
What It’s About: Twenty-seven-year-old Josey Cirrini is sure of three things: winter in her North Carolina hometown is her favorite season, she’s a sorry excuse for a Southern belle, and sweets are best eaten in the privacy of her hidden closet. For while Josey has settled into an uneventful life in her mother’s house, her one consolation is the stockpile of sugary treats and paperback romances she escapes to each night……
Publication Date: May 20, 2008
3.98 out of 5 on Goodreads
magical realism romance chick lit
Summer Hours at the Robbers Library
Sue Halpern
What It’s About: From journalist and author Sue Halpern comes a wry, observant look at contemporary life and its refugees. Halpern’s novel is an unforgettable tale of family…the kind you come from and the kind you create.People are drawn to libraries for all kinds of reasons. Most come for the books themselves, of course; some come to borrow companionship…
Publication Date: February 27, 2018
3.58 out of 5 on Goodreads
books about books contemporary library
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Betty Smith
What It’s About: The beloved American classic about a young girl’s coming-of-age at the turn of the century, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a poignant and moving tale filled with compassion and cruelty, laughter and heartache, crowded with life and people and incident. The story of young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet formative years in the slums of Williamsburg has enchanted and inspired millions of readers for more than sixty years…
Publication Date: August 18, 1943
4.27 out of 5 on Goodreads
classics historical fiction book club
Emma
Jane Austen
What It’s About: The Vintage Classics Austen series is designed by the writer and illustrator Leanne Shapton and introduced by some of our finest contemporary writers and Austen fans: Alexander McCall Smith, Lynne Truss, Amanda Vickery, Francesca Segal, P.D. James and Andrew Motion.
‘Jane Austen’s Emma is her masterpiece, mixing the sparkle of her early books with a deep sensibility’ Robert McCrum, Observer
Emma is young, rich and independent…
Publication Date: December 23, 1815
4.02 out of 5 on Goodreads
classics romance classic
All Adults Here
Emma Straub
What It’s About: When Astrid Strick witnesses a school bus accident in the center of town, it jostles loose a repressed memory from her young parenting days decades earlier. Suddenly, Astrid realizes she was not quite the parent she thought she’d been to her three, now-grown children. But to what consequence?
Astrid’s youngest son is drifting and unfocused, making parenting mistakes of his own…
Publication Date: May 4, 2020
3.61 out of 5 on Goodreads
contemporary read in 2020 2020 books
Eat, Pray, Love
Elizabeth Gilbert
What It’s About: 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…
Publication Date: February 16, 2006
3.58 out of 5 on Goodreads
non fiction memoir travel
The Little Paris Bookshop
Nina George
What It’s About: Monsieur Perdu can prescribe the perfect book for a broken heart. But can he fix his own?
Monsieur Perdu calls himself a literary apothecary. From his floating bookstore in a barge on the Seine, he prescribes novels for the hardships of life. Using his intuitive feel for the exact book a reader needs, Perdu mends broken hearts and souls…
Publication Date: April 26, 2013
3.51 out of 5 on Goodreads
book club romance books about books
How the Penguins Saved Veronica
Hazel Prior
What It’s About: A curmudgeonly but charming old woman, her estranged grandson, and a colony of penguins proves it’s never too late to be the person you want to be in this rich, heartwarming story from the acclaimed author of Ellie and the Harpmaker.
Eighty-five-year-old Veronica McCreedy is estranged from her family and wants to find a worthwhile cause to leave her fortune to…
Publication Date: March 5, 2020
4.07 out of 5 on Goodreads
contemporary book club animals
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand
Helen Simonson
What It’s About: You are about to travel to Edgecombe St. Mary, a small village in the English countryside filled with rolling hills, thatched cottages, and a cast of characters both hilariously original and as familiar as the members of your own family. Among them is Major Ernest Pettigrew (retired), the unlikely hero of Helen Simonson’s wondrous debut…
Publication Date: March 2, 2010
3.89 out of 5 on Goodreads
book club romance contemporary
The Bookshop on the Corner
Jenny Colgan
What It’s About: Nina Redmond is a literary matchmaker. Pairing a reader with that perfect book is her passion… and also her job. Or at least it was. Until yesterday, she was a librarian in the hectic city. But now the job she loved is no more.
