In 1996,
The Oprah Winfrey Show introduced Oprah’s Book Club – and the publishing world has never been the same.
Since Oprah selected her first work,
The Deep End of the Ocean by Jacquelyn Mitchard, books – fiction, non-fiction, troubled memoirs – have skyrocketed to popularity. And the episodes in which Oprah discussed the book, typically with the author present, are some of the most popular interviews the talk show host has conducted.
Below, you will find titles chosen in 1998:
A feisty young woman who is seven months pregnant when she leaves her Tennessee trailer park with her boyfriend, she is abandoned outside a Wal-Mart in Oklahoma.
Sybil Danforth, an uncertified lay midwife in rural Vermont, gets into trouble when she performs an emergency Caesarian on a minister's wife. Sybil's daughter, Connie, looks back to 1981 to tell the story of the murder trial.
When Ava returns to her hometown to visit her sister, she becomes involved with Eddie Jefferson. The romance is threatened because each of them has a terrible secret: Ava is HIV-positive, and Eddie is a convicted murderer.
A 40-year-old housepainter named Dominick Birdsey, from a spectacularly dysfunctional family, is the narrator of this long novel about the search for self-acceptance. A "New York Times" Notable Book for 1998.
This is the story of Sophie Caco, the daughter of a Haitian exile, conceived in an act of violence. When Sophie is 12, her mother--who had abandoned her--asks the girl to join her in New York.
An abused wife named Frannie leaves home with her young son, and lives under a new identity in Florida, where she tries to make a comfortable life for the two of them.
A professor's wife named March Murray travels from California to her hometown in Massachusetts to attend the funeral of the woman who helped raise her after her mother died.
Toni Morrison writes about a group of African Americans who found a community in Oklahoma called Ruby. When the outside world threatens the peace of the community, five women whose lives are particularly troubled take refuge in an abandoned convent, which alienates the men of the town.
