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WOW Book Club
Bookshelf
Pages and Passageways.
Preview this month's selected WOW Book Club reads. Below is a curated list of the most acclaimed Penguin Random House stories. These12 compelling books were selected based on their authors' prominence as leading literary minds. Dive into our diverse collection works from a variety of writers across time, lands, and genres.
In this wonderous odyssey of bibliomania, we invite you to accompany us.
Music for reading or scrolling.
“Maus” (1991)
by Art Spiegelman
Spiegelman’s graphic novel, given the American Book Award, ignites his father’s haunting past as a Holocaust survivor. Vilifying the lack of humanity, he portrays his parents in a metaphorical world of cat and mouse, sharing a necessary truth of history.
“Their Eyes Were Watching God” (1937)
by Zora Neale Hurston
Hurston's celebrated novel chronicles an epic, Black Floridian quest for love and its calamities. This Harlem Renaissance novel covers the pilgrimage of Black womanhood in the 1930s. As a Black female writer, she casts a light on her community's turmoil.
“One Hundred Years of Solitude” (1967)
by Gabriel García Márquez
A magical realism story translated into 46 languages, Marquez's magnus opus is an enchanted, disorienting tale of the mythical Macondo, a city of mirrors. Witness an unfixed reflection of the world, shown by snarled branches of the Buendía family tree.
“Exit West” (2017)
by Mohsin Hamid
In internationally-acclaimed writer Hamid's New York Times Bestseller, boundaries disintegrate in a surreal depiction of civil war and immigration. In this fiction that confronts real atrocities, lovers Saeed and Nadia question "what is home," as they flee through magical doors.
“The Road” (2006)
by Cormac McCarthy
Recipient of a Pulitzer Prize for Fiction, “The Road” is a grim story of father and son who try to survive human extinction, the final witnesses of the apocalypse and the remnants of an annihilated world.
“A Mercy” (2008)
by Toni Morrison
Nobel Prize winner Toni Morrison’s evocative rendering of early America follows the effects of maternal “abandonment” and how the intricacies of racial hierarchy impacts relationships. Morrison’s story weeps the generational trauma that is so often neglected in history.
“The Best We
Could Do” (2017)
by Thi Bui
This graphic memoir, winner of the American Book Award, illustrates Bui’s life, capturing her family's harrowing, sometimes conflicting, experiences as Vietnamese refugees. Becoming a mother herself, she reflects on her family's accounts of war and immigration atrocities.
“The Professor and the Madman” (1998)
by Simon Winchester
Who could guess that the distinguished Oxford English Dictionary was composed by a disillusioned murderer? This non-fiction story recounts the unlikely bond between an editor and asylum inmate, sharing a lexicography love that delivers the great English work.
“Things Fall Apart” (1958)
by Chinua Achebe
Southeastern Nigeria is untainted by colonial rule at the start of Nigerian writer Achebe’s debut novel. However, European arrival causes disarray for the Igbo people, brutally rupturing traditions and identities as they are coerced to choose between countering moral views.
“Nineteen Eighty-Four” (1949)
by George Orwell
Globally celebrated, Orwell’s famous dystopian novel is frightening. Revolutionary in themes of mass surveillance by tyrannical regimes, it follows Winston Smith in his struggle to find freedom despite the leering eyes of “Big Brother.”
“The Catcher in the Rye” (1951)
by J. D. Salinger
One of Modern Library’s 100 best English-language novels of the 20th century, J. D. Salinger’s acclaimed bildungsroman reveals the tormenting thoughts of recently-expelled teenager Holden Caulfield as he navigates a fictitious adult world.
“La Princesse de Clèves” (1678)
by Madame de La Fayette
As the assumed author, Madame de La Fayette’s unattributed novel is set around 1550. A plot of concealed romance, this salacious and ruthless spotlight falls on Mme de Cleves and her husband’s friend Duc de Nemours, a promiscuous bachelor.
