The Ultimate Reading List: Read with Jenna’s 2025 Book Club Picks

The Read with Jenna book club has become a must-follow for bibliophiles, with Jenna Bush Hager consistently curating a list of thought-provoking and engaging reads. The 2025 selections continue this tradition, featuring a diverse range of genres and stories that are sure to captivate. From gripping mysteries to powerful literary fiction, there’s something on this list for every reader.

Whether you’re looking for your next beach read, a book to spark discussion with friends, or simply a great story to get lost in, the “Read with Jenna” picks for 2025 are a perfect place to start.

Get ready to add some new titles to your reading list and discover your next favorite book!

Check out the Read with Jenna picks below:

September 2025

Buckeye: A novel

by Patrick Ryan

In Bonhomie, Ohio, a stolen moment of passion, sparked in the exuberant aftermath of the Allied victory in Europe, binds Cal Jenkins, a man wounded not in war but by his inability to serve in it, to Margaret Salt, a woman trying to obscure her past. Cal’s wife, Becky, has a spiritual gift: She is a seer who can conjure the dead, helping families connect with those they’ve lost. Margaret’s husband, Felix, is serving on a Navy cargo ship, out of harm’s way—until a telegram suggests that the unthinkable might have happened.

Later, as the country reconstructs in the postwar boom, a secret grows in Bonhomie—but nothing stays buried forever in a small town. Against the backdrop of some of the most transformative decades in modern America, the consequences of that long-ago encounter ripple through the next generation of both families, compelling them to reexamine who they thought they were and what the future might hold.

Sweeping yet intimate, rich with piercing observation and the warmth that comes from profound understanding of the human spirit, Buckeye captures the universal longing for love and for goodness.
Description from Publisher

August 2025

my other heart

by Emma Nanami Strenner

A missing child, two girls in search of their true identities–a stunning novel of mothers, daughters and best friends

In June 1998, Mimi Truang is on her way home to Vietnam when her toddler daughter vanishes in the Philadelphia airport.

Seventeen years later, two best friends in Chestnut Hill, Pennsylvania, discuss their summer plans before college. Kit, with the support of her white adoptive parents, will travel to Tokyo to explore her Japanese roots. This dizzying adventure offers her a taste of first love and a new understanding of what it means to belong.

Sabrina had hoped to take a similar trip to China, but money is tight. Her disappointment subsides, however, when she meets a bold, uncompromising new mentor who prompts Sabrina to ask questions she’s avoided all her life. Meanwhile, Mimi purchases a plane ticket to Philadelphia. She finally has a lead in her search for her daughter.

When Mimi, Kit, and Sabrina come face to face, they will confront the people they truly are, in this tremendously moving novel that is propelled to its astonishing climax in a way you will never forget.
Description from Publisher

July 2025

Happy Wife

by Meredith Lavender & Kental Shores

A young woman must find her missing husband and prove her innocence in this twisty, unputdownable novel set in an ultrawealthy Florida community where looks can kill.

Nora Davies doesn’t exactly fit in to Winter Park, Florida, where old-guard Floridians mix with the tax-fleeing coastal elite. Twenty-eight and barely making ends meet working at a country club, Nora feels like she’s going nowhere fast. Enter Will a prominent forty-six-year-old lawyer, father to a teenage daughter and recently divorced. The two set Winter Park’s social scene agog when they fall in love and marry after a whirlwind Cinderella-style courtship.

But Winter Park is fully upended when Will disappears the morning after a birthday bash Nora throws for him. Going back and forth between Nora and Will’s romance and the search in the wake of Will’s mysterious disappearance, Nora must answer the question from all Where. Is. Will?

Combining breathless suspense, glittering and juicy social dynamics, and an unforgettable cast of characters, Happy Wife is a clever and subversive novel that explores marriage, wealth, and the secrets that lurk behind closed doors.
Description from Publisher

June 2025

A Family matter

by Claire Lynch

A young wife following her heart. A husband with the law on his side. Their daughter, caught in the middle. Forty years later, a family secret changes everything.

1982. Dawn is a young mother, still adjusting to life with her husband, when Hazel lights up her world like a torch in the dark. Theirs is the kind of connection that’s impossible to resist, and suddenly life is more complicated, and more joyful, than Dawn ever expected. But she has responsibilities and commitments. She has a daughter.

2022. Heron has just received news from his doctor that turns everything upside down. He’s an older man, stuck in the habits of a quiet existence. Telling Maggie, his only child—the person around whom his life has revolved—seems impossible. Heron can’t tell her about his diagnosis, just as he can’t reveal all the other secrets he’s been keeping from her for so many years.

