5 Of The Best Books Over 500 Pages That Are Totally Worth Picking For Your Book Club

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Selecting a book club pick can feel like a literary juggling act. You have to keep in mind the purpose of the club (general hangout? Cultural connection?), your club members' personal preferences, critical hype, easy wine and snack tie-ins, and more. You're essentially giving people homework, so the pressure is on to choose something enticing. It's especially tempting, for that reason, to keep it short. No one wants to slog through Proust so their friends don't get mad at them.

But that's the coward's way. Good books are measured in how long they feel, not how long they actually are, and some of the best ones weigh down your tote bag more than your attention span. We'd like to challenge you to consider a selection that's riveting from front to back even if that distance is intimidating, so we narrowed down the five best book club picks over 500 pages.

"Pachinko" is the story of Sunja, a Korean woman living in Japan-occupied Busan and then Osaka, but it stretches from her grandparents' experience of the Japanese annexation of 1910 to her grandchildren living in modern-day New York City. Over the course of nearly a century, each of them cope with discrimination against Koreans by the Japanese and the shame of Sunja's out-of-wedlock pregnancy, alternately trying to outrun their identities or descending into the underworld they see as the only one to welcome them (including that of pachinko parlors). Min Jin Lee's historical epic is so thick with thought-provoking drama that you'll never notice its 512 pages fly by.

When it was released in 2017, "Pachinko" made the finals for the National Book Award for Fiction and was hailed as one of the most exciting books of the year by Buzzfeed, Elle, and the BBC. BookBub specifically named it one of the most anticipated book club reads of 2017, and Now Read This, the joint book club of PBS NewHour and The New York Times, made good on that promise when they chose "Pachinko" as their July 2018 pick. In fact, it's such a well-loved book club selection that some editions include a reading group guide.

The fact that "The Book Thief" is narrated by Death himself suggests that it's not exactly a feel-good read, and the more he tells us about Liesel Meminger, the more you might be convinced. In 1939, Liesel is a nine-year-old German girl on a train to meet the strangers who promise to keep her safe from the Nazi regime's wrath for Communists like her mother, a journey her little brother doesn't survive. Basically, she loses all the family she's ever known in the first few pages of the book.

Okay, yes, it really does seem like "The Book Thief" isn't beating the bleakness allegations. But Liesel's indomitable spirit — as well as her love of books, legally acquired or otherwise — keeps it from becoming 608 pages of bummer, even as seemingly everyone she loves is swallowed up by the war machine. The diehard readers populating most book clubs will no doubt relate, but if you need any help getting the discussion going, it's such a popular book club pick (including that of BookTok celebrity Jack Edwards) that you can find discussion guides all over the web or even a "Bookclub-in-a-Box."

If you've read (that is, were devastated by) "The Boy in the Striped Pyjamas," you'll get why "The Heart's Invisible Furies," the author's 2017 release, comes so highly recommended. It follows Cyril Avery, who is alienated by the family who adopted him in 1940s Ireland even before he understands that he's gay. Like "Pachinko," it spans nearly a century as Cyril struggles with the meaning of family, whether found or bound, and it's just as much about a time and a place as it is about him.

At 592 pages, it's a sweeping saga, but it covers so much time and intensity that not a single one is wasted. Book club readers will be inspired to share their own experiences of family and community, which is probably why it was voted Book of the Year of 2017 by Book of the Month Club members, possibly the world's highest book club honor. If that's not enough to convince you, "The Heart's Invisible Furies" was also named one of The New York Times readers' favorite books of 2017 and won the 2018 Goldsboro Books Glass Bell Award.

Marion and Shiva Stone were also born and abandoned in scandal, but they had the added challenge of being conjoined twins. Though they were surgically separated just after birth, they maintain an otherworldly connection as they grow up under the care of a pair of doctors from the hospital where they were born, even as the paths of their medical careers wildly diverge and their love for the same woman opens a chasm in their relationship.

If you thought a love triangle involving formerly conjoined twins sounded like a wild ride, you'd be wise to brace yourself for even more intensity before starting "Cutting For Stone" by Abraham Verghese. The story takes place against the backdrop of the Eritrean liberation movement. The rich characters, political drama, and breathtakingly lifelike descriptions of the brothers' medical work packing its 658 pages will give book club members plenty to talk about. It's easy to see why Verghese's fiction debut landed among Amazon's and Publisher's Weekly's best books of 2009 and made him such an acclaimed author; in fact, you may already know him from his similarly lengthy 2023 book club favorite, "The Covenant of Water."

If the name "Demon Copperhead" sounds vaguely familiar, that's because it's Barbara Kingsolver's modern-day retelling of Charles Dickens' "David Copperfield," lifting its plucky protagonist from Victorian England and dropping him in drug-addled Appalachia. The title redheaded stepchild spends its 560 pages bouncing around various foster homes, seizing and blowing opportunities, and coming to terms with who he is and what he wants out of life. Mostly, it's to see the ocean.

"Demon Copperhead" is a Pulitzer Prize winner, so there's no doubt about its quality. But is it a book club candidate? Some heavy hitters sure think so. In addition to being named one of the 10 best books of 2022 by The Washington Post and The New York Times, it was selected by Reddit's official book club in December 2023 and the queen herself as an Oprah's Book Club pick in October 2022. Are you really going to argue with Oprah?

To put together this list, we scoured Reddit and Goodreads for long book recommendations, careful to narrow our search to threads that requested titles over 500 pages. We paid special attention to frequently recommended titles, high-profile book club selections, and those with themes and characters most likely to invite discussion. We excluded heavy genre fiction to maintain broad appeal, classics readers have likely already read, and books that are part of a series to maintain self-containment. We also excluded titles with fewer than 1,000 reviews on Amazon or Goodreads to ensure a large sample size. The results were ranked by their cumulative Goodreads and Amazon review scores. If the same author appeared more than once in the top results, we excluded the lower-rated book to maintain variety.