Oprah Winfrey’s latest book club pick is Nathan Hill’s Wellness.
Hill’s novel, published Tuesday by Alfred A. Knopf, tells the story of Jack and Elizabeth, a Chicago couple who met in college and are now navigating their early middle age, raising a son and designing their dream condo. A critic for Kirkus called the book “a warmhearted satire that chronicles our ‘perfectly, stupidly, dreadfully elegant’ accommodations to life.”
Winfrey announced her new selection on Oprah Daily, saying, “This is a love story like none other—one that continues long after ‘happily ever after,’ and captures the full, complicated, occasionally hilarious, and always surprising path of a single relationship.”
She and Hill appeared on CBS Mornings, where the novelist recounted how he learned that his novel—his second, following the 2016 bestseller The Nix—would be featured in Winfrey’s book club.
“Oprah crashed a Zoom call,” he said. “I was having what I thought was just going to be a normal meeting with my publisher, and then my screen was taken over by Oprah.…I’m very accustomed to seeing Oprah on a screen, so my impulse was just to sit back and listen, learn, be entertained. And it took an awkward amount of time to realize that she was actually speaking to me, and I had to speak back.”
Winfrey talked about why Hill’s novel appealed to her.
“It’s basically a love story gone wrong,” she said, telling Hill, “I really appreciated your ability to take language and draw us into the story in such a modern, contemporary, vibrant way.”
Michael Schaub is a contributing writer.
