Book Club Books at the Biggest Public Libraries

From the author of Erasure comes a retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, but from Jim’s point of view. Jim is an enslaved man who learns he’s about to be sold to a white man in New Orleans, and so hides out until he can think of something that’ll keep him from being separated from his family. Then he meets Huck Finn — running from his own problems — and the two embark on their familiar story, this time with Jim’s full humanity on display.

Twenty years ago, Detective Chelsey Clahoun’s sister disappeared. Her sister was never seen again, so Chelsey dedicated her life to finding other missing girls, which is a pretty depressing vocation, not going to lie. Turns out people are awful, and Chelsey’s cases rarely end nicely, but then a teenager who’d been missing for two years — Ellie Black — turns up alive in the woods. The happy turn of events turns sour, though, when Chelsey realizes that Ellie is not trying to spill on what happened, who took her, or where she’s been all this time, and Chelsey will need to know all those things if she’s to stop another girl from being taken.

Here, an accomplished actress and an attractive younger man meet for lunch in a Manhattan restaurant. Who they are to each other is a question that Kitamura’s narrative unfurls, except it extends the question to all relationships. It looks at the dynamics—or roles—we have with different people in our lives, showing how we’re constantly auditioning, even with people who think they know us best.