10 Perfect Book Club Picks for 2026

The best book club pick isn't the best book. It's the book that generates the best conversation. You want something that people will disagree about, something with moral complexity, something that makes everyone say "but what about..." over a glass of wine. Here are ten books that do exactly that.

1. Tomorrow, and Tomorrow, and Tomorrow — Gabrielle Zevin (2022)

Sam and Sadie meet as children in a hospital and bond over video games. Over 30 years, they build games together, navigating love, ambition, creative partnership, and the question of whether two people can build something great together without destroying each other. It's about collaboration and who gets credit. Your book club will argue about whether Sam or Sadie was more at fault. There is no correct answer.

2. Lessons in Chemistry — Bonnie Garmus (2022)

Elizabeth Zott is a brilliant chemist in the 1960s who ends up hosting a cooking show. She uses it to teach women chemistry. It's funny, sharp, and deceptively furious about how the world treats ambitious women. The discussion question writes itself: has anything actually changed? The answers will surprise you.

3. Demon Copperhead — Barbara Kingsolver (2022)

A retelling of David Copperfield set in the opioid-ravaged communities of Appalachian Virginia. Demon's voice is so alive — funny, profane, heartbreaking — that you forget you're reading Dickens. Kingsolver won the Pulitzer for this, and it's a book club goldmine because everyone will have a different opinion about who failed Demon and when.

4. The Remains of the Day — Kazuo Ishiguro (1989)

Stevens is a butler who has devoted his entire life to service. On a road trip through the English countryside, he reflects on his career, his former employer's Nazi sympathies, and the housekeeper he might have loved. The repression is the point — everything Stevens can't say is louder than what he can. Your book club will spend an hour trying to decide if his life was wasted or noble. Ishiguro gives you no answer.

5. Such a Fun Age — Kiley Reid (2019)

Emira, a Black babysitter, is accused of kidnapping her white employer's child in a grocery store. The incident sets off a chain of events that exposes the well-meaning racism of liberal white women. Reid writes with empathy for everyone and lets no one off the hook. It's the rare book about race that doesn't lecture — it just shows you the dynamics and lets the discomfort do the work.

6. Klara and the Sun — Kazuo Ishiguro (2021)

Narrated by Klara, an Artificial Friend (a solar-powered robot companion) observing human behaviour from a shop window and then from inside a family. Ishiguro uses Klara's naive perspective to ask what love actually is and whether it can be replicated. Published just before the AI explosion, it now reads as prophetic. The question for your book club: can something that isn't human genuinely love?

7. Homegoing — Yaa Gyasi (2016)

Two half-sisters are born in 18th-century Ghana. One marries a British colonist. The other is sold into slavery. Gyasi follows each sister's descendants through seven generations, alternating chapters between the two lines. It's ambitious, heartbreaking, and structurally brilliant. Each chapter is essentially a short story that works on its own but gains power from the whole. The discussion will be long and no one will want to stop.

8. Olga Dies Dreaming — Xochitl Gonzalez (2022)

Set against the backdrop of Hurricane Maria and Puerto Rican politics, this novel follows Olga, a successful wedding planner in Brooklyn, and her brother, a congressman, as they reckon with their activist mother's legacy. It's political, romantic, and funny. The question it poses: what do you owe the place you come from? Members from immigrant backgrounds will have particularly strong opinions.

9. Trust — Hernan Diaz (2022)

Four nested narratives tell the story of a wealthy financier in 1920s New York. Each version contradicts the last. Diaz won the Pulitzer for this puzzle box of a novel that asks who gets to write history and whose version of events we believe. The structure itself is the discussion: which narrator did you trust? (The answer says more about you than about the book.)

10. Intermezzo — Sally Rooney (2024)

Two brothers — one a successful lawyer, the other a chess prodigy — grieve their father's death while navigating complicated love lives. Rooney's fourth novel is her most emotionally generous, with less of the cool detachment that divided readers on her earlier work. The conversation starter: do the brothers actually know each other at all? And the bigger question: do any siblings?

How to pick for your club

Choose based on your group's personality. A literary group will love Trust and The Remains of the Day. A group that likes social novels will devour Such a Fun Age and Lessons in Chemistry. A group that wants to cry will get Demon Copperhead. A group that wants to argue about AI and humanity should read Klara and the Sun.

The only bad book club pick is a book everyone agrees about. Pick something divisive. The disagreement is the fun part.