Determined to make a new life for herself, Nina moves to a sleepy village many miles away…
Publication Date: February 11, 2016
3.84 out of 5 on Goodreads
romance chick lit books about books
Little Beach Street Bakery
Jenny Colgan
What It’s About: For fans of Sophie Kinsella, Jojo Moyes, and Jennifer Weiner, a moving, laugh-out-loud novel—with recipes!—about a young woman who begins her life anew as a baker in Cornwall.Amid the ruins of her latest relationship, Polly Waterford moves far away to the sleepy seaside resort of Polbearne, where she lives in a small, lonely flat above an abandoned shop…
Publication Date: March 13, 2014
3.88 out of 5 on Goodreads
chick lit romance contemporary
The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend
Katarina Bivald
What It’s About: This is a book about books. All sorts of books, from Little Women and Harry Potter to Jodi Picoult and Jane Austen, from to Stieg Larsson to Joyce Carol Oates to Proust. It’s about the joy and pleasure of books, about learning from and escaping into them, and possibly even hiding behind them. It’s about whether or not books are better than real life…
Publication Date: September 4, 2013
3.56 out of 5 on Goodreads
books about books book club romance
The Authenticity Project
Clare Pooley
What It’s About: The story of a solitary green notebook that brings together six strangers and leads to unexpected friendship, and even love
Julian Jessop, an eccentric, lonely artist and septuagenarian believes that most people aren’t really honest with each other. But what if they were? And so he writes–in a plain, green journal–the truth about his own life and leaves it in his local café…
Publication Date: February 4, 2020
3.96 out of 5 on Goodreads
contemporary romance book club
Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World’s Worst Dog
John Grogan
What It’s About: John and Jenny were just beginning their life together. They were young and in love, with a perfect little house and not a care in the world. Then they brought home Marley, a wiggly yellow furball of a puppy. Life would never be the same.
Marley quickly grew into a barreling, ninety-seven-pound streamroller of a Labrador retriever, a dog like no other…
Publication Date: October 18, 2005
4.13 out of 5 on Goodreads
non fiction animals memoir
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before
Jenny Han
What It’s About: Lara Jean’s love life gets complicated in this New York Times bestselling “lovely, lighthearted romance” from the New York Times bestselling author of The Summer I Turned Pretty series.
What if all the crushes you ever had found out how you felt about them… all at once?
Sixteen-year-old Lara Jean Song keeps her love letters in a hatbox her mother gave her…
Publication Date: April 15, 2014
4.13 out of 5 on Goodreads
young adult romance contemporary
The Graveyard Book
Neil Gaiman
What It’s About: Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a perfectly normal boy. Well, he would be perfectly normal if he didn’t live in a graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor the world of the dead.
There are dangers and adventures for Bod in the graveyard: the strange and terrible menace of the Sleer; a gravestone entrance to a desert that leads to the city of ghouls; friendship with a witch, and so much more…
Publication Date: September 30, 2008
4.13 out of 5 on Goodreads
young adult horror middle grade
The Wedding Date
Jasmine Guillory
What It’s About: On the eve of his ex’s wedding festivities, Drew Nichols is minus a plus one. Until a power outage strands him with the perfect candidate for a fake girlfriend… Agreeing to go to a wedding with a guy she gets stuck with in an elevator is not something Alexa Monroe would normally do. But Drew’s proposal proves hard to resist…
Publication Date: January 30, 2018
3.60 out of 5 on Goodreads
romance contemporary chick lit
Sometimes, you just want a feel-good book that will lift up your sprits. Lately, I’ve definitely been leaning hard toward happier, more life-affirming books and even if they may toe the line at being a bit saccharine at times. I guess I just really think it’s good for you to clear your mind and enjoy these wonderful, uplifting novels every once in a while.
This is a list of the 50 Best Uplifting & Life-Affirming “Feel-Good” Books to Read! This list covers books released at any time, but there’s a slight preference for newer titles. I hope you enjoy them, and if you have one that you personally love that’s not on this list, please drop a comment below!
The Flatshare
Beth O’Leary
What It’s About: Tiffy and Leon share a flat
Tiffy and Leon share a bed
Tiffy and Leon have never met…
Tiffy Moore needs a cheap flat, and fast. Leon Twomey works nights and needs cash. Their friends think they’re crazy, but it’s the perfect solution: Leon occupies the one-bed flat while Tiffy’s at work in the day, and she has the run of the place the rest of the time…
Publication Date: April 10, 2019
4.10 out of 5 on Goodreads
romance contemporary chick lit
Writers & Lovers
Lily King
What It’s About: Following the breakout success of her critically acclaimed and award-winning novel Euphoria, Lily King returns with an unforgettable portrait of an artist as a young woman.
