The 17 Books Everyone in Our Book Club Is Obsessed With
Did you know we recently started a book club on Facebook? If you love reading as much as we do, come and join in on all of the great book recommendations from our community. We're so happy to have a place to turn in trying times to find comfort in the words of our favourite books, as well as discovering new ones to add to our bedside stack. There has been a huge variety of titles recommended in the group, but it's clear to see that there are a few best-sellers that it seems everyone is reading now. These are the eleven books we're obsessed with right now.
1. Where The Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens
Delia Owens has previously received acclaim for her internationally bestselling nonfiction books about her life as a wildlife scientist in Africa. Where The Crawdads Sing is her first novel and revolves around a mysterious murder in a small town in North Carolina. Locals immediately suspect a girl who spends her time alone in the wild and whose life is about to change when two young men from town take an interest in her.
2. Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid
Such a Fun Age comes recommended by Reese Witherspoon's book club and is at once a made-up tale and something we wouldn't be surprised to see on the news. After babysitting her employer's two-year-old daughter, Emira is apprehended at a supermarket in an affluent area and charged with kidnapping. Her boss, feminist blogger Alix, resolves to make things right but things just get messier for the pair who are entangled in this mess.
3. My Dark Vanessa By Kate Elizabeth Russell
Nuanced, bold and uncomfortable, Vanessa Wye, a thirty-two-year-old woman, must cast her mind back to when she was fifteen-years-old and began a relationship with her English teacher. She remembers it to mutual love, but when he's accused years later of abuse, she'll have to reconsider everything she had previously thought about their romance.
4. Grown Ups by Marian Keyes
Johnny Casey, his two brothers, and their wives are a tight-knit group. They enjoy weekends away together, and their kids are inseparable. With such a close group of adults there is bound to be some disagreements and people who enjoy each other’s company a bit too much. When Cara gets a concussion and can’t seem to keep her thoughts to herself, everyone’s dirty laundry is aired.
5. Unfollow by Megan Phelps-Roper
Megan Phelps-Roper left her life in the Westboro Baptist Church aged twenty-six after a lifetime of attending protests and living with camera crews and documentary makers in her home. Now, she's an advocate for all of the groups she was once taught to detest and is spreading her message of empathy with the world.
6. Your Own Kind of Girl by Clare Bowditch
A promise she made to herself at twenty-one, Your Own Kind of Girl is a book filled with heartbreaking and at times playful stories from Clare's own life. As a well-respected and notable figure in the arts, this memoir pulls back the curtain on the not-so-glamorous parts of life that we can all relate to on some level.
7. Dark Emu by Bruce Pascoe
Essential reading for anyone living on the Australian continent, Dark Emu provides an authentic insight into the traditional owners of the land and the way in which they used domesticated plants, harvested and stored as hunter-gatherers. Revolutionary for the time, this book aims to educate people on the sophisticated technologies indigenous Australians have implemented for generations.
8. The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel
Weaving together high-end Manhattan hotels, a shady shipping company and the wilderness of Vancouver Island, this mysterious book will keep you on your toes as the characters are interwoven and greed and guilt makes people do things they’d never dreamed of—like murder.
9. The Dry by Jane Harper
When Luke Hadler turns a gun on his family and then himself, his childhood friend and Federal Police investigator Aaron Falk returns to his hometown to mourn. Only then does he begin to dig deeper, with old wounds and secrets boiling to the surface.
10. Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman
If you've visited a bookstore in the past six months, you'll be familiar with the recognisable cover of this breakout hit. With months spent on the New York Times best sellers list, Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine by Gail Honeyman is a story about loneliness and the power one kind gesture can have in shaking up someone's lif
11. The Loudness of Unsaid Things by Hilde Hinton
Susie’s life has always been uncertain. One day, her dad packed up their life and moved them to the city…without her mum. She hated travelling back to visit her mum in the “mind hospital” and was resentful of the chaos and things she could never speak honestly. Miss Kaye, a worker at the facility helps Susie to figure out a way to communicate with her unwell mother through music.
12. Unorthodox by Deborah Feldman
What has now become a Netflix adaptation, Unorthodox is a best-selling memoir of a young Jewish woman and her escape from a religious sect. Despite her repression, Deborah Feldman grew into a free-thinking young adult who took comfort in the words of writers like Jane Austen. This is her story of forging a path to freedom.
13. American Dirt by Jeanine Cummings
In American Dirt, fear keeps a mother and her son running, while hope keeps them alive. You won't be able to put down this exhilarating page-turner that follows a desperate family attempting to flee a drug cartel and cross the USA border to begin a new, safer life,
14. Eggshell Skull by Bri Lee
After beginning a career as a bright-eyed judge's assistant in Brisbane, Bri Lee found herself at the centre of her own sex crime investigation. This fierce and eloquent memoir addresses the injustices that Bri, the daughter of a policeman and law student, faced as a victim of the justice system.
15. The Tattooist of Auschwitz by Heather Morris
Based on the real-life interviews of Holocaust survivor and Auschwitz-Birkenau tattooist Ludwig (Lale) Sokolov, this confronting and moving title explores how even during the most difficult hardships, love and joy are possible when you find someone you connect with deeply.
16. A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara
Testing the limits of brotherly love and human endurance, four broke college graduates move to New York to make their way in the world only to uncover their own deeply-held fears and unspoken traumas that darken their friendship along the way.
17. Boy Swallows Universe by Trent Dalton
With a lengthy list of awards and achievements, Boy Swallows Universe takes us back to 1983 where young Eli's life is complicated to say the least. With a mum in jail, a heroin dealer for a stepfather and a mute brother, this story is one of both extreme heartbreak and joy.
