Reading list · 15 books
Reese Witherspoon's reading list
Reese Witherspoon is an Academy Award-winning actress and producer who launched Reese's Book Club through her Hello Sunshine media company in 2017. Her monthly picks have made the New York Times bestseller list with reliable speed, and several selections — including Where the Crawdads Sing, Daisy Jones & The Six, and Little Fires Everywhere — have been adapted into films or series she produced. She gravitates toward fiction about women navigating complex circumstances, memoirs of resilience and self-discovery, and stories with strong female interiority that mainstream publishing had historically underpublished.
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01
Delia Owens
One of the club's signature picks and its best-known adaptation — Witherspoon's production company produced the 2022 film. She selected it in 2018 and has described it as the book she hand-sold to more people than any other, telling friends to cancel their plans and read it immediately.
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02
Celeste Ng
Celeste Ng's second novel was a 2017 selection that Witherspoon and Kerry Washington co-produced as a Hulu limited series. The book's central question — who gets to define a family, and who gets to burn down the rules — maps directly onto themes the club returns to repeatedly.
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03
Taylor Jenkins Reid
Taylor Jenkins Reid's novel about a fictional 1970s rock band was selected in 2019 and adapted as an Amazon Prime series Witherspoon's company produced. She picked it for its voice — the oral-history format gives every character's version of events equal weight, which mirrors how she thinks about storytelling.
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04
Bonnie Garmus
Bonnie Garmus's debut was the club's October 2022 pick and became the rare selection that crossed into mainstream cultural saturation. Witherspoon has cited Elizabeth Zott as one of the protagonists who most embodies the club's ethos: a woman who refuses to shrink herself to fit available categories.
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05
Laura Dave
Laura Dave's thriller was a 2021 pick that Witherspoon's company later adapted as an Apple TV+ series with Julia Roberts. She selected it for its pace and for Hannah's determination — a woman reconstructing her husband's hidden life while keeping her stepdaughter safe.
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06
Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine
Gail Honeyman
Gail Honeyman's debut was one of the club's earliest picks and established the tone for what was coming: a protagonist who is brittle, strange, and deeply sympathetic. Witherspoon has described Eleanor as one of the most original characters she'd encountered in years of reading.
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07
The Seven Husbands of Evelyn Hugo
Taylor Jenkins Reid
Taylor Jenkins Reid's Hollywood-set novel was selected in 2019 and introduced many club readers to Reid before Daisy Jones arrived. Witherspoon has talked about Evelyn Hugo's moral complexity — a woman who made ruthless choices and refuses to apologize for them — as exactly the kind of female character the club exists to champion.
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08
Taylor Jenkins Reid
Taylor Jenkins Reid's tennis novel was a 2022 selection. Witherspoon has called Carrie Soto one of the most demanding protagonists the club has featured — a woman who defines herself entirely through excellence and has to reckon with what that costs.
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09
Taylor Jenkins Reid
Reid's 2021 novel was selected when it published and continued the pattern of the club amplifying her work. Set over a single catastrophic night, it follows four celebrity siblings at a party that burns their shared mythology down — Witherspoon picked it partly for how it handles what famous mothers pass on to their children.
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10
Nita Prose
Nita Prose's debut mystery was the club's November 2021 pick. Witherspoon selected it for Molly the Maid's voice — a protagonist with an atypical way of processing the world who is genuinely underestimated at every turn, including by the reader.
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11
Tara Westover
Tara Westover's memoir was an early club selection that drew Witherspoon for the same reasons it drew many readers: a woman reconstructing herself entirely without the scaffolding of the family or the education that shape most coming-of-age stories.
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12
Brit Bennett
Brit Bennett's novel about twin sisters who choose opposite racial identities was a 2020 selection. Witherspoon has described it as a book that opens up the question of what we choose about ourselves versus what is chosen for us — and what it costs either way.
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13
Liane Moriarty
Liane Moriarty's novel predates the formal club but is foundational to its aesthetic — Witherspoon's production company made the HBO series, and her enthusiasm for Moriarty's blend of dark comedy and domestic menace shaped what kinds of books she later selected.
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14
Kristin Hannah
Kristin Hannah's novel about an Alaska homestead gone wrong was a 2018 pick that gave the club one of its starkest protagonists: a teenage girl watching her father's trauma unravel the world her mother built around it. Witherspoon has cited it as the Hannah novel that hooked her on the author entirely.
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15
Sally Rooney
Sally Rooney's second novel was selected in 2019 and extended the club into literary fiction with a younger, more formally adventurous sensibility. Witherspoon chose it for Marianne — a character who understands her own damage with more precision than she can use to stop it.
More on Reese Witherspoon's picks
Reese Witherspoon started Reese's Book Club in 2017 as a formal extension of something she'd been doing informally for years: recommending books to anyone who would listen. The club operates primarily through Instagram and the Hello Sunshine website, with monthly picks announced alongside discussion questions, author interviews, and reading-group guides. The picks have become self-fulfilling — publishers now submit galleys hoping for the bump, and the club has functioned as a reliable mechanism for surfacing debut fiction and mid-career literary writers who might otherwise be overlooked by the cultural conversation.
The list below draws from across the club's history. The connective tissue is not genre — there are thrillers, literary novels, beach reads, and memoirs here — but a consistent interest in women who act, choose, and suffer the consequences, rather than women who wait. Witherspoon has been candid that she looks for female protagonists who feel like real people rather than narrative functions. On the club's social channels she often frames picks in terms of what the main character is trying to do: Eleanor Oliphant is trying to survive without people, Eleanor Vance is trying to understand herself, and Celeste Price is trying to outrun everyone else's story about her.
Several of the club's picks crossed over into film and television, in part because Witherspoon's production company Hello Sunshine was positioned to move on them quickly. That overlap between book and adaptation has made the club unusually interesting to track as a cultural signal: books selected here often find second audiences when the screen version arrives.