Blindsided by her mother’s sudden death, and wrecked by a recent love affair, Casey Peabody has arrived in Massachusetts in the summer of 1997 without a plan…
Publication Date: March 3, 2020
4.08 out of 5 on Goodreads
contemporary literary fiction romance
The House in the Cerulean Sea
TJ Klune
What It’s About: A magical island. A dangerous task. A burning secret. Linus Baker leads a quiet, solitary life. At forty, he lives in a tiny house with a devious cat and his old records. As a Case Worker at the Department in Charge of Magical Youth, he spends his days overseeing the well-being of children in government-sanctioned orphanages…
Publication Date: March 16, 2020
4.53 out of 5 on Goodreads
fantasy lgbtq lgbt
The Midnight Library
Matt Haig
What It’s About: The New York Times bestselling WORLDWIDE phenomenon
Winner of the Goodreads Choice Award for Fiction | A Good Morning America Book Club Pick
“A feel-good book guaranteed to lift your spirits.”—The Washington Post
The dazzling reader-favorite about the choices that go into a life well lived, from the acclaimed author of How To Stop Time and The Comfort Book..
Publication Date: August 13, 2020
4.15 out of 5 on Goodreads
fantasy book club contemporary
The Giver of Stars
Jojo Moyes
What It’s About: From the author of Me Before You, set in Depression-era America, a breathtaking story of five extraordinary women and their remarkable journey through the mountains of Kentucky and beyond.
Alice Wright marries handsome American Bennett Van Cleve hoping to escape her stifling life in England.
Publication Date: October 3, 2019
4.27 out of 5 on Goodreads
historical fiction book club audiobook
Where the Heart Is
Billie Letts
What It’s About: Talk about unlucky sevens. An hour ago, seventeen-year-old, seven months pregnant Novalee Nation was heading for California with her boyfriend. Now she finds herself stranded at a Wal-Mart in Sequoyah, Oklahoma, with just $7.77 in change. But Novalee is about to discover hidden treasures in this small Southwest town–a group of down-to-earth, deeply caring people willing to help a homeless, jobless girl living secretly in a Wal-Mart…
Publication Date: January 1, 1995
4.02 out of 5 on Goodreads
chick lit romance books i own
The Sisterhood of the Traveling Pants
Ann Brashares
What It’s About: Carmen got the jeans at a thrift shop. They didn’t look all that great: they were worn, dirty, and speckled with bleach. On the night before she and her friends part for the summer, Carmen decides to toss them.
But Tibby says they’re great. She’d love to have them. Lena and Bridget also think they’re fabulous…
Publication Date: September 11, 2001
3.80 out of 5 on Goodreads
chick lit books i own contemporary
Anxious People
Fredrik Backman
What It’s About: A poignant, charming novel about a crime that never took place, a would-be bank robber who disappears into thin air, and eight extremely anxious strangers who find they have more in common than they ever imagined
Looking at real estate isn’t usually a life-or-death situation, but an apartment open house becomes just that when a failed bank robber bursts in and takes a group of strangers hostage.
Publication Date: April 25, 2019
4.25 out of 5 on Goodreads
contemporary book club audiobook
A Man Called Ove
Fredrik Backman
What It’s About: A grumpy yet loveable man finds his solitary world turned on its head when a boisterous young family moves in next door.
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.
Publication Date: August 27, 2012
4.35 out of 5 on Goodreads
book club contemporary audiobook
The Help
Kathryn Stockett
What It’s About: The wildly popular New York Times bestseller and reading group favorite. Aibileen is a black maid in 1962 Jackson, Mississippi, who’s always taken orders quietly, but lately she’s unable to hold her bitterness back. Her friend Minny has never held her tongue but now must somehow keep secrets about her employer that leave her speechless…
Publication Date: February 10, 2009
4.46 out of 5 on Goodreads
historical fiction book club books i own
The Rosie Project
Graeme Simsion
What It’s About: An international sensation, this hilarious, feel-good novel is narrated by an oddly charming and socially challenged genetics professor on an unusual quest: to find out if he is capable of true love.
