Oprah Winfrey selected Ann Napolitano’s Hello Beautiful as the 100th pick for her popular book club.
Napolitano’s novel, published Tuesday by Dial Press, follows four sisters whose family is thrown into disarray after one falls in love with a man whose childhood was marked by darkness and neglect. A critic for Kirkus wrote of the book, “Napolitano’s characters can break your heart as they work to mend their own.”
Winfrey announced the selection on CBS Mornings, telling Gayle King, “It’s one of those choices where you feel like, I can’t wait for everybody else to have a chance to get to know these characters.”
On the show, Napolitano described getting the phone call from Winfrey letting her know of the book’s selection.
“I was taking out the garbage in my apartment building, and the phone said Chicago, and this voice said, ‘Hi, Ann, it’s Oprah Winfrey,’” she said. “And I just stood there holding the garbage while I talked to you, because I was afraid that if I moved, the call would go away, and this experience would go away.”
On Instagram, Winfrey reflected on her book club, which she launched in 1996 with Jacquelyn Mitchard’s novel The Deep End of the Ocean.
“It was over 26 years ago that I started Oprah’s Book Club, because I wanted to get the whole country reading and connecting over what I thought were great stories,” she said. “And I wasn’t sure at the time that the idea would even kind of work. But here we are. We’ve read 99 books together.”
Michael Schaub, a journalist and regular contributor to NPR, lives near Austin, Texas.
