July Book Options | Chapters & Chai Book Club
July Book Options | Chapters & Chai Book Club
This July, we're reading one of the following five books, and the choice is yours. Our options are all in the contemporary literary fiction realms with themes of coming-of-age, romance, or friendships.
So Thrilled For You by Holly Bourne
A terrible heatwave. A very tense baby shower. It will all end in tears...
Nicki, Lauren, Charlotte and Steffi have been friends since university. Now in their thirties, life is pulling them in different directions - but when Charlotte organises the baby shower of hell for pregnant Nicki, the girls are reunited.
Under a sweltering hot summer day, tensions rise - and by the end of the evening, nothing will ever be the same. Someone started a fire at the house - and everyone's a suspect... Is it Steffi, happily child-free but feeling judged by her friends? Is it Charlotte, desperate to conceive and jealous of those who have? Is it Lauren, who is finding motherhood far, far worse than she imagined? Or is it Nicki herself, who never wanted a baby shower anyway?
In the aftermath, the police put together the facts - but the truth will shock everyone. Even you.
Genre: Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Summer, Mystery
Average Rating (Goodreads): 3.87
Pages: 423
Heart the Lover by Lily King
Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Readers' Favorite Fiction (2025)
You knew I’d write a book about you someday.
Our narrator understands good love stories—their secrets and subtext, their highs and their free falls. But her greatest love story, the one she lived, never followed the simple rules.
In the fall of her senior year of college, she meets two star students from her 17th-Century Lit class: Sam and Yash. Best friends living off-campus in the elegant house of a professor on sabbatical, the boys invite her into their intoxicating world of academic fervor, rapid-fire banter and raucous card games. They nickname her Jordan, and she quickly discovers the pleasures of friendship, love and her own intellectual ambition. Youthful passion is unpredictable though, and she soon finds herself at the center of a charged and intricate triangle. As graduation comes and goes, choices made will alter these three lives forever.
Decades later, Jordan is living the life she dreamed of, and the vulnerable days of her youth seem comfortably behind her. But when a surprise visit and unexpected news brings the past crashing into the present, Jordan returns to a world she left behind and is forced to confront the decisions and deceptions of her younger self.
Written with the superb wit and emotional sensitivity fans and critics of Lily King have come to adore, Heart the Lover is a deeply moving story that celebrates love, friendship, and the transformative nature of forgiveness. Wise, unforgettable, and with a delightful connective thread to Writers & Lovers, this is King at her very best, affirming her as a masterful chronicler of the human experience and one of the finest novelists at work today.
Genre: Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Romance, Coming-of-Age
Average Rating (Goodreads): 4.22
Pages: 256
Slags by Emma Jane Unsworth
Once a slag, always a slag?
It’s the 1990s. Sarah is 15, obsessed with sex, getting drunk on Malibu, and her teacher, Mr Keaveney.
Fast forward: Sarah is 41, the last of the party girls. But the mad nights out are losing their shine.
Craving adventure, she sets off with her sister Juliette on a whisky-fuelled campervan trip across Scotland.
They know all the dark corners of each other’s history – and it’s time to dig up some demons, kicking and screaming.
Because the things that once defined us shouldn’t define us forever… should they?
Genre: Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Coming-of-Age
Average Rating (Goodreads): 3.37
Pages: 288
Margo's Got Money Troubles by Rufi Thorpe
Goodreads Choice Award Nominee for Readers' Favourite Fiction (2024)
Now, at twenty, Margo is alone with an infant, unemployed, and on the verge of eviction. She needs a cash infusion—fast. When her estranged father, Jinx, shows up on her doorstep and asks to move in with her, she agrees in exchange for help with childcare. Then Margo begins to form a plan: she’ll start an OnlyFans as an experiment, and soon finds herself adapting some of Jinx’s advice from the world of wrestling. Like how to craft a compelling character and make your audience fall in love with you. Before she knows it, she’s turned it into a runaway success. Could this be the answer to all of Margo’s problems, or does internet fame come with too high a price?
Blisteringly funny and filled with sharp insight, Margo’s Got Money Troubles is a tender tale starring an endearing young heroine who’s struggling to wrest money and power from a world that has little interest in giving it to her. It’s a playful and honest examination of the art of storytelling and controlling your own narrative, and an empowering portrait of coming into your own, both online and off.
Average Rating (Goodreads): 3.83
Pages: 304
It’s a Friday night in a campus bar in Berkeley, fall of 2000, and Percy Marks is pontificating about music again. Hall and Oates is on the jukebox, and Percy—who has no talent for music, just lots of opinions about it—can’t stop herself from overanalyzing the song, indulging what she knows to be her most annoying habit. But something is different tonight. The guy beside her at the bar, fellow student Joe Morrow, is a songwriter. And he could listen to Percy talk all night.
Joe asks Percy for feedback on one of his songs—and the results kick off a partnership that will span years, ignite new passions in them both, and crush their egos again and again. Is their collaboration worth its cost? Or is it holding Percy back from finding her own voice?
Moving from Brooklyn bars to San Francisco dance floors, Deep Cuts examines the nature of talent, obsession, belonging, and above all, our need to be heard.
Genre: Contemporary, Literary Fiction, Romance, Coming-of-Age
Average Rating (Goodreads): 3.61
Pages: 277
~ Kee