What Book Clubs Are Reading in October

This month’s Belletrist selection is the new novel from Booker Prize finalist Patricia Lockwood. Amid a global pandemic, a young woman struggles to hold on to reality as her mind falters, her memories scatter, and her sense of self begins to dissolve. 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.

Stephen Colbert’s October pick is a literary mystery from Booker Prize winner Ian McEwan. What We Can Know moves from a 2014 dinner party to a post-nuclear England in 2119, where a scholar searches for a lost poem and uncovers hidden truths. “It’s a brilliant novel,” Colbert said, “about whether we can ever really know the truth about the past—or each other.”

Dua Lipa’s latest Service95 Book Club pick is Flesh by David Szalay, currently shortlisted for the Booker Prize. The novel follows István, a solitary boy in Hungary, whose life is shaped by a series of disconnections and silent traumas that follow him into adulthood. “I found Flesh a tense and gripping read – and by the end, I cared deeply about István,” Dua said. “David Szalay’s discipline as a writer to give us just enough is unmatched.”

Leigh Haber and Anand Giridharadas spotlight We the People by Jill Lepore in this month’s Ink Book Club. A historian at Harvard and staff writer for The New Yorker, Lepore looks at how the U.S. Constitution was designed to change and why it rarely has. She traces the history of amendment efforts, explains the rise of originalism, and makes a powerful case for renewing the Constitution to meet the needs of a modern democracy.

Roxane Gay and Dakota Johnson both chose Angela Flournoy’s second novel this month. The Wilderness traces two decades in the lives of five Black women navigating ambition, intimacy, and change from the 2000s through the 2020s. Roxane praised it as “sharp, soulful… a brilliant portrait of friendship as both compass and thicket,” while Dakota called it “so special” and “an era-defining novel.”

This month, Kaia Gerber’s Library Science highlights a 1930s Austrian novel about a working-class woman pulled into a world of wealth and then cast out of it. “While it’s billed as Cinderella meets Bonnie and Clyde,” the club notes, “it’s really about sympathizing with human beings… and it feels more relevant than ever.”

For October’s spooky season, both The New York Times Book Club and Kathryn Budig’s Inky Phoenix Book Club selected The Buffalo Hunter Hunter by Stephen Graham Jones, a haunting historical horror set in 1912 Montana.

Natalie Portman's latest book club pick is a Booker Prize-nominated tragicomedy that follows a well-to-do Irish family as their lives crack under mounting pressures. Portman said the novel offers “a nuanced look into the stories we tell within families and how they affect our individual lives.”

“The Texas Book Club is capping off its inaugural read and preparing to dive into a dystopian novel set in a future version of Texas where (gasp) books are against the law,” the club announced. Their October pick follows two women in the ruined border town of Three Rivers as they fight back against an authoritarian mayor, a poisoned environment, and a ban on reading itself.

Jenna Bush Hager calls her October pick “the kind of book that will have you canceling weekend plans just to keep reading.” Set on Long Island, the novel follows three sisters reuniting for Thanksgiving two decades after a tragic accident. Each carries secrets and struggles with love, career, and family, and when a guest from their past arrives, old tensions and new truths threaten to upend their reunion.