Don Tillman, professor of genetics, has never been on a second date. He is a man who can count all his friends on the fingers of one hand, whose lifelong difficulty with social rituals has convinced him that he is simply not wired for romance.
Publication Date: January 30, 2013
4.02 out of 5 on Goodreads
romance book club contemporary
The Book Woman of Troublesome Creek
Kim Michele Richardson
What It’s About: The hardscrabble folks of Troublesome Creek have to scrap for everything–everything except books, that is. Thanks to Roosevelt’s Kentucky Pack Horse Library Project, Troublesome’s got its very own traveling librarian, Cussy Mary Carter.
Cussy’s not only a book woman, however, she’s also the last of her kind, her skin a shade of blue unlike most anyone else…
Publication Date: May 7, 2019
4.23 out of 5 on Goodreads
historical fiction book club audiobook
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
Gail Honeyman
What It’s About: Librarian’s note: An alternative cover edition can be found here. No one’s ever told Eleanor that life should be better than fine
Meet Eleanor Oliphant: she struggles with appropriate social skills and tends to say exactly what she’s thinking. Nothing is missing in her carefully timetabled life of avoiding unnecessary human contact, where weekends are punctuated by frozen pizza, vodka, and phone chats with Mummy.
Publication Date: May 9, 2017
4.27 out of 5 on Goodreads
book club contemporary audiobook
The Storied Life of A.J. Fikry
Gabrielle Zevin
What It’s About: As surprising as it is moving, The Storied Life of A. J. Fikry is an unforgettable tale of transformation and second chances, an irresistible affirmation of why we read, and why we love.
We are not quite novels. We are not quite short stories. In the end, we are collected works..
Publication Date: April 1, 2014
3.99 out of 5 on Goodreads
book club contemporary books about books
Evvie Drake Starts Over
Linda Holmes
What It’s About: In a sleepy seaside town in Maine, recently widowed Eveleth “Evvie” Drake rarely leaves her large, painfully empty house nearly a year after her husband’s death in a car crash. Everyone in town, even her best friend, Andy, thinks grief keeps her locked inside, and Evvie doesn’t correct them.
Meanwhile, in New York City, Dean Tenney, former Major League pitcher and Andy’s childhood best friend, is wrestling with what miserable athletes living out their worst nightmares call the “yips”: he can’t throw straight anymore, and, even worse, he can’t figure out why…”
Publication Date: June 25, 2019
3.84 out of 5 on Goodreads
romance contemporary chick lit
Ella Minnow Pea: A Novel in Letters
Mark Dunn
What It’s About: Ella Minnow Pea is a girl living happily on the fictional island of Nollop off the coast of South Carolina. Nollop was named after Nevin Nollop, author of the immortal pangram,* “The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog.” Now Ella finds herself acting to save her friends, family, and fellow citizens from the encroaching totalitarianism of the island’s Council, which has banned the use of certain letters of the alphabet as they fall from a memorial statue of Nevin Nollop…
Publication Date: October 1, 2001
3.88 out of 5 on Goodreads
book club humor epistolary
The Little Book of Hygge: The Danish Way to Live Well
Meik Wiking
What It’s About: Denmark is often said to be the happiest country in the world. That’s down to one thing: hygge.
‘Hygge has been translated as everything from the art of creating intimacy to cosiness of the soul to taking pleasure from the presence of soothing things. My personal favourite is cocoa by candlelight…
Publication Date: September 1, 2016
3.75 out of 5 on Goodreads
non fiction self help lifestyle
The Last Lecture
Randy Pausch
What It’s About: A lot of professors give talks titled ‘The Last Lecture’. Professors are asked to consider their demise and to ruminate on what matters most to them: What wisdom would we impart to the world if we knew it was our last chance? If we had to vanish tomorrow, what would we want as our legacy?
When Randy Pausch, a computer science professor at Carnegie Mellon, was asked to give such a lecture, he didn’t have to imagine it as his last, since he had recently been diagnosed with terminal cancer…
Publication Date: April 8, 2008
4.24 out of 5 on Goodreads
non fiction memoir biography
Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore
Robin Sloan
What It’s About: The Great Recession has shuffled Clay Jannon away from life as a San Francisco web-design drone and into the aisles of Mr. Penumbra’s 24-Hour Bookstore, but after a few days on the job, Clay discovers that the store is more curious than either its name or its gnomic owner might suggest. The customers are few, and they never seem to buy anything; instead, they “check out” large, obscure volumes from strange corners of the store.
