The Complete List of All 104 Books in Oprah’s Book Club

In this memoir of “lying, stealing, writing, and healing,” Lara Love Hardin recounts how opioid addiction destroyed her quiet suburban life—and how she built something stronger out of the rubble. From the outside, Hardin’s life looked perfect. She had a two-story home in a California cul-de-sac, four beautiful children, a small business—“a pet cemetery, of all things”—and a handsome husband. But behind the scenes, she was drowning. Her worsening opioid addiction had taken her from prescription painkillers to heroin, from selling her own belongings to stealing her neighbors’ credit cards. Hardin is eventually charged with 32 felonies. The end of her life as a soccer mom marks the beginning of a new life: one built on accountability, forgiveness,vulnerability, growth, and reinvention. After jail, Hardin became a renowned ghostwriter, collaborating with celebrated doctors, spiritual leaders, and activists on their books. She even coauthored Anthony Ray Hinton’s memoir, The Sun Does Shine, which was an Oprah’s Book Club selection in 2018. Oprah described selecting Hardin’s own memoir for the club as a “full-circle moment.”

Let Us Descend tells the story of Annis a young, enslaved woman, separated from her mother and sold South. Traveling from the Carolina rice fields to the New Orleans slave markets to a Louisiana sugar plantation, Annis uncovers a hidden world of ancestral wisdom and spiritual forces, handed down by her African maternal line.

Jesmyn Ward is the author of three previous novels—two of which have won the National Book Award. She is the only woman and the only Black author to have received such an honor. “A fan of her writing for years,” Oprah has read all of Ward’s books and calls her newest offering, Let Us Descend, “a vital work for our culture.”

Oprah’s 102nd Book Club pick is a hilarious and tender exploration of love, marriage, life hacks, technology, and how to reconcile the people we once were with the strangers we inevitably, eventually, become. Jack and Elizabeth meet as starry-eyed college students deeply enmeshed in the ’90s Chicago grunge scene and—quickly—in a whirlwind romance. Two decades later, their world and their relationship have transformed; their lives are now governed by the responsibilities of parenthood, the tyranny of self-optimization, and the planning of their suburban “forever home.” Traversing time and geography, we follow Jack and Elizabeth as they confront the mind-warping power of Facebook algorithms, the legacy of childhood trauma, the marital law of a vindictive HOA, and some all-too-relatable marital strife.

As Oprah insists, this book will take you for “an incredible ride.” Buckle up!

Inspired by his great-grandmother, who, as a child, married a widower, Verghese introduces the fictional Big Ammachi, matriarch of a Christian family in Kerala, India. We follow three generations from 1900 to 1977, through mysterious drownings, afflictions, colonialism, and independence. This epic tale soars with lyricism and tension, transporting you across time and continents. So clear your schedule and immerse yourself in this instant classic, which Verghese, a physician, wrote while simultaneously working as a professor of medicine at Stanford University.

Oprah says, “It is one of the best books I have read in my entire life, and I have been reading since I was 3!”

What Oprah said about her 100th pick: “I’m telling you, once you start, you won’t want it to end…and be prepared for tears.”

Written in homage to the classic Little Women, Hello Beautiful follows the story of the four Padovano sisters, who live in Pilsen, a working-class neighborhood of Chicago. The girls’ close-knit, rambunctious family is forever changed when the eldest, Julia, marries a young man with a tragic past that threatens their future together.

“This book has the power to transform the way you see your life and even the world,” Oprah says. “I have started to look at my own life in the world differently.”

Bittersweet, by Susan Cain, is a nonfiction title that explores how we deal with sadness. Not by denying it. Not by surrendering to it. But by acknowledging it. Even if, at times, it seems self-defeating because: We’re all supposed to be happy, right? Or at least try to be happy?

Oprah says, “It’s an absolutely riveting read.” Demon Copperhead re-envisions the Charles Dickens classic David Copperfield, setting it in modern-day Appalachia. Kingsolver was inspired while on a visit to Dickens’s seaside English retreat and actually started writing Demon Copperhead at Dickens's own desk. It’s Kingsolver’s 17th novel in some three decades, and in writing it, Kingsolver says she wanted to counter some of the condescension and downright snobbery directed at the region in which she was born and still lives, a region whose people, she believes, have been exploited for generations, most recently by pharmaceutical companies who targeted Appalachian residents and created the current opioid crisis.

Masters has been incarcerated in California’s San Quentin State Prison for the past 41 years. Oprah read the book shortly after it was first published by HarperOne, in 2009, and it left a strong impression: “His story, of a young boy victimized by addiction, poverty, violence, the foster care system, and later the justice system, profoundly touched me then, and still does today,” said Oprah.

HarperOne has reissued the book, which contains a foreword by spiritual teacher Pema Chödrön, who has long championed Masters’s cause.

