By Kavita Mistry
Book club favorites vary from year to year, and we’re here to keep you updated on the most current trends!
In this year’s subscriber survey, we once again asked book club members to name their top three book club books of all time. From their answers, we’ve compiled our latest list of book clubs’ top ten overall favorite books.
Book Clubs’ All-Time Overall Favorite Books as of 2025
| Rank | Book | % Respondents |
| 1 | A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles (2016, Viking) | 8.99% |
| 2 | The Women by Kristin Hannah (2024, St. Martin’s Press) | 4.81% |
| 3 | Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus (2022, Doubleday) | 4.68% |
| 4 | Horse by Geraldine Brooks (2022, Viking) | 3.92% |
| 5 | James by Percival Everett (2024, Doubleday) | 3.42% |
| 6 | The Nightingale by Kristin Hannah (2015, St. Martin’s Press) | 3.16% |
| 7 | Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese (2009, Knopf) | 2.91% |
| 8 | Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver (2022, Harper) | 2.78% |
| 9 | Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger (2013, Atria) | 2.41% |
| 10 | Where the Crawdads Sing by Delia Owens (2018, G.P. Putnam’s Sons) | 2.15% |
Unsurprisingly, between this year and last year, several books remained on the list, either in the same position or in a different ranking. But we also have a few new stars, including two that were just published in 2024: James, Percival Everett’s retelling of Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and Kristin Hannah’s The Women, about American women who served as nurses in the Vietnam War.
It’s always exciting to see what older books book club members have recently discovered as favorites, and this year, Ordinary Grace by William Kent Krueger, a literary mystery published in 2013 that won a 2014 Edgar Award, makes its way onto the list at #9.
Meanwhile, A Gentleman in Moscow by Amor Towles holds its place in the #1 spot, and Lessons in Chemistry by Bonnie Garmus keeps its #3 ranking. Horse by Geraldine Books and Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese swap the #4 and #7 rankings, with Horse rising and Verghese’s novel dropping (considering this is the oldest book on the list and it’s shown up in previous years, it’s impressive that it’s still here). The Nightingale, the second (and older) of Kristin Hannah’s novels in the top ten, Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, and Delia Owens’ Where the Crawdads Sing all stayed on the list with changes in rankings.
Below, you can see how books compare to where they were in 2024.
Top 10 Comparison 2025 vs 2024
This list reinforces two things we already knew from previous years: Book clubs love historical fiction, and they also love Barbara Kingsolver. Demon Copperhead is the only book on the list primarily set in contemporary times.
BookBrowse reviewed and recommended all of these titles at or near time of publication, which reinforces the quality of our recommendations for book clubs and book lovers.
As was the case last year, all the books on the list were published within approximately 15 years. This doesn’t mean that book clubs aren’t reading older books, only that newer books are likely to accumulate more votes between clubs because they represent a larger chunk of the titles book clubs are reading overall.
While some of the authors on this list, like Kristin Hannah and Amor Towles, have been consistently popular with book clubs, Percival Everett, whose novel James was published shortly after his 2001 book Erasure was adapted into the 2023 movie American Fiction, is a well established writer who seems to have only recently become this big with our book club member subscribers. Groups who wish to explore his work further have a gold mine of more than twenty previous novels to choose from.
We hope you’ve enjoyed seeing what titles are currently most popular with book clubs, from old favorites to new arrivals! To explore more of BookBrowse’s book club resources, visit our book club hub, browse 2000+ discussion guides, or check out our book club advice. If you’re looking to participate in an online book club, we hope to see you in our Community Forum as well.