Publication Date: September 26, 2012
3.74 out of 5 on Goodreads
mystery fantasy book club
The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared
Jonas Jonasson
What It’s About: It all starts on the one-hundredth birthday of Allan Karlsson. Sitting quietly in his room in an old people’s home, he is waiting for the party he-never-wanted-anyway to begin. The Mayor is going to be there. The press is going to be there. But, as it turns out, Allan is not… Slowly but surely Allan climbs out of his bedroom window, into the flowerbed (in his slippers) and makes his getaway.
Publication Date: September 9, 2009
3.82 out of 5 on Goodreads
humor book club contemporary
The Keeper of Lost Things
Ruth Hogan
What It’s About: A charming, clever, and quietly moving debut novel of endless possibilities and joyful discoveries that explores the promises we make and break, losing and finding ourselves, the objects that hold magic and meaning for our lives, and the surprising connections that bind us.
Lime green plastic flower-shaped hair bobbles—Found, on the playing field, Derrywood Park, 2nd September…
Publication Date: February 21, 2017
3.81 out of 5 on Goodreads
book club contemporary fantasy
Furiously Happy: A Funny Book About Horrible Things
Jenny Lawson
What It’s About: #1 New York Times Bestseller. In Furiously Happy, a humor memoir tinged with just enough tragedy and pathos to make it worthwhile, Jenny Lawson examines her own experience with severe depression and a host of other conditions, and explains how it has led her to live life to the fullest:
“I’ve often thought that people with severe depression have developed such a well for experiencing extreme emotion that they might be able to experience extreme joy in a way that ‘normal people’ also might never understand…
Publication Date: September 22, 2015
3.88 out of 5 on Goodreads
non fiction humor memoir
One Day in December
Josie Silver
What It’s About: A love story about what happens after you meet, or rather, don’t meet the one.
Laurie is pretty sure love at first sight doesn’t exist anywhere but the movies. But then, through a misted-up bus window one snowy December day, she sees a man who she knows instantly is the one. Their eyes meet, there’s a moment of pure magic…
Publication Date: October 18, 2018
3.93 out of 5 on Goodreads
romance contemporary chick lit
The Secret Life of Bees
Sue Monk Kidd
What It’s About: Set in South Carolina in 1964, The Secret Life of Bees tells the story of Lily Owens, whose life has been shaped around the blurred memory of the afternoon her mother was killed. When Lily’s fierce-hearted black “stand-in mother,” Rosaleen, insults three of the deepest racists in town, Lily decides to spring them both free…
Publication Date: November 8, 2001
4.06 out of 5 on Goodreads
historical fiction book club books i own
The Unlikely Pilgrimage of Harold Fry
Rachel Joyce
What It’s About: Meet Harold Fry, recently retired. He lives in a small English village with his wife, Maureen, who seems irritated by almost everything he does, even down to how he butters his toast. Little differentiates one day from the next. Then one morning the mail arrives, and within the stack of quotidian minutiae is a letter addressed to Harold in a shaky scrawl from a woman he hasn’t seen or heard from in twenty years…
Publication Date: March 15, 2012
3.91 out of 5 on Goodreads
book club contemporary audiobook
The Guernsey Literary and Potato Peel Society
Mary Ann Shaffer
What It’s About: “. . . I wonder how the book got to Guernsey? Perhaps there is some sort of secret homing instinct in books that brings them to their perfect readers.”
January, 1946: London is emerging from the shadow of the Second World War, and writer Juliet Ashton is looking for her next book subject…
Publication Date: July 29, 2008
4.17 out of 5 on Goodreads
historical fiction book club historical
Where’d You Go Bernadette
Maria Semple
What It’s About: Bernadette Fox has vanished.
When her daughter Bee claims a family trip to Antarctica as a reward for perfect grades, Bernadette, a fiercely intelligent shut-in, throws herself into preparations for the trip. But worn down by years of trying to live the Seattle life she never wanted, Ms. Fox is on the brink of a meltdown.
