Oprah’s bookclub #117: Bridge of Sighs by Richard Russo

Expected publication: september 25, 2007

Genre: Fiction

pages: 528

Bridge of Sighs courses with small-town rhythms and the claims of family. Here is a town, as well as a world, defined by magnificent and nearly devastating contradictions.

The cover beautifully captures the contrast between a small town outside of New York bridge and the Bride of sighs in Italy, nicknamed after the sighs of the prisoners who would pass over it. This is the same bridge that holds the tradition that if a couple kisses while passing underneath it, they will enjoy eternal love.

I love that Oprah picks a random book from 2007 to be her newest book club pick.

Reese’s bookclub: To the moon and back by Eliana Ramage

Expected publication: September 2, 2025

Genre: litfic, queer

pages: 448

One young woman’s relentless quest to become the first Cherokee astronaut will irrevocably alter the fates of the people she loves most in this tour de force of a debut about ambition, belonging, and family.

Spanning three decades and several continents, To the Moon and Back encompasses Steph’s turbulent journey, along with the multifaceted and intertwined lives of the three women closest to her sister Kayla, an artist who goes on to become an Indigenous social media influencer, and whose determination to appear good takes her life to unexpected places; Steph’s college girlfriend Della Owens, who strives to reclaim her identity as an adult after being removed from her Cherokee family through a challenge to the Indian Child Welfare Act; and Hannah, Steph and Kayla’s mother, who has held up her family’s tribal history as a beacon of inspiration to her children, all the while keeping her own past a secret.

Read with Jenna: Buckeye by Patrick Ryan

Expected publication: September 2, 2025

Genre: Historical fiction, WWII

pages: 464

This is an epic weaving the intimate lives of two Midwestern families together spanning generations from the second world war to the late twentieth century.

As the country reconstructs in the postwar boom, a secret grows in Bonhomie, but nothing stays buried forever in a small town. Twenty-five years later, as another war convulses America, the consequences of that long-ago encounter set in motion a series of events that will upend the next generation of both families as they head toward a new century.

GMA: The book of lost hours by Hayley Gelfuso

Expected publication: August 26, 2025

Genre: Fantasy (Time Travel)

pages: 400

Eleven-year-old Lisabet Levy is trapped in the time space library filled with books of memoires and wold events. While she waits for her watchmakes father to return for her, she finds that government agents are entering the time space and destroying books and deleting history that doesn’t fit their version. She sets about saving these scraps left until an American spy offers her a glimpse into the world she left behind and it set’s her on a course to change history and the time space library.

Service95: The trees by Percival Everett

Published: September 21, 2025

Pages: 309

When a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive in Money, Mississippi, to investigate a series of brutal murders, they find at each crime scene an unexpected second body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till. After meeting resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a string of racist white townsfolk, the MBI detectives suspect these are killings of retribution.

Then they discover eerily similar murders taking place in rapid succession all over the country. The past, it seems, refuses to be buried. The uprising has begun. In this provocative page-turner that takes direct aim at racism and police violence, Percival Everett offers a devastating critique of white supremacy and confronts the legacy of lynching in the United States.

All the way to the river by Elizabeth Gilbert

Expected publication: September 9, 2025

Genre: Memoir

pages: 400

You might remember Eat, Pray, Love where Liz Gilbert inspired a generation to do a journey of self-discovery. Or Big Magic where she dared us to explore our creativity. Or one of her ficiton books (City of girls being one of my favorites.) Or maybe you know her book club where she raises POC voices. Either way, she’s finally back with a memoir of another one of her journeys. One about Love, Loss, and liberation – and apparently, the oxford comma. Gotta love her!

The secret of secrets by Dan Brown

Expected publication: September 9, 2025

Genre: Thriller, Mystery

pages: 688

Who didn’t love Robert Langdon when his story started 25 years ago. (Feel old yet?) Angels and demons, The Da Vinci code (with Tom Hanks in the film) was peak thriller years! But to be honest, I lost track after that. Can you believe that this is the sixth Langdon book? I’m tempted to pick this up and continue his story. I wanna recommend his book to Swifties, I think Swift and Brown have more in common than you might think.

We love you, Bunny by Mona Awad

Expected publication: September 23,2025

Genre: Thriller

pages: 496

A prequel and a sequel to the cult classic “Bunny” where a student becomes entranced by a clique where all the girls call each other bunny.

In this book the bunnies kidnap her after she’s published a novel about them. This is a weird girl book. I, unfortunately, am not a weird girl. But if Bunny was your trope, I’m sure you’ll want to jump on this one too.

