The Book Club

A rabbit that was dead at breakfast is nibbling a girl's hair by lunch. Astrid Scholte turns the cursed portrait inside out: here the painter pays, and a whole court lives on her years. A sharp idea and a vivid castle, followed by a journey that never quite matches them.

A girl with a broken heart loses her shoes, sneaks into a masked ball and has until sunrise to outlast her school, her rival and a prince. Amber Hamilton's second novel is a grim Cinderella about grief, numbness and choosing who to love.

Taryn tells her twin a fairy tale about a murderous bridegroom before she admits what she did. Holly Black's illustrated Elfhame collection is at its best when its liars and tyrants explain themselves, and at its weakest when it asks newcomers to keep up.

At dawn on a Gujarat beach, a thin old man bends down and picks up a crust of salt, and an empire starts to lose its grip. Kurlansky's history treats that gesture as the end of a five-thousand-year story about who owns the most ordinary thing on the table.

M. John Harrison won the Booker Prize 2026 with The End of Everything. In September I told groups not to start with it. Here is how to make it work if your club wants the winner anyway.

Two girls practise a relay handoff in a dusty Georgia yard minutes before men with guns arrive. Karin Slaughter's 2017 novel follows those sisters into middle age, when a school shooting reopens the night that split them. Harrowing, clever about the law and generous to its survivors, though its last act explains more than it dramatises.

A long kitchen table on a Colorado ranch, two people pretending not to notice each other's knees. Sadie Kincaid closes her Wages of Sin duet with a romance about a woman learning to want things for herself, and lets the conspiracy around it fall apart too easily.