The LARB Book Club

In her first work of memoir, acclaimed author Arundhati Roy recounts her remarkable life, tracing in particular her complicated relationship to her mother Mary. Vulnerable, compassionate, and sagacious at once, the LARB Book Club Fall 2025 pick is “Mother Mary Comes to Me” by Arundhati Roy.

Dive into a compulsively readable journey through philosophy, literature, and the antihero’s pursuit of self-improvement in the LARB Book Club Summer 2025 pick “Fresh, Green Life” by Sebastian Castillo.

What unravels when a stranger claims he is your son? Take a front row seat for an exploration of power, performance, and identity in the LARB Book Club Spring 2025 pick “Audition” by Katie Kitamura.

This electrifying novel weaves together the lives of those irrevocably changed by a disaster, in a poignant picture of ever-changing Harlem. Check out our Winter 2025 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Lazarus Man” by Richard Price.

A seductive read about the murky world of wealth, morality, and self-discovery. Check out our Fall 2024 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Entitlement” by Rumaan Alam.

Hollywood in the 1950s—fresh with queer screenwriters, deceit, and postwar psychosis. Check out our Summer 2024 pick for the LARB Book Club: “The Future Was Color” by Patrick Nathan.

A harrowing memoir about a woman’s tragic death from the vantage of her surviving spouse. Intense and highly controversial, this book raises an essential question: who has the right to narrate someone else’s life? Check out our Spring 2024 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Molly” by Blake Butler.

An intergenerational family epic recounting imperialism and its legacy, written in prose that transcends genre. Check out our Winter 2024 pick for the LARB Book Club: “The Liberators” by E. J. Koh.

Post-Soviet geopolitics, oil wars, and the climate crisis provide the backdrop for a young woman’s coming-of-age in a novel that seamlessly intertwines the political with the personal. Check out our Fall 2023 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Mobility” by Lydia Kiesling.

An autobiography by Harriet Jacobs, the first formerly enslaved African American woman to publish an account of her life, in her own words. Check out our Summer 2023 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl” by Harriet Jacobs, edited by Koritha Mitchell.

A stunning lyrical exploration of violence and identity, the scars of intergenerational trauma, and the healing power of cage fighting. Check out our Spring 2023 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Muscle Memory” by Jenny Liu.

How do we call out injustice and its perpetrators? How do we pave a way toward healing a fractured country? This book analyzes progressive movements in the age of extreme polarization in an attempt to answer those questions. Check out our Winter 2023 pick for the LARB Book Club: “The Persuaders” by Anand Giridharadas.

A childhood tragedy followed by a life of mysterious coincidences—this remarkable novel explores memory, mourning, and the uncanny experience of grief. Check out our Fall 2022 pick for the LARB Book Club: “The Furrows” by Namwali Serpell.

Myth, migration, ghostliness—a remarkable collection of surrealist short stories that contemplates power, memory, and the relationships of Asian American women. Check out our Summer 2022 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Gods of Want” by K-Ming Chang.

Following a Ukranian beekeeper on a mission to collect pollen in peace, this timely novel imaginatively navigates the unfolding crisis in Ukraine with humor and brevity. Check out our Spring 2022 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Grey Bees” by Andrey Kurkov.

A definitively COVID-era novel that deals with the universalizing experience of isolation, the profound privilege of the ultra-wealthy, and the web of friendships and affairs born out of total seclusion. Check out our Winter 2022 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Our Country Friends” by Gary Shteyngart.

Grappling with the legacy of colonial violence and intervening against the naturalizing impulse of dominant American narratives, this poetry collection is at once tender and urgent. Check out our Fall 2021 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Postcolonial Love Poem” by Natalie Diaz.

At 51 years old, twins Julius and Jeanie have been sequestered from the outside world their entire lives—that is, until their mother’s death. Check out our Summer 2021 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Unsettled Ground” by Claire Fuller.

An essay collection from an iconic author exploring how great fiction works. Check out our Spring 2021 pick for the LARB Book Club: “A Swim in a Pond in the Rain” by George Saunders.

An anthology exploring desire and sexuality with short fiction from a truly remarkable roster of writers. Check out our Winter 2021 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Kink,” edited by R. O. Kwon and Garth Greenwell.

Witty, political, and deeply touching, this translation from French into English tells the story of an orphan driven by his acute sense of justice. Check out our Fall 2020 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Black Moses” by Alain Mabanckou, translated by Helen Stevenson.

Three women, each on their own journey to overcome burdens both personal and political. Check out our Summer 2020 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Breasts and Eggs” by Mieko Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd.

Later adapted into multiple films and plays, this essential classic follows a small-town man on his journey to Hollywood fame. Check out our Spring 2020 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Merton of the Movies” by Harry Leon Wilson.

Written by a Ukrainian political dissident and film director, these autobiographical stories offer a powerful message about justice and freedom. Check out our Winter 2020 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Life Went on Anyway” by Oleg Sentsov.

A story flickering between displacement and restoration in which a rare books dealer traverses the globe, encounters a cast of remarkable characters, and forever changes his perception of self. Check out our Summer 2019 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Gun Island” by Amitav Ghosh.

