The Best Picks From The Good Morning America Book Club For Your Next Read

Rise and shine! There's a better way to begin your day than the morning scroll. The "Good Morning America" book club, launched in 2019, may not shout the loudest in the crowded arena of celebrity-endorsed reading lists. But over the years, it's curated a slate of stories that suit the morning's tempo, pairing beautifully with burnt toast and a soft-boiled egg.

Each month, the GMA team chooses a new title and slips it onto the breakfast tables of millions across the country. You might assume these are simply comfort reads. Yes, some do go down easily — like a pleasant, light croissant — but many come with a literary ambition that's worth getting out of bed for. Quirky premises give way to surprising edges, proving there's more to this book club than mere cereal box fluff.

So, if your alarm bells are ringing and the day feels like it's arriving too fast, hit snooze and reach for one of these stories instead. It might just be the most rewarding part of your morning.

Angie Cruz's "Dominicana" was the inaugural pick for the Good Morning America book club – a strong choice that made clear the club started as it meant to go on. "So many of our staffers behind the scenes love to read," the team shared on their website, "and when we were looking for the perfect book to kick things off, "Dominicana" really stood out." Even before its 2019 release, the literary world had anticipated this as one of the year's defining reads.

Ana, a 15-year-old girl from the Dominican Republic, is sent to New York in the 1960s, ostensibly to begin a new life. But the promise of opportunity has an unspoken cost. Alone in a foreign city and trapped in a marriage arranged to help her family, Ana navigates the muted terror of everyday isolation in the immigrant experience. Cruz, drawing on her own mother's experiences, gives her protagonist a voice that's intimate and authoritative.

Though it never shies from the bleakness of Ana's circumstances, "Dominicana" still finds room for flashes of humor. Later shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction, it was also accompanied with a signature pastelito recipe for viewers eager to cook along with this special book.

Plenty of book covers are beautiful, but "Junie's" — bathed in soft sherbet light and a cinematic dusky stillness — boasts an allure that feels uniquely magnetic. It sets the tone for what's inside: a ghost story of the brutal realities of American history.

Set on an Alabama plantation before the Civil War, "Junie" follows a sixteen-year-old girl of the same name, grieving the recent death of her sister, Minnie. After rescuing Junie from drowning, Minnie dies of illness — but doesn't stay gone for long. Her voice begins calling to Junie from the woods, urging her to complete three tasks before it's too late. A coming-of-age story threaded with the supernatural, the true horror is the world Junie is forced to survive in.

When asked what she hoped readers would take from "Junie," Eckstine didn't hesitate: empathy. "I really hope that readers take away the power of empathy from this book," she told "GMA" viewers on air. "I wanted us to remember, as readers and as people, that people under harrowing conditions are still these incredibly complex people, and how important it is for all of us to extend that empathy to everyone."

That principle is threaded through every page. Eckstine writes into this space with care, never softening the reality of the time. The violence that structures Junie's world – slavery, misogyny, abuse – is constant. Yet through all of it, she remains alert to beauty. The novel's subject matter inevitably invites comparison to Toni Morrison's "Beloved" — named among the most tragic classic books — which also uses the supernatural to reveal something as unbearably human. But in any case, "Junie" is a bold, original work of historical fiction that earns its place on any shelf.

Before you've even opened "Homeseeking," it's clear you're in exceptionally accomplished hands. Karissa Chen is a Fullbright fellow, a Kundiman Fiction fellow, a VONA/Voices fellow, and the editor-in-chief of Hyphen magazine. Her debut novel is the product of both deep research and lived emotional insight.

Set between China and Taiwan across seven decades, "Homeseeking" explores the lasting imprint of war and dislocation. Though conflict forms the backdrop, the story hones in on a devastation closer to home – what happens to friendship when history intervenes. Suchi and Haiwen are childhood best friends growing up in the dense residential lanes of old Shanghai. The two are inseparable until war pulls them apart, sending their lives in opposite directions.

Chen, then, structures the novel with striking formal ambition: Suchi's story unfolds chronologically, while Haiwen's is told in reverse. Names shift, memory slips, and yet the emotional throughline remains clear. With sharp attention to setting — from food to clothing to the pervasive expectations placed on young women — Chen captures how identity is shaped as much by constraint as it is by desire.

Heartfelt, psychologically insightful and intricately told, it's not difficult to see why it was listed as one of the best books of the 2020s by AAPI authors to add to your TBR immediately.

As artificial intelligence entrenches itself into nearly every contemporary life — search engines, workflow, dating apps, even fashion shows, like Marc Jacobs' — "Klara and the Sun" offers a meditative portrait of our programmed devotion. Should we fear this future or embrace it? Kazuo Ishiguro suggests both. The novel, he said to Nashville PBS, was his attempt to imagine "a society that could go either way," and to explore how we might "recognize ourselves so that we can benefit from these things, and not have these things destroy our civilization."

Solar-powered Klara is an Artificial Friend — a companion to keep teenagers company in a near-future society where loneliness has been normalized. From the confines of a storefront, she studies the world with a devotional attentiveness. She draws meaning from small observations and the Sun — her source of energy, and perhaps something more.

Rather than push towards the technological spectacle, Nobel Prize-winning Kazuo Ishiguro remains where he is best placed: in the domestic, the peripheral, the tenderly withheld. When Klara is eventually chosen by a family, the novel deepens poignantly, and Ishiguro's clipped, reverent prose fits perfectly Klara's algorithmic gaze.

The score of "The Violin Conspiracy" strikes an immediately endearing chord: a young Black violinist, Ray, inherits his grandmother's worn-out instrument, only to discover it's a Stradivarius worth fortunes. The revelation brings sudden recognition, but also a discordant swell of attention. Author Brendan Slocumb then changes the tempo, layering a literary mystery into its bildungsroman melody, as the violin is tolen on the eve of a career-defining competition.

Who took it? Perhaps it's Ray's own relatives, formerly tone-deaf to his musical ambitions, now eager to cash in on the violin's value. Or it could be the heirs of those who once enslaved his ancestors, suddenly asserting a legal claim to something they believe still belongs to them. Slocumb is just as finely tuned to the deeper undercurrents of race and inheritance as he is to the architecture of a classic whodunnit — a balance that more than earns "The Violin Conspiracy" its place among the best thriller and mystery picks from the "Good Morning America" book club.

In curating our list of the best "Good Morning America" book club picks, we narrowed our selections to stories that caught our eye before the coffee had even kicked in. From there, the list was filtered through strong critical reception, thoughtful reader reviews on Goodreads, and — above all — their quality. Only the books with real substance made it onto this spread: those that bring memorable plots and are genuinely well-written, with staying power beyond their TV endorsement. Happy reading!