Dua Lipa’s Best Book Club Picks, Ranked (and Read) by a Books Editor

Min Jin Lee’s 2017 best-seller is one of my top ten books of all time. (And it was through her author interview with Lipa that I discovered Service95.) It follows four generations of a Korean family beginning in the early 1900s and spanning until 1989. Though the cast of characters is large, everything revolves around the matriarch, Sunja, looking at how one choice she makes reverberates through the generations of her family. They endure Japanese colonization and immigration to Japan against the background of destabilizing world events, with Sunja at the helm trying to steer them through. Lee’s follow-up, American Hagwon, hits bookshelves in September, and Pachinko has been adapted as an Apple TV+ series.

I rarely cry over books and movies, but Khaled Hosseini’s 2007 follow-up to his best-selling debut, The Kite Runner, made my eyes well up. Both books are phenomenally searing; I think A Thousand Splendid Suns particularly moved me because it’s the story of two women whose lives become intertwined through an abusive marriage. The book moves from the 1970s to the early 2000s in Afghanistan, where the duo must weather domestic violence, foreign insurrection and oppressive regimes. It’s a sweeping novel about sisterhood, love and sacrifice that’ll stay with you long after the last page is turned.

I’m not usually one for memoir, but Japanese Breakfast frontwoman Michelle Zauner’s Crying in H Mart had me reading to the end. It’s a poignant (and at times regretful) wrestling with Zauner’s relationship with her mother, who dies after battling cancer. This memoir packs everything into an experience only children of immigrants will understand fully—the pressure to carry on a legacy that came from sacrifice, the identity crisis that comes with negotiating cultures and the powerful bond of food to heal—but it’s a must-read no matter your background.

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My classics book club read Gabriel García Márquez’s 1967 magnum opus together and it left us all…confused. For starters, every single character in this book seems to be named some version of Aureliano. But confusing family nomenclature aside, it was a fascinating plunge into Latin American magical realism that was at times funny (and meme-worthy) and at others gut-wrenching. As the name suggests, it follows seven generations of the Buendía family as they build the town of Macondo and ultimately weather a series of catastrophic world events and unusual, magical happenings. It deals with themes ranging from the supernatural to solitude, time, elitism and…incest.

I can’t believe I’m putting this to paper…I’ve only read part of The Handmaid’s Tale. In my defense, I was in high school; running a classics book club as an adult has made me realize I probably just didn’t have the brain power as a teenager to appreciate the great books when I was younger. I did write my high school senior year term paper on Alias Grace, though, so Margaret Atwood’s worlds are familiar territory. Maybe this is the year I actually read the book cover-to-cover. (And then promptly watch the Hulu series and its sequel, The Testaments). For those who haven’t been introduced to Atwood’s most popular work, The Handmaid’s Tale is set in Gilead, a theonomic, totalitarian state in which women are enslaved as reproductive apparatuses to boost a declining birth rate. It is narrated by Offred, a woman separated from her husband and daughter and forced into servitude; she soon uncovers a resistance movement, in which she is quickly entangled.

Our editor-in-chief, Jillian Quint, was quick to nominate The Guest, Emma Cline’s 2023 beach read of the summer. The short novel follows the mononymous protagonist Alex, who is presumed to be a call girl, as she attempts to survive a summer in the Hamptons after being dumped by her wealthy, older boyfriend. Little is revealed about Alex’s past or her hopes for the future; the novel is propulsive in that it lives in the now, the reader wondering how Alex will wheel, deal and impersonate her way through the week before she hopes to make amends. The Guest is an interesting study on wealth, privilege and how social capital is often more than enough to keep you living the good life.