Under The Radar Picks From Reese's Book Club That You May Not Have Heard Of

For authors, the honor of being picked for Reese's Book Club can be nothing short of a career-altering jolt. Wondering how getting picked for Reese's Book Club changes everything for an author and their work? According to BookScan, titles chosen by Witherspoon can see a staggering 700% spike in sales — a figure that renders traditional marketing efforts almost quaint by comparison.

The golden sticker on the cover of paperbacks is a siren call, in that Reese's selections have a way of becoming the books on everybody's lips (and eyes). Just look at "Where the Crawdads Sing" or "Daisy Jones & The Six," both of which went from page to screen with a flurry of deals, studio backing, and a tidal wave of Goodreads reviews.

But for every chart-topping blockbuster juggernaut — the picks from Reese's Book Club that made it to the big (and small) screen — there's a hidden gem waiting to be found. With a back catalogue stretching back to 2017, the club is rife with brilliant titles that have slipped beneath the mainstream radar. They may have flown slightly lower, but they deserve your full attention nonetheless. Who knows, your next favorite read might be one of them

For a book titled "Happiness," it's ironically one of the most heartbreaking reads from Reese's Book Club. Heather Harpham's memoir, subtitled "The Crooked Little Road to Semi-Ever After, " opens with a modern love story that ends before it begins. She's an actor in California; he's a novelist in New York, making for a fun, but short-lived dalliance. Everything changes when Harpham discovers she's pregnant. Brian doesn't want to move, so she returns west to raise the baby on her own. But hours after her daughter is born is when the real rupture comes: her baby girl has a serious blood disorder that would pull Harpham and Brian into a new reality of hospitals and procedures.

This is not a typical romance. Nor is it a traditional parenting memoir. It's about navigating a crisis whilst still figuring out how to be a couple and a family. The writing is lean and unsentimental, but still warm; a rare balance. It's funny in dark moments, and honest in difficult ones — full of small, precise observations that land forcefully.

In many ways, it's one of Reese's most accomplished picks. But with only around 15,000 Goodreads ratings (compared to, say, Delia Owens's "Where the Crawdads Sing," which boasts almost 3.5 million), "Happiness" remains curiously overlooked. Still, critical mass isn't always the measure of impact; there are things more durable than hype. It scored an impressive 4.14 average across its reviews, affirming that quality over quantity still counts.

For anyone who fell for London's bookish charm on the page before seeing it in person, "All That Life Can Afford" is a love letter to that very feeling. In Emily Everett's immersive debut, readers follow Anna, a working-class American graduate student and bookworm who arrives in London in 2009 with romantic optimism. She takes on a job in the damp, romantic capital, tutoring the children of the very rich, and is soon ushered into a world of private schools, summer estates, and unspoken rules.

One such invitation takes her to Saint-Tropez, France, where she's introduced to a constellation of wealthy people. Everett threads in questions of class, grief, and belonging, showing how easy it is to love your footing when you're trying to become someone else. Anna makes a few bad choices, but her arc is rewarding.

With its picture-perfect Mediterranean interlude and the soft menace of class performance, it's one of the best Reese's Book Club picks to check out if you're missing "The White Lotus." You might just find yourself booking a one-way ticket to something you'll want to reread your way back to.

Reese Witherspoon kicked off 2023 with a bold January pick: Thrity Umrigar's "Honor," which she praised as a "powerful story about family, devotion, and cultural truths — all through the eyes of an incredible journalist."

There's always been something enduringly magnetic about journalist-led entertainment. On-screen takes like "The Bold Type" and "Confessions of a Shopaholic" gave us aspirational chaos in the world of glossy magazines, whilst harder-hitting narratives like "She Said" grappled with the industry's moral weight and real-world consequences. "Honor," by contrast, moves in a far more sobering, eye-opening register.

When Smita, an Indian-American journalist, returns to the country of her childhood to report on the case of Meena — a Hindu woman attacked by her own family for marrying a Muslim man — she's confronted with a brutal story. Alongside this, she drifts into a tentative relationship with Mohan, a man she meets on assignment. Umrigar handles this romantic subplot with intention, deliberate in its symmetry to Meena, whose love nearly costs her her life. Who gets to love freely? And at what cost?

Umrigar brings the authority of experience to the page. Before turning to fiction, she worked as a journalist, a background that lends "Honor" its measured pace and authorial precision. Readers have taken notice, earning a well-deserved 4.35 average from over 68,000 ratings and nearly 7,000 written reviews on Goodreads. One review, putting it plainly, wrote, "You owe it to yourself to grab this one ... and be forever changed."

J. Courtney Sullivan's "The Cliffs" takes place in a remote coastal town in Maine — so small you might miss it on the map, and judging by its comparatively modest Goodreads footprint (35,000 ratings and under 4,000 reviews), most readers have. But like the town itself, the novel holds more than meets the eye.

Jane Flanagan returns to Awadapquit after decades away. Her mother has died, her marriage is faltering, and the only thing left to do is clear out her childhood home. It's during this return that she meets Genevieve Richards, a wealthy newcomer restoring an old Victorian house perched above the sea nearby. When strange, possibly supernatural things start happening during the renovation, Genevieve asks Jane to dig into the property's history. The more she learns about the lives that passed through those rooms, the more she's forced to confront her own.

The novel, like the house it hinges upon, is full of unseen lives — among them, a summer camp for psychic mediums and the last Shaker village still standing in Maine. "I populated the house with fascinating women," Sullivan told Reese's Book Club. "We are always in conversation with the people who came before us, even if we don't know their stories."

Margaret Wilkerson Sexton had already published two novels when "On the Rooftop" found its way onto Reese Witherspoon's reading list. But it was this tale's themes of dreams and motherhood that hooked the Book Lover-in-Chief. Set in 1950s San Francisco, we meet Vivian, a mother who has built her life around watching her three daughters, known onstage as The Salvations, succeed where she could not.

Vivian's dream is finally within reach: a meeting with a major agent who could launch their careers. But as the sisters approach the precipice of success, they begin to question what it is they actually want. Vivan herself, for all her certainties, is not exempt from change. As her daughters pull away, she, too, is asked to reimagine herself as a woman learning how to let go.

Fans of "The Secret Lives of Church Ladies" will likely be drawn to this San Francisco-set story — author Deesha Philyaw herself called it "beautiful, moving, and truly unforgettable." Reese Witherspoon echoed her sentiments, praising "On the Rooftop" as "an utterly original and brilliant story about learning how to mother children who have very different dreams and how to encourage them to reach for the stars."