Publication Date: August 14, 2012
3.89 out of 5 on Goodreads
book club humor contemporary
The Lido
Libby Page
What It’s About: A tender, joyous debut novel about a cub reporter and her eighty-six-year-old subject—and the unlikely and life-changing friendship that develops between them.
Kate is a twenty-six-year-old riddled with anxiety and panic attacks who works for a local paper in Brixton, London, covering forgettably small stories…
Publication Date: April 19, 2018
3.88 out of 5 on Goodreads
contemporary book club contemporary fiction
The Sugar Queen
Sarah Addison Allen
What It’s About: Twenty-seven-year-old Josey Cirrini is sure of three things: winter in her North Carolina hometown is her favorite season, she’s a sorry excuse for a Southern belle, and sweets are best eaten in the privacy of her hidden closet. For while Josey has settled into an uneventful life in her mother’s house, her one consolation is the stockpile of sugary treats and paperback romances she escapes to each night……
Publication Date: May 20, 2008
3.98 out of 5 on Goodreads
magical realism romance chick lit
Summer Hours at the Robbers Library
Sue Halpern
What It’s About: From journalist and author Sue Halpern comes a wry, observant look at contemporary life and its refugees. Halpern’s novel is an unforgettable tale of family…the kind you come from and the kind you create.People are drawn to libraries for all kinds of reasons. Most come for the books themselves, of course; some come to borrow companionship…
Publication Date: February 27, 2018
3.58 out of 5 on Goodreads
books about books contemporary library
A Tree Grows in Brooklyn
Betty Smith
What It’s About: The beloved American classic about a young girl’s coming-of-age at the turn of the century, Betty Smith’s A Tree Grows in Brooklyn is a poignant and moving tale filled with compassion and cruelty, laughter and heartache, crowded with life and people and incident. The story of young, sensitive, and idealistic Francie Nolan and her bittersweet formative years in the slums of Williamsburg has enchanted and inspired millions of readers for more than sixty years…
Publication Date: August 18, 1943
4.27 out of 5 on Goodreads
classics historical fiction book club
Emma
Jane Austen
What It’s About: The Vintage Classics Austen series is designed by the writer and illustrator Leanne Shapton and introduced by some of our finest contemporary writers and Austen fans: Alexander McCall Smith, Lynne Truss, Amanda Vickery, Francesca Segal, P.D. James and Andrew Motion.
‘Jane Austen’s Emma is her masterpiece, mixing the sparkle of her early books with a deep sensibility’ Robert McCrum, Observer
Emma is young, rich and independent…
Publication Date: December 23, 1815
4.02 out of 5 on Goodreads
classics romance classic
All Adults Here
Emma Straub
What It’s About: When Astrid Strick witnesses a school bus accident in the center of town, it jostles loose a repressed memory from her young parenting days decades earlier. Suddenly, Astrid realizes she was not quite the parent she thought she’d been to her three, now-grown children. But to what consequence?
Astrid’s youngest son is drifting and unfocused, making parenting mistakes of his own…
Publication Date: May 4, 2020
3.61 out of 5 on Goodreads
contemporary read in 2020 2020 books
Eat, Pray, Love
Elizabeth Gilbert
What It’s About: 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…
Publication Date: February 16, 2006
3.58 out of 5 on Goodreads
non fiction memoir travel
The Little Paris Bookshop
Nina George
What It’s About: Monsieur Perdu can prescribe the perfect book for a broken heart. But can he fix his own?
Monsieur Perdu calls himself a literary apothecary. From his floating bookstore in a barge on the Seine, he prescribes novels for the hardships of life. Using his intuitive feel for the exact book a reader needs, Perdu mends broken hearts and souls…
Publication Date: April 26, 2013
3.51 out of 5 on Goodreads
book club romance books about books
How the Penguins Saved Veronica
Hazel Prior
What It’s About: A curmudgeonly but charming old woman, her estranged grandson, and a colony of penguins proves it’s never too late to be the person you want to be in this rich, heartwarming story from the acclaimed author of Ellie and the Harpmaker.
