The Best Book Club Books of August

In El Salvador in 1923, Graciela is a young girl growing up on a volcano with indentured Indigenous women who work on coffee plantations. One day, she’s whisked away and sent to the capital, where she’ll meet the sister she never knew she had and serve as an oracle for rising dictator El Gran Pendejo. While they are shielded from some things their fellow countrymen suffer, the dictator is still immensely cruel, and after years of living under him, they come to realize how much they’ve unwillingly helped shape the genocide that strikes Graciela’s community. When she and her sister finally escape, they both think the other dead, and in their quest to reinvent themselves, they’ll journey from Hollywood to Paris, with the ghosts of their past lives at their heels.

The ancient city of Nineveh produced one of the most enduring pieces of literature: The Epic of Gilgamesh. It’s this poem that affects the lives of Arthur in 1840s London, Narin in 2014 Turkey, and Zaleekah in 2018 London. Each of them fight to make it out of their predicaments—even as struggles with mental health threaten to pull them back down—and each is tied to the other through a single drop of water.

Add this latest by the prolific Sutanto to the list of books coming out recently that really chop up the whole image of The Influencer. Influencer Meredith (Mer) Lee taught Aspen Palmer everything she knows about the life of an influencer. But then Aspen gets big and basically leaves Mer in the dust. So Mer, petty as she is, decides that a little Lite Stalking^TM and meddling in Aspen’s affairs are in order. Aspen, meanwhile, is confused on why it suddenly feels like everything in her life is falling apart, but she’s also not one to fall for the okie-doke and has some things up her sleeve. To make things extra spicy, Mer goes missing, and Aspen’s whole world goes sideways.

I remember seeing this referred to as “sluts across Europe” early on in its publicity run, and all I have to say is “yes.” Theo and Kit are bisexual exes who both decide—unbeknownst to the other—to finally use the voucher for the European tour they were supposed to go on a while back before it expires. It’s only once the tour is underway that they realize they’ll be stuck with each other for three weeks of beautiful landscapes, romantic locales, and decadent flavors. Which is all totally fine, of course.

In this memoirifesto, Louisiana librarian Amanda Jones recounts how she went to advocate for the freedom to read at a local public hearing in 2022 and was immediately plunged into a nightmare. Right-wing book banners called her things like a pedo and a porn pusher, but she fought back. She sued her defamers and has been encouraging others to do the same. In That Librarian, she calls on all book lovers to stand up to the deluge of book bans the U.S. has been suffering through the last few years.