Something to Talk About: Award-Winning Books for Book Clubs

Why it’s here: Winner of the Women's Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. In Stratford-upon-Avon in the 1580s, a young Latin tutor falls for Agnes, a wild, gifted healer who walks the fields with a falcon on her glove. Maggie O'Farrell tells the story of a famous family from the side history forgot - the wife, the children, the home - in prose so vivid you can smell the herbs.

Perfect for: Groups who want to talk about marriage, motherhood and the people history leaves out.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the Women's Prize. Barbara Kingsolver retells David Copperfield in today's Appalachia: Demon, born to a teenage mother in a trailer, faces foster care, child labour, failing schools and the opioid epidemic - told in his own funny, furious, unforgettable voice. A big book that reads fast.

Perfect for: Groups who want to talk about poverty, addiction and how America sees its rural communities.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize. Thirteen linked stories from a small coastal town in Maine, all touched by Olive Kitteridge - a retired schoolteacher who is blunt, difficult, compassionate and impossible to forget. Elizabeth Strout makes ordinary lives feel enormous; it will make your group laugh, wince and recognise themselves.

Perfect for: Groups who want to talk about ageing, marriage and whether they actually like Olive.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Women's Prize. Newlyweds Celestial and Roy seem to have everything ahead of them - until Roy is sentenced to twelve years in prison for a crime Celestial knows he didn't commit. Tayari Jones tells the story from several sides, and lets every character make their case. An Oprah's Book Club pick, and a guaranteed debate.

Perfect for: Groups who want to argue about loyalty, love and what we owe each other.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize - shared with Demon Copperhead - and the Kirkus Prize. Everyone in 1920s New York has heard of Wall Street tycoon Benjamin Rask and his wife Helen - and of the bestselling novel that claims to tell their story. But there are other versions. Hernán Díaz puts competing accounts side by side, and lets the reader work out whom to believe. Clever, elegant and made for discussion.

Perfect for: Groups who want to talk about money, power and who gets to tell the story.

Why it’s here: Winner of the International Booker Prize. After a series of violent dreams, Yeong-hye stops eating meat - a small act of independence that shocks her husband and family and sets off an increasingly disturbing chain of events. Han Kang's short, strange and unsettling novel is told largely through the people around her, each trying to bring her back under control.

Perfect for: Groups who don't mind a challenge and want to talk about control, the body and rebellion.

Why it’s here: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize. In an Irish town in 1985, in the weeks before Christmas, coal merchant Bill Furlong does his rounds - and finds the past rising up to meet him, along with the silences of a community controlled by the Church. Claire Keegan's quiet, devastating novella can be read in an evening and discussed for hours.

Perfect for: Groups who want a short read with a big moral question at its heart.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Booker Prize. Six astronauts circle the Earth sixteen times in a single day aboard the International Space Station, watching continents, seasons and storms pass beneath them. Samantha Harvey's short, luminous novel has almost no plot - and that's the point: it's a meditation on our planet and what it means to be human.

Perfect for: Groups who want to talk about the climate, our place in the universe and what makes a novel.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Booker Prize. Tony Webster, now retired, thinks he knows the story of his own life - his clever school friends, his first love, his calm divorce. Then a lawyer's letter arrives. Julian Barnes's short, precise novel is about memory, regret and how we tell the story of our own past.

Perfect for: Groups who want to talk about memory, regret and the stories we tell about ourselves.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Carnegie Medal. Sociologist Matthew Desmond follows eight families in Milwaukee as they struggle to keep a roof over their heads, and the landlords who profit from them. It reads like a novel and changes how you think about poverty and housing.

Perfect for: Groups who want to talk about inequality - and what could actually be done about it.

Why it’s here: Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Orwell Prize. In 1972, masked intruders dragged Jean McConville, a widowed mother of ten, from her Belfast home. Patrick Radden Keefe uses her story to tell the history of the Troubles in Northern Ireland - as gripping as any thriller, and far more troubling.

Perfect for: Groups who want to talk about political violence, silence and how communities live with their past.

Why it’s here: Winner of the Pulitzer Prize and the National Book Critics Circle Award. At eighteen, Hua Hsu - the son of Taiwanese immigrants, into zines and indie record shops - sees his classmate Ken as everything he defines himself against. Then they become friends. A tender, funny memoir about friendship, identity and growing up in 1990s California.

Perfect for: Groups who want to talk about friendship, identity and the people who shape who we become.