Books and Brilliance is All* Above All’s virtual book club, connecting readers from all across the country to share stories about powerful leaders and women – both fiction and nonfiction. This group is for anyone who loves to read, believes in reproductive justice, and wants to connect with others who share those values.
Each month, we rotate who facilitates the discussion on a voluntary basis. Whoever leads the discussion shares three books for the group to choose from, and whichever book has the most votes is what we will read that month. That way, everyone is able to share their favorite novels or knock down their TBR list!
Sign up to join! Meeting details will be shared after sign up. Scroll down to see what books we have read so far!
FAQs
A. Nope! You can join even if you haven’t read the book or haven’t finished, as long as you’re okay with some spoilers!
A. Whoever the discussion leader is for the month shares three book options, and the group then votes on which book we’d like to read.
A. That’s totally alright! Members volunteer to lead discussions, so if you don’t want to, you don’t have to!
A. Yes! Stay tuned 🙂
Sign up here for our Books and Brilliance Book Club!
Upcoming
Mercy Hill
Wednesday, June 17th at 6pm ET
A debut family novel about four sisters growing up on the campus of the underfunded state mental hospital where their strong-willed mother serves as head of psychiatry. A richly moving story of sisterhood, loyalty, and mental health in America.
May 2026 Book
Pachinko
Wednesday, May 20th at 6pm ET
Pachinko is a story of love, sacrifice, ambition, and loyalty. From bustling street markets to the halls of Japan’s finest universities to the pachinko parlors of the criminal underworld, Lee’s complex and passionate characters—strong, stubborn women, devoted sisters and sons, fathers shaken by moral crisis—survive and thrive against the indifferent arc of history.
April 2026 Book
The Book Club for Troublesome Women
By Marie Bostwick
The Book Club for Troublesome Women is a humorous, thought provoking, and nostalgic romp through one pivotal and tumultuous American year–as well as an ode to self-discovery, persistence, and the power of sisterhood.
March 2026 Book
The Street
By Ann Petry
The Street follows the spirited Lutie Johnson, a newly single mother whose efforts to claim a share of the American Dream for herself and her young son meet frustration at every turn in 1940s Harlem. Opening a fresh perspective on the realities and challenges of black, female, working-class life, this classic American novel became the first novel by an African American woman to sell more than a million copies.
February 2026 Book
Lessons In Chemistry
By Bonnie Garmus
Chemist Elizabeth Zott is not your average woman. In fact, Elizabeth Zott would be the first to point out that there is no such thing as an average woman. But it’s the early 1960s and her all-male team at Hastings Research Institute take a very unscientific view of equality. Except for one: Calvin Evans; the lonely, brilliant, Nobel-prize nominated grudge-holder who falls in love with—of all things—her mind. True chemistry results.
January 2026 Book
The Frozen River
By Ariel Lawhon
Maine, 1789: When the Kennebec River freezes, entombing a man in the ice, Martha Ballard is summoned to examine the body and determine cause of death. As a midwife and healer, she is privy to much of what goes on behind closed doors in Hallowell. Her diary is a record of every birth and death, crime and debacle that unfolds in the close-knit community.
December 2025 Book
The Child Finder
By Rene Denfeld
Told in the alternating voices of Naomi and a deeply imaginative child, The Child Finder is a breathtaking, exquisitely rendered literary page-turner about redemption, the line between reality and memories and dreams, and the human capacity to survive.
November 2025 Book
Pandora’s Jar
By Natalie Haynes
Pandora’s Jar brings nuance and care to the millennia-old myths and legends and asks the question: Why are we so quick to villainize these women in the first place—and so eager to accept the stories we’ve been told?
October 2025 Book
Demon Copperhead
By Barbara Kingsolver
Set in the mountains of southern Appalachia, Demon Copperhead is the story of a boy born to a teenaged mother in a single-wide trailer, with no assets beyond his dead father’s good looks and copper-colored hair, a caustic wit, and a fierce talent for survival.
September 2025 Book
The Nightingale
By Kristin Hannah
During Nazi occupation in France, two sisters take different paths in WWII – one lives with a German captain to protect her family, while another joins the Resistance, both of them risking everything. This unforgettable novel by Kristin Hannah about love and strength in the face of war has enthralled a generation.
August 2025 Book
Great Big Beautiful Life
By Emily Henry
Two writers compete for the chance to tell the larger-than-life story of a woman with more than a couple of plot twists up her sleeve in this dazzling and sweeping new novel from Emily Henry.