14 Spectacular Reads From Oprah’s Book Club

One of Oprah’s 2016 selections, THE UNDERGROUND RAILROAD is a magnificent tour de force chronicling a young slave’s adventures as she makes a desperate bid for freedom in the antebellum South via the Underground Railroad.

THE DEEP END OF THE OCEAN imagines every mother’s worst nightmare—the disappearance of a child. Both highly suspenseful and deeply moving, this novel explores a family's struggle to endure, even against extraordinary odds.

Jo Becker has every reason to be content: she has three dynamic daughters, a loving marriage, a rewarding career, and yet she feels a sense of unease. When an old housemate reappears, Jo drifts away from her present life as she delves into her memories and the dark secrets of one fateful summer in 1968.

Everywhere hailed as a novel of rare beauty and power, White Oleander tells the unforgettable story of Ingrid, a brilliant poet imprisoned for murder, and her daughter, Astrid, whose odyssey through a series of Los Angeles foster homes-each its own universe, with its own laws, its own dangers, its own hard lessons to be learned-becomes a redeeming and surprising journey of self-discovery.

In TARA ROAD, Maeve Binchy beautifully weaves together the lives of several women who live on Tara Road in Dublin—from a newlywed to a career woman to a battered wife to an all-knowing fortune teller—and their enduring fantasies to experience a life other than their own.

After Samantha’s husband leaves her, she must reconstruct a life for herself and her son. Struggling to make her mortgage payments, Samantha takes in boarders, and as she connects with her new tenants, she realizes that her true need is to reconnect with herself—to remember and reclaim the person she used to be.

When he falls ill on his way home from school, fifteen-year-old Michael Berg is rescued by Hanna, a woman twice his age. In time she becomes his lover—then she inexplicably disappears. When Michael next sees her, he is a young law student, and she is on trial for a hideous crime. As he watches her refuse to defend her innocence, Michael gradually realizes that Hanna may be guarding a secret she considers more shameful than murder. An Oprah Book Club selection

In THE HEART OF A WOMAN, Maya Angelou writes about the joys and burdens of being a black mother in America and chronicles her experiences joining New York City’s society of black artists and writers.

After a disastrous marriage to a brutal drifter ends, Ruby meets Jack, a man 20 years her senior, and they form an unlikely union and a quiet kind of love that is no less powerful for being unstated. It’s a tough-minded and resolutely unsentimental story, just like Ruby, yet she contains a smidgen of sweetness at her core that takes the bitter edge off.

This exquisite novel confronts real-life issues of alienation and lack of opportunities through Ruth Grey, a woman who extracts what small pleasures and graces she can from a tiny Illinois town and the broken people who inhabit it.

In 1960 Vermont, Maria Fermoyle is a strong but vulnerable divorced woman whose loneliness and ambition for her children make her easy prey for dangerous con man Omar Duvall. He ends up bringing Marie to the brink of financial disaster and leads her sons into mortal danger.

After a decade of luxe living in Atlanta, Ava Johnson has temporarily returned home to Idlewild, Michigan, after her fabulous career and plans are smashed to bits by cold reality. Now, back in the community whose ordinariness once drove her away, she finds that her friends and family sorely need her in the face of impending trouble and tragedy.

With a profound sense of moral isolation and compassionate glimpses into its characters’ inner lives, THE HEART IS A LONELY HUNTER centers on John Singer, a deaf-mute who becomes the confidant for various types of misfits in a Georgia mill town during the 1930s.

Oprah’s most recent book club selection! LOVE WARRIOR is Glennon Doyle Melton’s inspiring account of how, after the implosion of her marriage, she found strength—and an invitation to live a richer, more authentic life.