January’s Best Book Club Books

I have to say that Kang’s timing with this release—after having just won the Nobel Prize in Literature—is A++. We Do Not Part is like The Vegetarian in that it’s also surrealist horror steeped in social issues and history. In it, Kyungha gets a call from her friend whose been injured and is in a hospital in Seoul. She wants Kyungha to go to her home on Jeju Island to save her pet bird, Ama. But a snowstorm greets Kyungha once she gets to Jeju Island. The terrible wind slows Kyungha from getting to her friend’s house, and the cold becomes all-encompassing. What’s more, there is an abject darkness that awaits Kyungha once she gets to the house and reality starts to blur.

This is one of my most anticipated books of 2025, and it’s all because of how much Tan’s Daughter of the Moon Goddess had me shook in 2022. While Immortal is set in the same Chinese mythology-inspired world, instead of a moon goddess’s daughter, we’re following the heir to the Tianxian throne. Liyen’s world suddenly gets turned upside down when she gets poisoned, which is bad enough, but it’s when her grandfather saves her that things really hit the fan. In saving her, he angers the immortals, whose queen sends the God of War to attack Tianxia, which leads to Liyen experiencing great loss, and even love, as she tries her best to save her people.

This tells a fictionalized story of the very real Elizabeth Taylor Greenfield, a Black woman born into slavery in Mississippi and adopted by a wealthy Quaker woman. It’s Elizabeth’s adoptive Quaker mother who educated her and encouraged her to pursue her musical interests. And she does, even when her mother’s white cousins contest her inheritance and leave her with few options once her mother dies. A random performance she does on a Buffalo, New York-bound steamboat leads to great opportunities for Elizabeth, and soon she’s on the path to becoming a history-making opera singer.

Perry has followed up the 2022 National Book Award-winning South to America with a look at the color blue and its relationship with Black folks. She looks at the blue cloths of West Africa that were traded for human beings in the 16th century, the Blues, as a genre and general feeling, and even at the more personal—the blue flowers she planted while grieving.

This book is starting 2025 with a buzz. In it, Suchi’s and Haiwen’s childhood friendship sweetens into teenage love in 1940s Shanghai, and it seems like their futures are laid out in tandem. But then Haiwen secretly signs up for the army to spare his brother from the draft, and that shared future is fractured. Their lives diverge for decades, except for one day when Haiwen is grocery shopping in L.A., looks up, and sees Suchi. It feels like they have a second chance at what should have been, but all of the living they’ve done weighs on them, and it’s not clear that they will be able to make something new and worthwhile.