Oprah's Book Club Picks That Are Actually Worth Reading

Four strangers come together in an unnamed Indian city during Indira Gandhi's Emergency of the mid-1970s — a widow, her nephew, a student, and two tailors from a lower caste — and the novel follows them with a patience and compassion that becomes almost unbearable as history closes in. Mistry writes in the tradition of the great nineteenth-century realists: Dickens, Hardy, Tolstoy. It is long and devastating and one of the finest novels of the last fifty years. It is not an easy read. It is one of those books that makes everything you read afterwards feel slightly inadequate by comparison.

The Lambert family — Alfred, the deteriorating patriarch; Enid, his wife who wants one last Christmas together; and their three adult children scattered across America — are brought together for a final reckoning. Franzen's novel is funny and savage and technically brilliant, and its portrait of a certain kind of Midwestern family is so precise it will make you uncomfortable. It caused a cultural controversy when selected — Franzen was publicly ambivalent about the Oprah endorsement — which tells you more about literary culture than it does about the book. The book is extraordinary.

Dolores Price is four years old at the start and forty by the end, and in between she survives — barely — a childhood defined by loss, assault, and a series of institutional failures that would break a less stubborn person. Lamb writes from inside Dolores's perspective with total conviction, and the novel earns its redemption because it earns its darkness first. What makes it worth reading is not the Oprah endorsement but the character herself: specific, honest, and impossible to forget.

Seven generations of the Buendía family in the fictional Colombian town of Macondo — founded by the patriarch José Arcadio Buendía and haunted from the first page by a prophecy of its own destruction. García Márquez's 1967 novel invented magic realism as a genre, won the Nobel Prize, and sold over fifty million copies. The opening sentence — "Many years later, as he faced the firing squad, Colonel Aureliano Buendía was to remember that distant afternoon when his father took him to discover ice" — is arguably the greatest opening sentence in the history of the novel. Read it slowly. It rewards the time.

Cal Stephanides — intersex, living in Berlin — narrates the story of his Greek-American family across three generations, from Asia Minor in 1922 to Detroit in the 1970s, tracing the genetic mutation that made him who he is. Eugenides won the Pulitzer Prize for this novel, and it deserved it: the scope is enormous, the research invisible, and Cal's voice — funny, precise, impossible to dislike — holds the whole thing together across four hundred pages. A novel about identity, genetics, immigration, and America that manages to be genuinely entertaining about all of them simultaneously.

James Frey arrives at a rehabilitation clinic at 23, having destroyed himself with alcohol and crack cocaine, and the book follows his six weeks there. It was published as memoir, and much of it turned out to be fabricated — a scandal that produced one of television's most memorable confrontations when Oprah called Frey back to account for the lies. The controversy is now part of the book's history and worth knowing. What remains, stripped of the memoir label, is a compulsive and genuinely well-written account of addiction and recovery — raw in ways most addiction narratives aren't, and honest about how hard the work actually is.

Wiesel was fifteen when he was deported with his family from the Hungarian town of Sighet to Auschwitz and then Buchenwald. Night is his account of what happened — written in spare, direct, devastating prose that owes nothing to literary effect and everything to the obligation of witness. One of the essential books of the twentieth century. The question Wiesel wrestles with — how to go on believing in God, in humanity, in a future, after Auschwitz — is not resolved. It cannot be. The book's value is in the asking, and in the refusal to look away.

Edgar Sawtelle is a mute boy growing up on a dog-breeding farm in rural Wisconsin in the 1970s. When his father dies and his uncle arrives, events begin to follow a shape that readers of Shakespeare will recognise — this is Hamlet, transposed to the American Midwest, with dogs. Wroblewski's debut novel is long, unhurried, and deeply atmospheric, and the dogs are rendered with a conviction that makes them feel like characters rather than symbols. The Wisconsin landscape, the specific world of kennel work, the quality of silence around a boy who cannot speak — all of it rendered with unusual care. An understated and quietly remarkable book.