Eighty-five-year-old Veronica McCreedy is estranged from her family and wants to find a worthwhile cause to leave her fortune to…
Publication Date: March 5, 2020
4.07 out of 5 on Goodreads
contemporary book club animals
Major Pettigrew’s Last Stand
Helen Simonson
What It’s About: You are about to travel to Edgecombe St. Mary, a small village in the English countryside filled with rolling hills, thatched cottages, and a cast of characters both hilariously original and as familiar as the members of your own family. Among them is Major Ernest Pettigrew (retired), the unlikely hero of Helen Simonson’s wondrous debut…
Publication Date: March 2, 2010
3.89 out of 5 on Goodreads
book club romance contemporary
The Bookshop on the Corner
Jenny Colgan
What It’s About: Nina Redmond is a literary matchmaker. Pairing a reader with that perfect book is her passion… and also her job. Or at least it was. Until yesterday, she was a librarian in the hectic city. But now the job she loved is no more.
Determined to make a new life for herself, Nina moves to a sleepy village many miles away…
Publication Date: February 11, 2016
3.84 out of 5 on Goodreads
romance chick lit books about books
Little Beach Street Bakery
Jenny Colgan
What It’s About: For fans of Sophie Kinsella, Jojo Moyes, and Jennifer Weiner, a moving, laugh-out-loud novel—with recipes!—about a young woman who begins her life anew as a baker in Cornwall.Amid the ruins of her latest relationship, Polly Waterford moves far away to the sleepy seaside resort of Polbearne, where she lives in a small, lonely flat above an abandoned shop…
Publication Date: March 13, 2014
3.88 out of 5 on Goodreads
chick lit romance contemporary
The Readers of Broken Wheel Recommend
Katarina Bivald
What It’s About: This is a book about books. All sorts of books, from Little Women and Harry Potter to Jodi Picoult and Jane Austen, from to Stieg Larsson to Joyce Carol Oates to Proust. It’s about the joy and pleasure of books, about learning from and escaping into them, and possibly even hiding behind them. It’s about whether or not books are better than real life…
Publication Date: September 4, 2013
3.56 out of 5 on Goodreads
books about books book club romance
The Authenticity Project
Clare Pooley
What It’s About: The story of a solitary green notebook that brings together six strangers and leads to unexpected friendship, and even love
Julian Jessop, an eccentric, lonely artist and septuagenarian believes that most people aren’t really honest with each other. But what if they were? And so he writes–in a plain, green journal–the truth about his own life and leaves it in his local café…
Publication Date: February 4, 2020
3.96 out of 5 on Goodreads
contemporary romance book club
Marley and Me: Life and Love With the World’s Worst Dog
John Grogan
What It’s About: John and Jenny were just beginning their life together. They were young and in love, with a perfect little house and not a care in the world. Then they brought home Marley, a wiggly yellow furball of a puppy. Life would never be the same.
Marley quickly grew into a barreling, ninety-seven-pound streamroller of a Labrador retriever, a dog like no other…
Publication Date: October 18, 2005
4.13 out of 5 on Goodreads
non fiction animals memoir
To All the Boys I’ve Loved Before
Jenny Han
What It’s About: Lara Jean’s love life gets complicated in this New York Times bestselling “lovely, lighthearted romance” from the New York Times bestselling author of The Summer I Turned Pretty series.
What if all the crushes you ever had found out how you felt about them… all at once?
Sixteen-year-old Lara Jean Song keeps her love letters in a hatbox her mother gave her…
Publication Date: April 15, 2014
4.13 out of 5 on Goodreads
young adult romance contemporary
The Graveyard Book
Neil Gaiman
What It’s About: Nobody Owens, known to his friends as Bod, is a perfectly normal boy. Well, he would be perfectly normal if he didn’t live in a graveyard, being raised and educated by ghosts, with a solitary guardian who belongs to neither the world of the living nor the world of the dead.
There are dangers and adventures for Bod in the graveyard: the strange and terrible menace of the Sleer; a gravestone entrance to a desert that leads to the city of ghouls; friendship with a witch, and so much more…
Publication Date: September 30, 2008
4.13 out of 5 on Goodreads
young adult horror middle grade
The Wedding Date
Jasmine Guillory
What It’s About: On the eve of his ex’s wedding festivities, Drew Nichols is minus a plus one. Until a power outage strands him with the perfect candidate for a fake girlfriend… Agreeing to go to a wedding with a guy she gets stuck with in an elevator is not something Alexa Monroe would normally do. But Drew’s proposal proves hard to resist…
Publication Date: January 30, 2018
3.60 out of 5 on Goodreads
romance contemporary chick lit
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