Oprah's Book List

Enjoy 2025 Selections
from Oprah's Book Club!

Keep track of the past and current book selections from Oprah's Book Club!

The River is Waiting
by Wally Lamb

Corby Ledbetter is struggling. New fatherhood, the loss of his job, and a growing secret addiction have thrown his marriage to his beloved Emily into a tailspin. And that’s before he causes the tragedy that tears the family apart.

“The River is Waiting is an ambitious, affecting novel that’s not afraid to look directly at human suffering, and to map out the pain we inflict on others, and on ourselves. With an unflinching eye and an unsentimental compassion for his characters, Wally Lamb finds glimmers of hope and healing and decency in the darkest places." — Tom Perrotta, New York Times bestselling author of The Leftovers and Little Children

Hardcover

Audiobook

Martriach: A Memoir
by Tina Knowles

Tina Knowles, the mother of iconic singer-songwriters Beyoncé Knowles-Carter, Solange Knowles, and bonus daughter Kelly Rowland, is known the world over as a Matriarch with a capital M: a determined, self-possessed, self-aware, and wise woman who raised and inspired some of the great artists of our time. But this story is about so much more than that.

“You are Celestine,” she said. She squatted to push the hair off my face and pull leaves off my pajama legs. “Like my sister and my grandmother.” And there, under the pecan tree, as she did countless times, that day my mother told me stories of the mothers and daughters that went before me.

Hardcover

Audiobook

That Bird Has My Wings: The Autobiography of an Innocent Man on Death Row
by Jarvis Jay Masters

In 1990, while serving a sentence in San Quentin for armed robbery, Jarvis Jay Masters was implicated as an accessory in the murder of a prison guard. A 23-year-old Black man, Jarvis was sentenced to death in the gas chamber. While in the maximum-security section of Death Row, using the only instrument available to him—a ball-point pen filler—Masters's astounding memoir is a testament to the tenacity of the human spirit and the talent of a fine writer.

Paperback

Audiobook

The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois
by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers

The great scholar, W. E. B. Du Bois, once wrote about the Problem of race in America, and what he called “Double Consciousness,” a sensitivity that every African American possesses in order to survive. Since childhood, Ailey Pearl Garfield has understood Du Bois’s words all too well. Bearing the names of two formidable Black Americans—the revered choreographer Alvin Ailey and her great grandmother Pearl, the descendant of enslaved Georgians and tenant farmers—Ailey carries Du Bois’s Problem on her shoulders.

Paperback

Audiobook

Nightcrawling
by Leila Mottley

Kiara and her brother, Marcus,
are scraping by in an East Oakland apartment complex optimistically called the Regal-Hi. Both have dropped out of high school, their family fractured by death and prison. But while Marcus clings to his dream of rap stardom, Kiara hunts for work to pay their rent—which has more than doubled—and to keep the nine-year-old boy next door, abandoned by his mother, safe and fed. One night, what begins as a drunken misunderstanding with a stranger turn into the job Kiara never imagined wanting but now desperately needs: nightcrawling.

Hardcover