The Swans of Harlem: Five Black Ballerinas, Fifty Years of Sisterhood, and Their Reclamation of a Groundbreaking History by Karen Valby
Courtesy Penguin Random House
This 2024 release paints a fascinating portrait of a trailblazing group of ballerinas — Lydia Abarca, Gayle McKinney-Griffith, Sheila Rohan, Marcia Sells and Karlya Shelton-Benjamin — who began dancing with the Dance Theatre of Harlem in 1969 and later performed for the Queen of England, among other luminaries. Valby describes the challenges they faced while breaking down barriers, including a lack of public recognition (their lives were “set to the thunderous applause and the damp hush of obscurity,” she writes). Her research includes interviews with the five dancers, who have been friends for half a century (a relationship the author first highlighted in a 2021 New York Times story, which inspired the book after it went viral).
All Fours by Miranda July
Courtesy Penguin Random House
This quirky novel is hilarious — a raunchy joy ride and one of my favorites from 2024 — though it’s not for everyone. (One reader wrote on Goodreads, “It made me feel icky. Like, super duper uncomfortable and nauseous.”) At the very least, it’ll make for a lively and humorous book club discussion. The story is told from the perspective of a 45-year-old woman who leaves her emotionally distant husband and kid in Los Angeles for a cross-country road trip to New York. The twist: She secretly holes up in a motel near home for a few weeks instead and begins a very different, fantastically strange journey in search of freedom (or something). Her transformative break from everyday life includes a sexually charged, obsessive relationship with a handsome young man named Davey, a wonderfully over-the-top motel-room redecoration project and a passionate dance of desire that manages to be both very funny and poignant. Starz has reportedly snapped up the rights for a TV series adaptation.
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
The winner of the 2024 Booker Prize, Orbital is a lyrical, thought-provoking story set during one day on the International Space Station. “Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft, they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene,” Harvey writes of the craft’s six occupants. Orbital’s 16 chapters represent the 16 revolutions the spaceship makes around Earth in 24 hours. While astronauts eat, sleep and do their space jobs, Harvey gets at the sheer outer-worldliness of it all: In weightlessness, Pietro feels his body dissolving; if he stayed long enough, he thinks, would he become something amphibious, like a tadpole? Nell, the meteorologist, watches a typhoon grow over Asia and thinks of it as the earth emoting. The English author has said she wanted the novel to avoid sci-fi fantasies of space. A bonus for book clubs with members pressed for time: It’s relatively short, at 224 pages (see our suggestions for other short novels here).
How the Light Gets In by Joyce Maynard
Maynard is the author of the bestselling memoir At Home in the World and novels such as To Die For and Labor Day (and is also known for her brief relationship with the author J.D. Salinger). This brilliant, moving story is a kind of sequel to her 2021 novel Count the Ways, which you don’t need to have read to become lost in this one. It’s centered on Eleanor, now in her 50s, who has moved from Boston back to the New Hampshire farm where she and her ex-husband, Cam, raised their family, to care for the dying Cam and live with her brain-injured adult son, Toby. Over 15 years, Eleanor wrestles with a baffling estrangement from her oldest daughter, along with guilt and resentment spurred by the long-ago accident that hurt Toby — all while falling into a passionate but unfulfilling affair. And yet, as she ages, we see her begin to appreciate the love and beauty that her life holds despite (or because of) its many disappointments and apparent wrong turns.
The Women by Kristin Hannah
Courtesy St. Martin’s Press
The most recent megahit from the author of giant bestsellers such as 2021’s The Four Winds and the cinematic World War II–era novel The Nightingale (2015) takes place during the political tumult of the 1960s, when Frances “Frankie” McGrath, a sheltered young nursing student, joins the Army Nurse Corps and follows her brother to Vietnam. Her experience at war is eye-opening and often terrifying, leaving her with emotional wounds that are not soon healed after she returns home to face disrespect and such comments as “There are no women in Vietnam, dear.” Warner Bros. has acquired film rights. (Read our interview with Hannah about the book.)
Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese
This may be a book you avoided after considering the weight of the thing: It’s a 715-page commitment. But if you’ve got ample reading time, you won’t regret diving into this absorbing bestseller, which weaves together multiple storylines — including that of a family in Kerala, on South India’s Malabar Coast, wrestling with what appears to be a curse: Someone from every generation dies by drowning. Oprah Winfrey chose the 2023 novel for her book club and called it “One of the best books I’ve read in my entire life.” Verghese, an Ethiopian American doctor of internal medicine and professor at Stanford University School of Medicine, is the author of the 2009 bestseller Cutting for Stone, among other books.