To the moon and back by Eliana Ramage

Expected publication: September 2, 2025

Genre: Fiction – indigenous, Queer

pages: 448

Steph Harper is on the run. When she was six, her mother, Hannah, fled an abusive husband—with Steph and her younger sister, Kayla, in tow—to Cherokee Nation, where she hoped they might finally belong. In response, Steph sets her sights as far away from Oklahoma as she can get, vowing that she will let nothing get in the way of pursuing the rigorous physical and academic training she knows she will need to be accepted by NASA, and ultimately, to go to the moon.

(Since my middle name is Steph I feel a bit biased here. I wanna read this!)

The Wasp Trap by Mark Edwards

Expected publication: September 16,2025

Genre: Thriller, Mystery

pages: 336

Six friends reunite in London to celebrate the life of their recently deceased ex-employer, a professor that brought them together in 1999 to help build a dating website based on psychological testing.

But what is meant to be a night of bittersweet nostalgia soon becomes a twisted and deadly game when the old friends find themselves held at gunpoint. They are given an ultimatum: reveal their darkest secrets to the group or pick each other off one-by-one.

Heart the lover by Lily King

Expected publication: September 30,2025

Genre: Contemporary fiction

pages: 256

In the fall of her senior year of college, she meets two star students from her 17th-Century Lit class: Sam and Yash. Best friends living off-campus in the elegant house of a professor on sabbatical, the boys invite her into their intoxicating world of academic fervor, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. They nickname her Jordan, and she quickly discovers the pleasures of friendship, love and her own intellectual ambition. Youthful passion is unpredictable though, and she soon finds herself at the center of a charged and intricate triangle. As graduation comes and goes, choices made will alter these three lives forever.

Decades later, Jordan is living the life she dreamed of, and the vulnerable days of her youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news brings the past crashing into the present, Jordan returns to a world she left behind and is forced to confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self.

Among the burning flowers

Expected publication:

Genre:

pages:

Remember priory of the orange tree that everyone and their mother read a few years ago? Well, here’s a prequel to that.

I tried jumping on this bandwagon, but I feel off pretty quick along with half the audience of the first book. For those of you still on it, this must be an exciting release.

The Wilderness by Angela Flournoy

Expected publication: September 16, 2025

Genre: Contemporary fiction

pages: 304

Desiree, Danielle, January, Monique, and Nakia are in their early twenties and at the beginning. Of their careers, of marriage, of motherhood, and of big-city lives in New York and Los Angeles. Together, they are finding their way through the wilderness, that period of life when the reality of contemporary adulthood—overwhelming, mysterious, and full of freedom and consequences—swoops in and stays.

I’ve burned myself on so many Manhattan novels, but this one comes with a stamp of recommendation by Brit Bennett and I absolutely love her work, so I will try!

Amity by Nathan Harris

Expected publication: September 2, 2025

Genre: Historical fiction, Civil War

pages: 320

New Orleans, 1866. The Civil War might be over, but formerly enslaved Coleman and June have yet to find the freedom they’ve been promised. Two years ago, the siblings were separated when their old master, Mr. Harper, took June away to Mexico, where he hoped to escape the new reality of the post-war South. Coleman stayed behind in Louisiana to serve the Harper family, clinging to the hope that one day June would return.

From the author of “The Sweetness of Water”, an Oprah pick in 2022, I’m sure many are looking forward to this.

Saltcrop by Yume Kitasei

Expected publication: September 30, 2025

Genre: Climate sci-fi

pages: 384

In Earth’s not too distant future, seas consume coastal cities, highways disintegrate underwater, and mutant fish lurk in pirate-controlled depths. Skipper, a skilled sailor and the youngest of three sisters, earns money skimming and reselling plastic from the ocean to care for her ailing grandmother.

But then her eldest sister, Nora, goes missing. Nora left home a decade ago in pursuit of a cure for failing crops all over the world. When Skipper and her other sister, Carmen, receive a cryptic plea for help, they must put aside their differences and set out across the sea to find―and save―her. As they voyage through a dying world both beautiful and strange, encountering other travelers along the way, they learn more about their sister’s work and the corporations that want what she discovered.

But the farther they go, the more uncertain their mission becomes: What dangerous attention did Nora attract, and how well do they really know their sister―or each other? Thus begins an epic journey spanning oceans and continents and a wistful rumination on sisterhood, friendship, and ecological disaster.