Masters had this to say about the selection of his book for Oprah’s Book Club:

“I turned 60 this year, having entered San Quentin at the age 19. I wrote That Bird Has My Wings while in solitary confinement, isolated and alone,” he says. “My greatest hope at that time was that a few young people would read my story and learn from my mistakes. Thanks to Ms. Winfrey and her book club, my story will be introduced to a national audience. It is my greatest hope that their lives will be the better for it, and I am forever grateful for the honor and the opportunity that Oprah has afforded me.”

Mottley, who is about to be 20, began her astonishing debut novel when she was just 16. It has received raves from such luminaries as Dave Eggers, Kiese Laymon, and this one from James McBride: “Leila Mottley has an extraordinary gift. She writes with the humility and sparkle of a child, but with the skill and deft touch of a wizened, seasoned storyteller.”

In her powerful and empowering memoir, the first Black actor to earn the so-called “Triple Crown of Acting”—an Oscar, a Tony, and an Emmy—details her rise from poverty and other trauma to emerge as an iconic American artist. Through revisiting her childhood and all its pain, she was able to finally answer the question that had long haunted her: How did I claw my way out?About the pick, Oprah had this to say: “There are so many lessons to be learned from this breathtaking memoir about triumphing over adversity and trauma. Viola Davis leaves it all on the page—from her beginnings in South Carolina as the fifth of six children born in a sharecropper’s shack to acclaim as an actor, producer, and philanthropist. I was so moved by this book that I just had to share it with our entire OBC audience.”

The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self, which was published last spring, was a New York Times bestseller and the first offering under Maria Shriver’s book imprint, The Open Field/Viking.

On her 94th pick,Oprah said: “As we all navigate this watershed moment in our collective history, The Way of Integrity provides a road map on the journey to truth and authenticity. Her latest work is filled with aha moments and practical exercises that can guide us as we seek enlightenment.”

Richard Powers’s intimate novel is about astrobiologist Theo Byrne, who is raising his 9-year-old son after his wife's death. It is tender and timely, drawing readers into existential questions about the place of humans in the world.

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Epic doesn't begin to describe this tour-de-force of a novel, which touches on family, legacy, identity, and America's tangled roots. Ailey, our protagonist, is the second of three girls. Ailey grows up visiting her mom's family in a small town in Georgia, and becomes curious about her roots—who does she descend from? Her first-person narration is a coming-of-age story meets history. But Jeffers also incorporates a sweeping narrative about Ailey’s ancestors, who she tries to know and understand through the years.

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Set in the fictional town of Old Ox, Georgia, at the very end of the Civil War, Harris’s powerful first novel centers on brothers Prentiss and Landry, who are at last leaving the plantation where they’ve spent their entire lives, and grappling with what will come next. “As I read this masterful novel,” Oprah said, “I kept thinking—this young 29-year-old is a first-time author, so how did he do this?” She continued, “As the best writers can do, Nathan takes us back in time, and helps us to feel we are right there with Prentiss and Landry as they get their first taste of freedom. I rooted for them, and feared for them, too.”

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For the first time in the history of the Book Club, Oprah chose four books by the same author at once: the Pulitzer Prize-winning Gilead, Home, Lila, and Jack by Marilynne Robinson. Together, these sublime novels form a quadrilogy of sorts, all of which takes place in the fictional Iowa town of Gilead. “Marilynne Robinson is one of our greatest living authors,” Oprah said, “and in the Gilead novels she’s written a quartet of masterpieces. The more closely I read them, the more I find to appreciate, and the more they show the way in seeing the beauty in the ordinary.”

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Home is a continuation of Gilead, the meaning of family and the secrets that surround them. Robinson had this to say in response to the news of her books being chosen: “Oprah Winfrey is a singular voice in this country and in the world. It is wonderful and amazing that my books will have the kind of attention only she could bring to them.”

From a life of poverty, Lila enters the town of Gilead, where she meets John Ames, a minister. Plagued by her past, Lila and Ames try to forge a new path.

When Oprah picked up a copy of Jack. The story—of the forbidden love between a down-on-his-luck white man and the prim and proper Black woman who’s come to occupy his mind and heart—is set in the mid-20th century. Yet it's a timeless tale of deep connection despite circumstance, of frailty, of familial bonds, of inequality, and of what it means to be human.

“Of all the books I’ve chosen for book club over the decades, there isn’t another that is more essential a read than this one,” Oprah said of Isabel Wilkerson's 500-page tome, which reveals the existence of a caste system in the United States. In the stunningly illuminating book, Wilkerson draws parallels between the United States, India, and the horrors of the Third Reich. “It explains why we are where we are in terms of racial injustice and inequality,” Oprah elaborated.

A 19-year-old drug dealer with an incredible pitching arm. A death-defying drunkard. An Italian-American mobster with a soft side. These are just a sampling of the many richly drawn characters whose lives intertwine in this soaring novel set in the projects of 1969 Brooklyn, which blends humor and wisdom on each page. Deacon King Kong finds the sublime in the ordinary—and you can read the first chapter here.