Foreign contractors are sent to a nation newly recovering from a decade-long civil war in order to develop infrastructure, which raises the question: whose role is it to forge peace anyway? Check out our Spring 2019 pick for the LARB Book Club: “The Parade” by Dave Eggers.

An utterly uninspired grad student fortuitously meets the niece of an iconic writer with access to her aunt’s secret notebooks. Inspiration turns to infatuation in this quintessential writerly novel. Check out our Winter 2019 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Talent” by Juliet Lapidos.

A behind-the-scenes account of Nazi Germany’s annexation of Austria, this book looks with fresh eyes at a well-known moment in history, dismantling the myth of an effortless victory. Check out our Fall 2018 pick for the LARB Book Club: “The Order of the Day” by Éric Vuillard, translated by Mark Polizzotti.

The final installment in a groundbreaking trilogy, this novel explores questions of personal and political identities, the nature of art and family, and the tensions between truth and representation—the most far-reaching and pressing questions we might ask. Check out our Summer 2018 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Kudos” by Rachel Cusk.

In a parking lot next to a Florida trailer park, a young girl lives in the front seat of her mother’s ’94 Mercury—contemporary America, and its harrowing gun infatuation, provides the backdrop for Pearl’s coming-of-age in this unforgettable novel. Check out our Spring 2018 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Gun Love” by Jennifer Clement.

Robots of doom, Supreme Court clones, and scheming lizard people—this curated collection of short stories offers deliberately fantastical twists on the conspiracies and fictions spun around the Obama adminstration. Check out our Winter 2017 pick for the LARB Book Club: “The Obama Inheritance” edited by Gary Phillips.

A poignant look at the refugee crisis in the UK, this at times heartbreaking story combines the techniques of eyewitness reporting with comic book storytelling to illuminate one of the most pressing issues of our times. Check out our Summer 2017 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Threads: From the Refugee Crisis” by Kate Evans.

On the cusp of adulthood, Harvard freshman Selin navigates the uncertainty of self-discovery and invention in a novel that is both hilarious and wise. Check out our Spring 2017 pick for the LARB Book Club: “The Idiot” by Elif Batuman.

In the Arizona desert, eight scientists are selected for a grand experiment: living under glass in E2, a prototype of a possible off-earth colony. With wit and humor, this novel explores the fallibility of human behavior and the looming question of our future. Check out our Winter 2017 pick for the LARB Book Club: “The Terranauts” by T. C. Boyle.

After the mysterious death of her lover, art model Josie finds herself caught in a twisted relationship with his mother in this bewitching story of love, betrayal, and obsession. Check out our Summer 2016 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Paint It Black” by Janet Fitch.

An explosive and harrowing look into the opiate epidemic, Big Pharma, and the consequences of capitalism run amok in the heartland of America. Check out our Spring 2016 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Dreamland: The True Tale of America’s Opiate Epidemic” by Sam Quinones.

Rattlesnake bites, wild horses, and mountain snowstorms—these stories, in their restless traversal of the American West, cut through the fabric of everyday life to examine what lies beneath it. Check out our Winter 2015 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Half an Inch of Water” by Percival Everett.

Saigon, 1975—following a double agent from a captain in the South Vietnamese army, this thrilling spy novel explores extreme politics and the enduring legacies of the Vietman War. Check out our Fall 2015 pick for the LARB Book Club: “The Sympathizer” by Viet Thanh Nguyen.

This second installment in Jane Smiley’s best-selling trilogy follows the Langdon family as they navigate the political and physical landscapes of midcentury America, bringing to the surface the challenges and rewards of family even in the most turbulent of times. Check out our Summer 2015 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Early Warning” by Jane Smiley.

In an age of constant movement and hyper-connection, this inspiring read explores the richness found in stillness. Check out our Spring 2015 pick for the LARB Book Club: “The Art of Stillness: Adventrues in Going Nowhere” by Pico Iyer.

At the brink of World War II, the murder of a Japanese family brings four distinct individuals together—an LAPD captain, an ex-IRA fighter, a police chemist, and a 21-year-old dilettante—into the eye of the crime’s political storm. Check out our Winter 2015 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Perfida” by James Ellroy.

Sequestered in a villa up in the hills of pre-Hollywood Los Angeles, Bloom and his father Jacob live apart from society—but it is only a matter of time before their dramatic pasts catch up to them in this dark, thrilling novel about art, family, and the birth of Los Angeles. Check out our Summer 2014 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Mount Terminus” by David Grand.

Boy Novak arrives to a small town in Massachusetts looking for beauty in this dazzling novel that explores identity, image, and the tyranny of the mirror. Check out our Spring 2014 pick for the LARB Book Club: “Boy, Snow, Bird” by Helen Oyeyemi.

A golden-haired girl in the apple orchard, a woman married to an ogre, and tiger-mending sisters traversing Malaysia—a collection of 15 stories that dazzle, confuse, and hold a mirror up to reality. Check out our Winter 2014 pick for the LARB Book Club: “The Color Master” by Aimee Bender.

Communists, counterculture, and New York in the 1950s—this vivid novel explores the ways in which the personal and the political are inextricably intertwined. Check out our inaugural LARB Book Club pick: “Dissident Gardens” by Jonathan Lethem.