Sally Rooney

Novelist Alice and magazine editor Eileen trade long emails on beauty, politics, and love while navigating new relationships — Alice with a warehouse worker she met online, Eileen with a childhood friend she's always loved. Rooney's quietest, most philosophical book, built on conversation over plot. Good for a group that likes to argue about ideas.

Sally Rooney

Two Dublin brothers, grieving their father, are pulled apart by how differently they love: Peter juggles an old relationship and a new one, Ivan falls for a woman twice his age over a chessboard. Told in alternating voices, it's Rooney's longest and most formally ambitious novel.

Sarah Addison Allen

In a small North Carolina town, the Waverley women cook with flowers that shift moods and own an apple tree that throws fruit at bad decisions. When Claire's estranged sister returns home with a secret, old family tensions resurface. Gentle Southern magical realism — a cozy, lighter read.

Jacqueline Harpman

Forty women are held in an underground cage by silent guards, with no memory of how they got there. When the guards vanish, the youngest — who alone remembers nothing of the world above — leads them out to find it empty. Spare and unsettling; the bleakest, shortest pick of the four.