A Family Matter is an exploration of love and loss, intimacy and injustice, custody and care, and whether it is possible to heal from the wounds of the past in the changed world of today.
Description from Publisher

May 2025

the names

by Florence Knapp

In the wake of a catastrophic storm, Cora sets off with her nine-year-old daughter, Maia, to register her son’s birth. Her husband, Gordon, a local doctor, respected in the community but a terrifying and controlling presence at home, intends for her to name the infant after him. But when the registrar asks what she’d like to call the child, Cora hesitates…

Spanning thirty-five years, what follows are three alternate and alternating versions of Cora’s and her young son’s lives, shaped by her choice of name. In richly layered prose, The Names explores the painful ripple effects of domestic abuse, the messy ties of family, and the possibilities of autonomy and healing.

With exceptional sensitivity and depth, Knapp draws us into the story of one family, told through a prism of what-ifs, causing us to consider the “one . . . precious life” we are given. The book’s brilliantly imaginative structure, propulsive storytelling, and emotional, gut-wrenching power are certain to make The Names a modern classic.
Description from Publisher

April 2025

heartwood

by Amity Gaige

Heartwood takes you on a journey as a search and rescue team race against time when an experienced hiker mysteriously disappears on the Appalachian Trail in Maine.

In the heart of the Maine woods, an experienced Appalachian Trail hiker goes missing. She is forty-two-year-old Valerie Gillis, who has vanished 200 miles from her final destination. Alone in the wilderness, Valerie pours her thoughts into fractured, poetic letters to her mother as she battles the elements and struggles to keep hoping.

At the heart of the investigation is Beverly, the determined Maine State Game Warden tasked with finding Valerie, who leads the search on the ground. Meanwhile, Lena, a seventy-six-year-old birdwatcher in a Connecticut retirement community, becomes an unexpected armchair detective. Roving between these compelling narratives, a puzzle emerges, intensifying the frantic search, as Valerie’s disappearance may not be accidental.
Description from Publisher

March 2025

The dream hotel

by Laila Lalami

A novel about one woman’s fight for freedom, set in a near future where even dreams are under surveillance.

Sara has just landed at LAX, returning home from a conference abroad, when agents from the Risk Assessment Administration pull her aside and inform her that she will soon commit a crime. Using data from her dreams, the RAA’s algorithm has determined that she is at imminent risk of harming the person she loves most: her husband. For his safety, she must be kept under observation for twenty-one days.

The agents transfer Sara to a retention center, where she is held with other dreamers, all of them women trying to prove their innocence from different crimes. With every deviation from the strict and ever-shifting rules of the facility, their stay is extended. Months pass and Sara seems no closer to release. Then one day, a new resident arrives, disrupting the order of the facility and leading Sara on a collision course with the very companies that have deprived her of her freedom.

Eerie, urgent, and ceaselessly clear-eyed, The Dream Hotel artfully explores the seductive nature of technology, which puts us in shackles even as it makes our lives easier. Lalami asks how much of ourselves must remain private if we are to remain free, and whether even the most invasive forms of surveillance can ever capture who we really are.
Description from Publisher

February 2025

this is a love story

by Jessica Soffer

An intimate and lyrical celebration of great love, great art, and the sacrifices we make for both

For fifty years Abe and Jane have been coming to Central Park, as starry-eyed young lovers, as frustrated and exhausted parents, as artists watching their careers take flight. They came alone when they needed to get away from each other, and together when they had something important to discuss. The Park has been their witness for half a century of love. Until now.

Jane is dying, and Abe is recounting their life together as a way of keeping them going: the parts they knew—their courtship and early marriage, their blossoming creative lives—and the parts they didn’t always want to know—the determined young student of Abe’s looking for a love story of her own, and their son, Max, who believes his mother chose art over parenthood and who has avoided love and intimacy at all costs. Told in various points of view, even in conversation with Central Park itself, these voices weave in and out to paint a portrait as complicated and essential as love itself.
Description from Publisher

January 2025

The life cycle of the Common Octopus

by Emma Knight

A witty, atmospheric, and brilliantly told novel that offers compelling portraits of womanhood, motherhood and female friendship, along with the irresistible intrigue surrounding an extraordinary British family

Arriving at the University of Edinburgh for her first term, Pen knows her divorced parents back in Canada are hiding something from her. She believes she’ll find the answer here in Scotland, where an old friend of her father’s—now a famous writer known as Lord Lennox—lives. When she is invited to spend the weekend at Lord Lennox’s centuries-old estate with his enveloping, fascinating family, Pen begins to unravel her parents’ secret, just as she’s falling in love for the first time . . .

As Pen experiences the sharp shock of adulthood, she comes to rely on herself for the first time in her life. A rich and rewarding novel of campus life, of sexual awakening, and ultimately, of the many ways women can become mothers in this world, The Life Cycle of the Common Octopus asks to what extent we need to look back in order to move forward.
Description from Publisher