What Book Clubs Are Reading in July

This month, Emma Roberts and Karah Preiss invite their club members into the high-stakes world of biotech startups. In a book Oprah Daily calls “a page-turning debut on friendship, rivalry, and the timeless quest for immortality,” two Harvard students chase a scientific breakthrough that could change everything. Sign up today at Tertulia.com/Belletrist to have each monthly Belletrist book pick delivered to your mailbox, along with an intimate author conversation at the end of the month.

The second pick for Stephen Colbert’s book club is a “powerful” historical novel inspired by film director G.W. Pabst’s struggle between art and power during WWII, exploring “themes of complicity, ego, and compromise in the name of making art,” according to Colbert. “This summer, any departure from the present sounds like a vacation.”

Just days after the New York Times noted fewer men are reading fiction, comedian John Mulaney launched Mulaney Reads to share “some incredible things” he’s recently read. His July selection is Playworld, a novel he praises as the best new read he’s had in years, about a young boy navigating ’70s New York — an era Mulaney calls his favorite.

Oprah’s latest Book Club pick is a family drama set on the Chesapeake Bay, where a summer getaway unravels after a driverless minivan ride sparks a chain of events. " It's the book of the summer,” says Oprah, “that will keep you hooked until the very last page.”

New York Magazine brings back its Beach Read Book Club with Great Black Hope, the buzzy debut in every book lover’s beach bag. This charged, ambitious novel that unpacks race, wealth, and secrets in elite New York, it’s also this month’s pick for Roxane Gay’s Audacious Book Club.

"If you want a particularly mind-bending escape, look no further than The Catch,” declared The New York Times when announcing their July pick. Written by a poet who co-wrote Beyoncé’s Black Is King, this psychological thriller centers on two sisters who encounter their supposedly dead mother, unaged and thriving, in London.

Zohran Mamdani has “thrust Big Apple politics into the national spotlight,” inspiring the July pick for Anand Giridharadas and Leigh Haber’s Ink Book Club: The Uproar by Karim Dimechkie. The novel follows Sharif, a social worker, and his dog Judy as they navigate a New York shaped by inequality, shifting neighborhood identities, and personal upheaval. According to The Ink Book Club announcement, the book “captures the anxiety and inequity that undergird city life today” and reflects the city’s diverse mix of “neighborhood identities and ethnicities, the ultra-rich and the financially insecure.”

Each month, Columbia’s Jeffrey Sachs interviews leading authors on history, justice, and development. This July, he’s joined by Bard College classicist and historian James Romm to explore Plato’s extraordinary attempt to bring philosophy into the halls of power, as told in Romm’s new book Plato and the Tyrant.

Kaia Gerber’s July pick is Bonjour Tristesse, the iconic 1954 French novel recently adapted into a feature film directed by Durga Chew-Bose and starring Lily McInerny, Chloë Sevigny, and Claes Bang. Released earlier this summer, the film brings new life to Françoise Sagan’s stylish, unsettling coming-of-age classic.

This July, both Natalie Portman and Dylan Mulvaney have chosen the same inspiring read for their book clubs: the memoir of New Zealand’s former prime minister, a history-making leader who became the world’s youngest female head of government.