Oprah official biography books

For the first time in Book Club history, Oprah picked the same book twice. Originally selected for the club in 2008, A New Earth is a spiritual manifesto on being present, relinquishing ego, and tapping into your greater purpose. “The reason I’m choosing it for the second time is that this book transformed my life,” Oprah explained, “I already had a life’s purpose in 2008 but it enhanced the purpose that I was living here on earth and I know it can do it for everyone who reads it.” Even if you’ve already read this self-help masterpiece, it’s worth picking up again; Oprah herself always has a copy on her nightstand to constantly refresh herself on the book’s transcendent teachings.

The latest Oprah’s Book Club selection is part of a new collaboration with Starbucks. Small Things Like These is a little book that packs a huge punch. At just 128 pages, the novella follows an Irish father and coal merchant in the weeks leading up to Christmas as he discovers a town secret that forces him to choose between protecting his own and standing up for the powerless. While the book is set in the 1980s and incorporates some fascinating (and chilling) Irish history, the story itself a timeless reminder of our human capacity for courage—and our responsibility for one another.

Alternating between the voices of Lisa Marie Presley and her daughter, Riley Keough, this memoir takes readers behind the famous musical gates of Graceland—and beyond, to a world of unfathomable wealth, impossible familial legacy, unthinkable loss, and unending love. The only child of Elvis Presley, Lisa Marie lived a life of excess, in both privilege and pain: Her childhood included pony rides through the hallways of the Graceland mansion and witnessing her father’s death at the age of 9; her adulthood included dating A-listers like Nicholas Cage and Michael Jackson, as well as losing her son and descending into addiction. Before her death in 2022, Lisa Marie recorded her own account of these experiences for a memoir she planned to write with her daughter—one that Riley had to finish in her absence. In From Here to the Great Unknown, Riley weaves in her own perspective with her mother’s, filling the gaps in Lisa Marie’s story and offering her own recollections, insights, and opinions. “I was just a few pages into this book, recognizing that it was going to be your voice and her voice, and then I thought, Oh, I have to choose this for the Book Club,” Oprah told Riley in an exclusive CBS interview. “It’s a lot of brave work you did in this book.”

“Tell Me Everything has all the things: romance and mystery and secrets and even a possible murder,” says Oprah. It also has a surprise reappearance of a character readers of Oprah’s Book Club will certainly remember: the indomitable and endearing Olive Kitteridge of Oprah’s 82nd Book Club pick, Olive Again. In Tell Me Everything, Olive’s story finally intersects with those of other beloved characters in the bestselling and Pulitzer Prize-winning author’s literary universe, but if you’ve never read any of Elizabeth Strout’s work (or watched the multi-Emmy Award-winning miniseries starring Frances McDermott as the titular Olive Kitteridge) don’t worry, this is a standalone and, in Oprah’s words, “marvelous” book.

In Familiaris, David Wroblewski tells the origin story of his bestselling first novel, and Oprah’s 66th Book Club pick, The Story of Edgar Sawtelle. Beginning in 1919, the sweeping epic follows the family’s patriarch, John Sawtelle, as he embarks, with his new wife and ragtag best friends, on building a utopian dog-breeding farm in northern Wisconsin. Laced through with magic, history, philosophy, whimsy, and humor, this book will capture your imagination—for all 975 pages!

In his 11th novel, Tóibín returns to the characters from his bestselling book Brooklyn, which was adapted into a widely acclaimed film starring Saoirse Ronan. But don’t worry; no prior reading is necessary to dive into this totally singular story.

Decades after immigrating to America from Ireland, Eilis Lacey has made a life for herself on Long Island with her husband, Tony, their two children, and his large extended Italian American family. But that life shatters in an instant when a stranger shows up on her doorstep and informs her that Tony has gotten his wife pregnant…and that he plans on leaving the baby on Eilis’s doorstep. As Oprah puts it, this is a novel about a woman’s reckoning with “infidelity, with long-lost love, with secrets, and the universal struggle we all have to figure out where we truly belong.”

In this memoir of “lying, stealing, writing, and healing,” Lara Love Hardin recounts how opioid addiction destroyed her quiet suburban life—and how she built something stronger out of the rubble. From the outside, Hardin’s life looked perfect. She had a two-story home in a California cul-de-sac, four beautiful children, a small business—“a pet cemetery, of all things”—and a handsome husband. But behind the scenes, she was drowning. Her worsening opioid addiction had taken her from prescription painkillers to heroin, from selling her own belongings to stealing her neighbors’ credit cards. Hardin is eventually charged with 32 felonies. The end of her life as a soccer mom marks the beginning of a new life: one built on accountability, forgiveness,vulnerability, growth, and reinvention. After jail, Hardin became a renowned ghostwriter, collaborating with celebrated doctors, spiritual leaders, and activists on their books. She even coauthored Anthony Ray Hinton’s memoir, The Sun Does Shine, which was an Oprah’s Book Club selection in 2018. Oprah described selecting Hardin’s own memoir for the club as a “full-circle moment.”

Let Us Descend tells the story of Annis a young, enslaved woman, separated from her mother and sold South. Traveling from the Carolina rice fields to the New Orleans slave markets to a Louisiana sugar plantation, Annis uncovers a hidden world of ancestral wisdom and spiritual forces, handed down by her African maternal line.

