Obama shares summer reading list featuring Yanagihara and St John Mandel

Former US president Barack Obama has once again released a 14-strong list of book recommendations to read this summer, continuing a tradition from his time in the White House.

Posting the list on Twitter, Obama’s choice spans fiction, non-fiction and narrative reporting, and includes Hanya Yanagihara’s 720-page third novel To Paradise (Picador), and Emily St John Mandel’s Sea of Tranquility (Picador), a work of speculative fiction and follow-up to her dystopian pandemic novel Station Eleven (Picador).

Also celebrated is Charmaine Wilkerson’s debut Black Cake, which was snapped up by Michael Joseph at auction for six figures.  The epic multi-generational family drama takes place in the Caribbean, the UK and the US and centres on the relationship between an estranged brother and sister.

Silverview by John le Carré (Penguin) and Jennifer Egan’s The Candy House (Little, Brown) have also made the cut. Razor Blade Tears by S A Cosby (Headline), which was longlisted for the CWA Gold Dagger Award, and The Family Chao by Lan Samantha Chang (Pushkin Press) are among other fiction titles to receive the former president’s nod.

Velvet was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia (Quercus), Mouth to Mouth by Antoine Wilson (Atlantic Books) and Jessamine Chan’s The School For Good Mothers (Cornerstone) have also been spotlit in fiction. 

In non-fiction, Why We’re Polarized by Ezra Klein (Profile Books), a dive into the American political system, is joined by A Little Devil in America: In Praise of Black Performance (Penguin Books) by Hanif Abdurraqib. Blood in the Garden: The Flagrant History of the 1990s New York Knicks (Atria) by Chris Herring, an account of how the basketball team reversed their fortunes, is also recommended. Yascha Mounk’s The Great Experiment: Why Diverse Democracies Fall Apart and How They Can Endure (Penguin) completes the line-up. 

Obama’s reading list comes after news  was released of his wife Michelle Obama’s new book, The Light We Carry (Penguin), which is out in November.