The Best Books for Book Clubs Out This Month

Orange cookies are something I’d never thought of, but they sound so right. The recipe also looks pretty simple! You need the usual cookie fare: baking soda, sugar, butter, flour, egg, and salt, but add orange zest, orange juice (obvi), and powdered sugar (for the icing).

For full instructions and ingredient measurements, go to the Preppy Kitchen site or follow along with the video.

This fiction debut from the award-winning Porter follows generations of Métis women and the bison that lived around them as everyone tries to figure things out. Young mother Carter is trying to find out more about her heritage, even as she struggles to balance her emotions, while her mother is trying not to make the same mistakes as Carter’s grandmother. This is all while Geneviève struggles with internal demons, and Mamé, who is in the Afterlife, sees her legacy being realized in her descendants but must cut her ties to the land of the living and let them forge their own path into the future.

Here’s a murder mystery set in a place I don’t usually see with murder mysteries: Nigeria. Philip Taiwo starts working on a case based around a megachurch in Ogun State, where a bishop’s wife was murdered, and a young woman went missing. As Taiwo will soon learn, there are secrets that, if uncovered, will threaten the entire church.

The Pulitzer-winning author of The Hours serves up a meditation on the complexities of family. Dan and Isabel are married and also both “a little bit in love with Isabel’s younger brother, Robbie” (I haven’t read the book yet, so I am also curious what this means). When the pandemic hits, each family member’s anxieties manifest in different ways: young Violet obsesses over her family’s safety, while teenage Nathan focuses on breaking rules. Meanwhile, Isabel and Dan are having communication issues, and Robbie is stranded in Iceland with little more than his secret Instagram life as solace.

Smith is another Pulitzer winner but for poetry. In To Free the Captives, Smith explores the questions: “Where are we going as a nation? Where have we been?” Using both personal and collective history, she looks at how we as a country have related to each other, how this has influenced our current state, and what the future may hold for us. She contends with the dichotomy of being a successful Black person in America — her father returned from WWI as a hero but with no job prospects as a Black man, for instance — and she looks to our ancestors for sources of hope.