What Book Clubs Are Reading in April

The scene? Y2K New York City. The players? Lily Chen, a young Asian-American from Florida and unpaid intern at a slick media company, and Matthew, an east coaster and heir to a pharmaceutically-funded empire. Despite their differences, they fall in love. Cut to: 2021. Fifteen-year-old Nick Chen feels like his single mom, Lily is hiding something. He embarks on a quest to discover who his biological dad is. A novel of class, society, and what we inherit.

Reese's April pick is a family saga of long-buried secrets that moves from the 1970s to 2016 as Marilyn Connolly and David Sorenson fall in love and have four radically different daughters. Wendy, widowed, is nursing an alcohol dependency problem; Violet, a former lawyer and now stay-at-home parent struggles with anxiety; Liza is a newly tenured professor with an unplanned pregnancy; and Grace, the youngest, is living a lie. Gripping and poignant, Reese calls the novel "emotional" and "messy in the best way."

Michelle Zauner is well-loved for her incisive, moody lyrics "as the uber-cool singer and guitarist of the American cult indie band Japanese Breakfast. With this book, she also proves herself to be a first-class memoirist, writing with raw honesty about her difficult teenage relationship with her mother and the grief that follows her mother’s death from cancer," writes Dua Lipa of this month's book pick. A book about love, family, food, and memory, the memoir will stay with and inspire readers.

The Belletrist Book Club run by Emma Roberts and Karah Preiss has picked one of the most anticipated novels of 2024 by National Book Award fiction finalist Lisa Ko. Memory Piece, spanning the pre-digital 1980s to the 2040s, follows Giselle, Jackie, and Ellen, friends drawn together by their sense of alienation. They dream of being artistic collaborators, fueled by creative freedom. They grow up to be a performance artist, a coder exhilarated by the early days of the internet, and an activist. As the world around them evolves and digitizes, their friendship does too, revealing the rift between the world we imagine and the one we live in.

Columbia professor Jeffrey Sachs' book club is a "global forum on the most relevant topics for humanity," and features monthly interviews with renowned authors in history, sustainable development, social justice, and more. This month's pick is Taking Back Philosophy, which questions how American education teaches philosophy, focusing heavily on Western philosphy. Author and professor Bryan W. Van Norden offers a biting and incisive critique of academic philosophy and ringing call to reconsider philosophy for the academic good.

Having fled Vietnam as refugees in the 1980s, Susan Lieu's family built a life in California, with her mother as the dynamic force behind their success. But when Susan was just eleven years old, her mother died suddenly following a botched plastic surgery. In the aftermath, a veil of silence fell over the family, leaving Susan to grapple alone with haunting questions. Susan's memoir follows her journey to understand her mother and to bring the truth of her life and death to light.

Game designer Holly Gramazio has created games to be played not just from your computer but unexpected places like the walls of a public park. She brings that playful creativity to a debut novel, in which a London woman discovers that a series of husbands she’s never met before continually emerge from her attic. She's cracking up early readers and critics, with what one Star-Tribune reviewer praised as a mash-up of Groundhog Day and Bridget Jones's Diary.

2022 Minnesota Book Award-winning author and 2013 Cupcake Wars star Abby Jimenez treats readers with Just For The Summer, her sixth novel that follows Justin, whose love life seems cursed. Every woman he dates winds up finding their soul mate after him. After a Reddit thread on his woes goes viral, a woman who says she's cursed the same way offers him a solution: they'll date each other and break up, and then go on to find their soulmates. What could go wrong, right? Right??

American Book Award-winner Emily Raboteau shares twenty essays that explore the last decade, from climate change to the COVID-19 pandemic, to personal topics like Black motherhood, racial inequality, and "lessons for survival" she's learned along the way. Following Raboteau's travels from coastal Alaskan fishing villages to New York City to small, Palestinian villages, the book weaves a compelling and urgent narrative of planetary and communal care and collective action.

"During an age in which human connection is at most a button-click away, why does it seem we're more lonely and socially anxious than ever?" This is the question raised by actor, singer and book club founder Amerie in introducing her April pick. In this memoir, Shoji Morimoto explores our lonely reality through profiling a "rental person who does nothing," except offer strangers a hand wave, company, accountability, or just the knowledge that someone is thinking of them. Don't miss out on the opportunity to submit questions for Amerie to ask author Morimoto during an Instagram Live at the end of the month!