Jesmyn Ward is the author of three previous novels—two of which have won the National Book Award. She is the only woman and the only Black author to have received such an honor. “A fan of her writing for years,” Oprah has read all of Ward’s books and calls her newest offering, Let Us Descend, “a vital work for our culture.”

Oprah’s 102nd Book Club pick is a hilarious and tender exploration of love, marriage, life hacks, technology, and how to reconcile the people we once were with the strangers we inevitably, eventually, become. Jack and Elizabeth meet as starry-eyed college students deeply enmeshed in the ’90s Chicago grunge scene and—quickly—in a whirlwind romance. Two decades later, their world and their relationship have transformed; their lives are now governed by the responsibilities of parenthood, the tyranny of self-optimization, and the planning of their suburban “forever home.” Traversing time and geography, we follow Jack and Elizabeth as they confront the mind-warping power of Facebook algorithms, the legacy of childhood trauma, the marital law of a vindictive HOA, and some all-too-relatable marital strife.

As Oprah insists, this book will take you for “an incredible ride.” Buckle up!

Inspired by his great-grandmother, who, as a child, married a widower, Verghese introduces the fictional Big Ammachi, matriarch of a Christian family in Kerala, India. We follow three generations from 1900 to 1977, through mysterious drownings, afflictions, colonialism, and independence. This epic tale soars with lyricism and tension, transporting you across time and continents. So clear your schedule and immerse yourself in this instant classic, which Verghese, a physician, wrote while simultaneously working as a professor of medicine at Stanford University.

Oprah says, “It is one of the best books I have read in my entire life, and I have been reading since I was 3!”

What Oprah said about her 100th pick: “I’m telling you, once you start, you won’t want it to end…and be prepared for tears.”

Written in homage to the classic Little Women, Hello Beautiful follows the story of the four Padovano sisters, who live in Pilsen, a working-class neighborhood of Chicago. The girls’ close-knit, rambunctious family is forever changed when the eldest, Julia, marries a young man with a tragic past that threatens their future together.

“This book has the power to transform the way you see your life and even the world,” Oprah says. “I have started to look at my own life in the world differently.”

Bittersweet, by Susan Cain, is a nonfiction title that explores how we deal with sadness. Not by denying it. Not by surrendering to it. But by acknowledging it. Even if, at times, it seems self-defeating because: We’re all supposed to be happy, right? Or at least try to be happy?

Oprah says, “It’s an absolutely riveting read.” Demon Copperhead re-envisions the Charles Dickens classic David Copperfield, setting it in modern-day Appalachia. Kingsolver was inspired while on a visit to Dickens’s seaside English retreat and actually started writing DemonCopperhead at Dickens's own desk. It’s Kingsolver’s 17th novel in some three decades, and in writing it, Kingsolver says she wanted to counter some of the condescension and downright snobbery directed at the region in which she was born and still lives, a region whose people, she believes, have been exploited for generations, most recently by pharmaceutical companies who targeted Appalachian residents and created the current opioid crisis.

Masters has been incarcerated in California’s San Quentin State Prison for the past 41 years. Oprah read the book shortly after it was first published by HarperOne, in 2009, and it left a strong impression: “His story, of a young boy victimized by addiction, poverty, violence, the foster care system, and later the justice system, profoundly touched me then, and still does today,” said Oprah.

HarperOne has reissued the book, which contains a foreword by spiritual teacher Pema Chödrön, who has long championed Masters’s cause.

Masters had this to say about the selection of his book for Oprah’s Book Club:

“I turned 60 this year, having entered San Quentin at the age 19. I wrote That Bird Has My Wings while in solitary confinement, isolated and alone,” he says. “My greatest hope at that time was that a few young people would read my story and learn from my mistakes. Thanks to Ms. Winfrey and her book club, my story will be introduced to a national audience. It is my greatest hope that their lives will be the better for it, and I am forever grateful for the honor and the opportunity that Oprah has afforded me.”

Mottley began her astonishing debut novel when she was just 16. It has received raves from such luminaries as Dave Eggers, Kiese Laymon, and this one from James McBride: “Leila Mottley has an extraordinary gift. She writes with the humility and sparkle of a child, but with the skill and deft touch of a wizened, seasoned storyteller.”

In her powerful and empowering memoir, the first Black actor to earn the so-called “Triple Crown of Acting”—an Oscar, a Tony, and an Emmy—details her rise from poverty and other trauma to emerge as an iconic American artist. Through revisiting her childhood and all its pain, she was able to finally answer the question that had long haunted her: How did I claw my way out?About the pick, Oprah had this to say: “There are so many lessons to be learned from this breathtaking memoir about triumphing over adversity and trauma. Viola Davis leaves it all on the page—from her beginnings in South Carolina as the fifth of six children born in a sharecropper’s shack to acclaim as an actor, producer, and philanthropist. I was so moved by this book that I just had to share it with our entire OBC audience.”

The Way of Integrity: Finding the Path to Your True Self was a New York Times bestseller and the first offering under Maria Shriver’s book imprint, The Open Field/Viking.

On her 94th pick,Oprah said: “As we all navigate this watershed moment in our collective history, The Way of Integrity provides a road map on the journey to truth and authenticity. Her latest work is filled with aha moments and practical exercises that can guide us as we seek enlightenment.”

Richard Powers’s intimate novel is about astrobiologist Theo Byrne, who is raising his 9-year-old son after his wife's death. It is tender and timely, drawing readers into existential questions about the place of humans in the world.

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