Two morning show book clubs have unveiled their picks for June.
At the Today show, co-host Jenna Bush Hager announced that she’s selected Megha Majumdar’s A Burning as the newest selection for her book club.
Hager said she felt “transported” to India through Majumdar’s novel.
“I think books are a tool for empathy,” Hager said. “And now when we are stuck at home—and I definitely won’t be traveling to India this summer—this is a tool for all of us to learn more about the plight of people all over the world.”
Majumdar told the show that she started writing her novel from “a place of alarm and anger.
“I hope that people will use the book to think about how they themselves have pursued dreams and tried to improve their own lives in hard conditions, however those hard conditions have presented in their own lives,” Majumdar said. “I also hope that people will find it a useful book for considering how injustice has shown up in their own communities.”
Meanwhile, Good Morning America chose Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half for its club, calling the novel “a powerful story about family, compassion, identity and roots.”
“There are a lot of love stories in this book—between sisters, between mothers and daughters, between romantic partners,” Bennett said. “The Vanishing Half really is about how we love people across space and distance and time and circumstance and that's something that really resonates with me right now.”
Michael Schaub is a Texas-based journalist and regular contributor to NPR.
