Books Selected for Oprah’s Book Club
Oprah’s Book Club 2.0 launched in June of 2012 and is a joint venture between, Oprah Winfrey, OWN: The Oprah Winfrey Network, and O: The Oprah Magazine. The club is a re-launch of the original Book Club which ran from 1996 until 2011. Here are all the authors, of African descent, who have been selected Oprah’s Book Clubs since 1996.
3 Books Selected for Oprah’s Book Club in 2018
November’s Selection
Becoming
by Michelle Obama
- 1 Time AALBC.com Bestselling Book!
- Selected for 3 Book Clubs’s Reading Lists
- A 2018 Oprah Book Club Selection
- An NAACP Image Award Honored Book
- 2019 BCALA Literary Award
Publication Date: Nov 13, 2018
List Price: $32.50
Format: Hardcover, 400 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9781524763138
Imprint: Crown
Publisher: Penguin Random House
Parent Company: Bertelsmann
Read Our Review of Becoming
Read a Description of Becoming
Download the 23-Page Reader’s Guide
An intimate, powerful, and inspiring memoir by the former First Lady of the United States
In a life filled with meaning and accomplishment, Michelle Obama has emerged as one of the most iconic and compelling women of our era. As First Lady of the United States of America—the first African-American to serve in that role—she helped create the most welcoming and inclusive White House in history, while also establishing herself as a powerful advocate for women and girls in the U.S. and around the world, dramatically changing the ways that families pursue healthier and more active lives, and standing with her husband as he led America through some of its most harrowing moments. Along the way, she showed us a few dance moves, crushed Carpool Karaoke, and raised two down-to-earth daughters under an unforgiving media glare.
In her memoir, a work of deep reflection and mesmerizing storytelling, Michelle Obama invites readers into her world, chronicling the experiences that have shaped her—from her childhood on the South Side of Chicago to her years as an executive balancing the demands of motherhood and work, to her time spent at the world’s most famous address. With unerring honesty and lively wit, she describes her triumphs and her disappointments, both public and private, telling her full story as she has lived it—in her own words and on her own terms. Warm, wise, and revelatory, Becoming is the deeply personal reckoning of a woman of soul and substance who has steadily defied expectations—and whose story inspires us to do the same.
June’s Selection
The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row
by Anthony Ray Hinton, with Lara Love Hardin
Publication Date: Jun 05, 2018
List Price: $26.99
Format: Hardcover, 288 pages
Classification: Nonfiction
ISBN13: 9781250205797
Imprint: St. Martin’s Press
Publisher: Macmillan Publishers
Parent Company: Holtzbrinck Publishing Group
Read a Description of The Sun Does Shine: How I Found Life and Freedom on Death Row
Oprah’s Book Club Summer 2018 Selection
The Instant New York Times Bestseller
A powerful, revealing story of hope, love, justice, and the power of reading by a man who spent thirty years on death row for a crime he didn’t commit.
"An amazing and heartwarming story, it restores our faith in the inherent goodness of humanity."
—Archbishop Desmond Tutu
In 1985, Anthony Ray Hinton was arrested and charged with two counts of capital murder in Alabama. Stunned, confused, and only twenty-nine years old, Hinton knew that it was a case of mistaken identity and believed that the truth would prove his innocence and ultimately set him free.
But with no money and a different system of justice for a poor black man in the South, Hinton was sentenced to death by electrocution. He spent his first three years on Death Row at Holman State Prison in agonizing silence—full of despair and anger toward all those who had sent an innocent man to his death. But as Hinton realized and accepted his fate, he resolved not only to survive, but find a way to live on Death Row. For the next twenty-seven years he was a beacon—transforming not only his own spirit, but those of his fellow inmates, fifty-four of whom were executed mere feet from his cell. With the help of civil rights attorney and bestselling author of Just Mercy, Bryan Stevenson, Hinton won his release in 2015.
With a foreword by Stevenson, The Sun Does Shine is an extraordinary testament to the power of hope sustained through the darkest times. Destined to be a classic memoir of wrongful imprisonment and freedom won, Hinton’s memoir tells his dramatic thirty-year journey and shows how you can take away a man’s freedom, but you can’t take away his imagination, humor, or joy.
February’s Selection
An American Marriage: A Novel
by Tayari Jones
- 3 Time AALBC.com Bestselling Book!
- Selected for 3 Book Clubs’s Reading Lists
- A 2018 Oprah Book Club Selection
- An NAACP Image Award Honored Book
- 2019 BCALA Literary Award
Publication Date: Feb 06, 2018
List Price: $26.95
Format: Hardcover, 320 pages
Classification: Fiction
ISBN13: 9781616208776
Imprint: Algonquin Books
Publisher: Workman Publishing Co., Inc.
Parent Company: Workman Publishing Co., Inc.
Read a Description of An American Marriage: A Novel
Read Tayari’s, “Notes on “Quotes” from An American Marriage”
An American Marriage is the newest Oprah’s Book Club selection!
Thank you, Oprah, for extending your hand to me and my new novel, An American Marriage. I am honored to join your book club and connect hearts and minds by raising our voices and telling our stories.”
Love,
Tayari
Newlyweds Celestial and Roy are the embodiment of both the American Dream and the New South. He is a young executive, and she is an artist on the brink of an exciting career. But as they settle into the routine of their life together, they are ripped apart by circumstances neither could have imagined. Roy is arrested and sentenced to twelve years for a crime Celestial knows he didn’t commit. Though fiercely independent, Celestial finds herself bereft and unmoored, taking comfort in Andre, her childhood friend, and best man at their wedding. As Roy’s time in prison passes, she is unable to hold on to the love that has been her center. After five years, Roy’s conviction is suddenly overturned, and he returns to Atlanta ready to resume their life together.
This stirring love story is a profoundly insightful look into the hearts and minds of three people who are at once bound and separated by forces beyond their control. An American Marriage is a masterpiece of storytelling, an intimate look deep into the souls of people who must reckon with the past while moving forward—with hope and pain—into the future.