Literary fiction book club questions
Discussion guides we've filed under Literary fiction, listed A to Z. 27 guides for your next meeting, each with themes, read-alikes, and where to find a copy.
All Them Dogs
Deep in West Dublin's gangland, two murderous associates find their criminal partnership complicated by a mutual attraction, in a novel that is as tender as it is brutal.
Booker Prize 2026 longlist
Beartown
In a small forest town that lives for its junior hockey team, a single violent act forces everyone to choose between loyalty to the team and standing with the person harmed.
A modern book club favorite
Black Bag
A struggling actor agrees to spend a term attending university lectures zipped inside a large black bag, as a psychology experiment, in a twisted campus satire about masculinity and being watched.
Booker Prize 2026 shortlist
The Children
Two siblings written into their late mother's beloved fantasy series confront the dark reality behind the magical childhood her readers imagine.
Read with Jenna (Today), June 2026
The Correspondent
Told entirely in letters, the story of a sharp, solitary retired lawyer who, as her sight and her certainties fade, finally faces the relationships and the loss she has long kept at arm's length.
Women's Prize for Fiction 2026 (winner)
Country People
A California academic family decamps to rural Vermont for a year, where the folklorist father tumbles into a world of eccentric locals and the blurry line between logic and magic.
Good Morning America Book Club, July 2026
The Disappearers
In late-1980s Jamaica, the murder of a gay actor rehearsing a play sets off tragic consequences, in a sweeping novel from the author of A Brief History of Seven Killings.
Booker Prize 2026 shortlist
Dominion
In a Mississippi Delta town ruled by a powerful preacher and his golden-boy son, two women watch the family's polished image crack, with devastating consequences.
Women's Prize for Fiction 2026 shortlist
The End of Everything
On a collapsing Kent coast shadowed by a mysterious alien invasion, a scavenger and his aunt scrape by, in a bleak, oddly compassionate dystopia about the here and now.
Booker Prize 2026 shortlist
Flashlight
After a father vanishes on a beach in Japan, leaving his young daughter the sole survivor, the mystery reverberates across four generations and the hidden history of one Korean family.
Women's Prize for Fiction 2026 shortlist
Heart the Lover
A college love triangle among three literature students burns bright, falls apart, and returns to haunt them decades later.
Women's Prize for Fiction 2026 shortlist
Helen of Nowhere
A disgraced professor, known only as \"Man,\" flees to the countryside to remake himself after his marriage and career collapse, in a brief, surreal fable for our times.
Booker Prize 2026 longlist
John of John
A young art graduate reluctantly returns to his windswept, deeply religious home on the Isle of Harris to confront the family and the self he left behind.
Booker Prize 2026 shortlist
Kingfisher
A creative-writing academic becomes obsessed with an older, famous poet, and his devotion curdles into a question of how much of another person one is allowed to take.
Women's Prize for Fiction 2026 shortlist
Little Wonder
A migrant mother and her piano-prodigy son are separated in a crowded Beijing train station and spend years trying to find their way back to each other.
Oprah's Book Club, June 2026
May We Feed the King
The story of a reluctant medieval monarch braids together with that of a modern-day curator staging a historic palace, in a puzzle-box novel that wrong-foots the reader at every turn.
Booker Prize 2026 shortlist
The Mercy Step
In 1960s Bradford, a fiercely observant girl narrates her own childhood in a hard immigrant household, finding refuge in books and plotting her way toward a life of her own.
Women's Prize for Fiction 2026 shortlist
My Friends
A teenager obsessed with a famous painting sets out to uncover the story of the four friends who made it, a story of art, refuge, and a bond that outlasts them.
A modern book club favorite
The Palm House
Two old friends spend their long evenings in a Southwark pub, setting the world to rights and quietly navigating grief, in a minimalist novel praised for its extraordinary dialogue.
Booker Prize 2026 longlist
The Renovation
When builders turn a woman's bathroom renovation into a magical portal to a working Turkish prison, the surreal premise opens onto questions of exile, activism, and the many forms of confinement.
Booker Prize 2026 longlist
The Shadow of the Object
Recovering from surgery in a Mexico City hospital, a woman strikes up a friendship with an elderly German collector of antique toys, in a meditation on grief and the truths found in the margins.
Booker Prize 2026 longlist
Switzy
A retired executive flies across Europe by private jet toward an assisted-dying clinic in Zurich, in a darkly funny, elegiac novel about what is left of a person at the end.
Booker Prize 2026 longlist
Taiwan Travelogue
In 1930s Japanese-ruled Taiwan, a Japanese novelist and her Taiwanese interpreter travel the island eating their way through it, as attraction and the weight of colonial power pull against each other.
International Booker Prize 2026 (winner)
The Things We Never Say
An ordinary Massachusetts teacher with a comfortable life is quietly consumed by isolation and despair, in a spare, powerful novel about what we hide from those around us.
Booker Prize 2026 shortlist