Celebrating the joy of shared reading!

The 2020 Great Group Reads selections have been chosen!

This year’s list features books from a wide-range of styles and from authors with diverse backgrounds.

On this list, you can find stories about social issues such as racism, immigration, LGBTQ+, mental health, and war.

You can find stories about families that explore the highs of love and the pain of grief.

While some books are contemporary and some are historical, the themes explored are universal and serve as fantastic conversation starters for your book group or as catalysts for reflection if you are reading the books on your own.

We hope you’ll read as many books as you can and enjoy them as we do. if you talk about them on social media, use #GreatGroupReads.

Don’t forget to check out our store on Bookshop, which has all of the GGR selections since 2009.

And if you are looking for a book club to join, the Bookwoman Book Club exclusively reads books from the GGR lists. We hope you’ll join us.

2020 Great Group Reads Selections Overview

2020 Great Group Reads Selections Book Info

This short, but affecting, novel tells the story of four generations. Narrated by each of the characters, the story explores family dynamics, the complexities of relationships, and how one act of violence forever echoes through and shapes a family.

School principal Afaf Rahman crouches in a former confessional as a school shooter guns down students at the Nurideen School for Girls in Chicago.  This is a propulsive novel alternating between Afaf’s live account of the heart-pounding attack and flashbacks to her childhood, her complicated relationship with her mother, the shattering of her family in the wake of her older sister’s disappearance, and her own discovery of the comfort of Islam. 

LONGLISTED FOR 2020 THE NATIONAL BOOK AWARD IN TRANSLATED LITERATURE

When Damaris adopts a female puppy and takes her back to the shack on a bluff at the edge of the Colombian jungle that she shares with her husband, she hopes that the dog will ease her longing for the children she’ll never have. The dog becomes not a surrogate child but a repository for love and violence, guilt and grief, and disappointment in this intense and coiled novel.

 In this thoroughly engaging and well-written story of identity and acceptance, a young transgender man moves West to prove his masculinity to strangers, to his family, and most importantly, to himself.

SEPTEMBER 2020 INDIE NEXT LIST

AN INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

OPTIONED FOR TELEVISION BY BRUNA PAPANDREA, THE PRODUCER OF HBO’S BIG LITTLE LIES

A page turning story set in the early days of Australia, this is the story of three women, two English convicts, and a young Aboriginal girl taken from her people to be raised as a sort of pet by the governor and his wife.  Dramatic and powerful, this takes on colonization, the powerlessness of women, the underclass, and native peoples, and the determination that enabled them to persevere in the face of exile.

APRIL 2020 INDIE NEXT LIST

Fourteen-year-old Lacey May, whose mother has disappeared, becomes emboiled in Pastor Vern’s plan to make it rain in drought stricken Peaches, California in this disturbing, yet engrossing novel about cults, faith, and motherhood.

Connected short stories centered around two sisters and their families portray a careful and genuine rendering of people in rural West Virginia as they face their present and their future with dignity and determination.

Sylv.ie is an AI created solely to serve her Husband, a human man who lives with his wife and their baby on the floors below Sylv.ie’s attic room.  As Sylv.ie adapts to her Husband’s wants and needs, she gains consciousness, agency, and humanity, leading her to question her role in her husband’s life and in life in general.  This science fiction, set in a near future, provides an insightful and terrifying look at the commodification of women, sex, the concept of freedom, and technology.

MARCH 2020 INDIE NEXT LIST

A NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER

Driven perfectionist Dannie knows perfectly well where she intends to be in five years in her career and her personal life, but after falling asleep one evening, she awakens to spend exactly one hour five years in her future. Confusingly, it is nothing like she envisioned. Returning to the present, she will spend the next five years trying to shake the destiny she’s seen in this completely engrossing and heartbreaking tale of friendship, fate, and love.

As fear and community suspicion about German immigrants grows, Nina and Otto Aust and their sons are first separated by the FBI, then interrogated, and ultimately sent to an internment camp in this WWII-set historical fiction.

