October National Book Club Picks

Looking for a new book club read? Check out these titles that were chosen as national book club picks this October!

BAD WORDS by Ríoghnach Robinson is the Good Morning America Book Club Pick for October, and the Barnes & Noble Book Club pick!

Parker Navarro’s buzzy debut novel should’ve been the book of the year. Instead, it was panned so harshly by notorious critic Selina Chan that it became the literary flop of the decade. Four years later, his new novel marks a second chance.

Selina’s carefully curated life is a result of the sacrifices she’s made in her pursuit for excellence. The last thing she wants to do is review Parker’s second book, but as the only Asian-American staffer at City Magazine, and with the iconic publication in financial trouble, she has no choice.

The review goes live: a devastating pan, again. That night, at an industry party, Parker and Selina erupt in a fight that’s secretly filmed—and it goes viral, driving Parker’s preorders and City’s subscription numbers.

As Parker and Selina are pitted against each other through pointed interviews and in-person clashes, their jabs about publishing, criticism, and who gets to lead an artist’s life give way to the realization that they might be more like-minded than they thought. While the feud carries on in public, a different conversation begins in private, especially after they’re thrust together one snowy New York evening and begin an epistolary exchange that starts to feel a lot like flirting.

Witty and endlessly charming, Ríoghnach Robinson’s BAD WORDS is about the power of writing and the unexpected intimacy of being truly, wholeheartedly, read.

HUNGERED by Amanda Rizkalla is Oprah Winfrey’s new book club pick!

Sofia’s mother promises that soon she’ll have her own bedroom to decorate. Soon, too, she’ll be able to see her friends, go back to school, and eat the colorful, tempting cakes in the grocery store’s display case. For now, though, twelve-year-old Sofia lives with her mother and younger brother in their car. For now, Sofia’s days are a blur of freeways and strip malls as her mother searches for a safe place to park for the night. For now, Sofia tries to carve out a space and an identity for herself while grappling with her family’s disintegration.

This haunting and lyrical novel captures the fault lines of an existence marked by economic insecurity, exploring what it means to come of age during a moment of displacement. Beautiful, evocative, and emotionally charged, Amanda Rizkalla’s HUNGERED is an indelible ode to survival, memory, and the search for home in its many forms.