When Galina Kogan’s mother dies, the young, Jewish book illustrator chooses to leave Soviet Russia for permanent exile in Australia.  A deep examination of otherness, of inhabiting different lives, of art, and of identity pervade this detailed novel of belonging.

A beautifully written, poignant memoir of friendship and loss, this story focuses on friends Lahey and Louisa’s deep and enduring friendship, with all of its ups and downs, and spans from childhood and young adulthood through an unimaginable terminal diagnosis and death.

MAY 2019 INDIE NEXT LIST

WINNER OF THE EDGAR AWARD FOR BEST FIRST NOVEL

The hyperbaric oxygen chamber Pak Yoo runs explodes with patients inside, killing a young autistic boy and a mother and injuring several others, including Pak himself and his teenage daughter.  As the mother of the dead child is tried for murder, the city sits in judgment on her as much for the explosion as for her treatment of her son. Secrets and lies come to light.  Disability, motherhood, and success all weave through this thrilling, legal drama.

APRIL 2020 INDIE NEXT LIST

In the 1980s — at the height of the AIDS crisis, a young, gay, man living with HIV loses his love and chooses to go home to rural Ohio to die. His family, wanting to keep his disease a secret, grapples with their love for him and the sexuality they both fear and hate.  Told from multiple perspectives, this is a searing, heart-rending look at bigotry, homophobia, and what home means.

A Tamil exile sits in prison awaiting trial for theft and terrorism. His lawyer must figure out the truth. From witnessing the death of his mother to emigrating to Britain, from his need for art to his fraught relationship with his daughter, from his job at the National Gallery to his role in a sad and disintegrating marriage, Ras’s story is revealed in this complex and human novel.

Evolutionary biologist and loner Amina Abdul studies hybrid zones.  When she moves to Washington for a post doc, she lands firmly in the hybrid zone that is her own family who are Muslim Indian immigrants. Part American, Amina’s  eleven-year-old nephew Omar is intensely curious about his Indian heritage. Set just a handful of years post 9/11, this is a powerfully written, tender look at immigration, belonging, and connection.

When Lenworth kidnaps his newborn daughter, he devastates his girlfriend Plum. Plum spends the next 17 years searching for the baby girl she never had a chance to raise.  With travels that extend from Jamaica to Brooklyn, this novel examines issues of parenthood, tragedy, identity, redemption, and betrayal.

Holbrook’s personal essays tackle an array of topics from life as a single mother to her many professional accomplishments and from racism and discrimination to the importance of finding your voice.  She tells the story of her own triumphant survival in a world that knocked her down over and over again.

Parish priest Father Paul is dying of cancer and looking back at a life shaped by faith, expectation, and regret. His sister Britta, who has come to take care of him, is mourning the loss of her husband. And his niece Maura is faced with a choice between a life with her husband and children and the man she believes is the one for her. This is a poignant affirmation that each of us only has one life, and it is our own choices that fill it with joy and sorrow, love and regret, celebration and mourning.

NOVEMBER 2019 INDIE NEXT BOOK

When Rennie’s glamorous mother, Malabar, entrusts Rennie with the knowledge of her affair with her husband’s best friend, Rennie is thrilled to become her mother’s confidante.  This memoir of mothers and daughters, complicity, lies, and secrets is astonishing, self-reflective, and honest.

---

About Great Group Reads

Great Group Reads started in 2009 and has become a much-lauded honor. Check out the links below for more information.

2021 Great Group Reads

For Readers

Make sure you are signed up for our Bookwoman emails, so when the call goes out to WNBA members in January 2021 for GGR readers, you can participate, get free books, and help choose the books for the 2021 GGR list.

For Publishers

If you’d like to submit for the 2021 Great Group Reads, an announcement will go out in January.

If you have questions, you can contact Kristen Knox at KKnox.NatlReadingGrpMonth [at] gmail.com