The Best Picks From Dakota Johnson's Book Club, TeaTime

Dakota Johnson has been a storyteller for a long time, whether she's acting or producing. Now, she's recommending books, and her passion found its next chapter with the creation of her TeaTime book club, a project born from her production company, TeaTime Pictures. 

In recent years, the trend of celebrity book clubs has become hard to miss. Johnson joined the growing ranks of stars curating their favorite reads for eager audiences in 2024. Launching the club on Instagram, she declared: "When you sign up to our channel we will send you down a rabbit hole." True to her word, members receive exclusive links, accompanying playlists, and author interviews every month — all designed to enrich the reading experience and draw members deeper into each story. 

In its first year, TeaTime has highlighted an assorted array of fiction spanning multiple genres. Each pick has brought inventive prose and thought-provoking themes to the table. Fans are invited to follow along on social media, accompanying every month's book with a cozy cup of tea and a story worth savoring. Here are our favorite picks from the list of TeaTime books.

In "Cinema Love," by Jiaming Tang, a weathered movie theater in rural 1980s China becomes the stage for forbidden love and survival. The Mawei City Workers' Cinema serves as a rare refuge for gay men, a place to flee from a society that refuses to accept them, and a shadowed sanctuary away from the wives left in the dark at home. Bao Mei — the cinema's ticket-seller, cleaner, and steadfast sentinel — has seen it all. Her own connection to the theatre is otherworldly; she was led there by the ghost of her brother, Hen Bao.

For a while, the cinema is a dreamscape where clandestine love can bask in the soft, flickering glow of old war films. But when a passionate affair between two patrons is exposed, the curtains fall on this diaphanous sanctuary. A scorned wife takes drastic action. Tang's debut novel then follows the characters on an exodus from the dim projection rooms in China to the neon-lit streets of New York's Chinatown. A strong example of great LGBTQ+ fiction, this was TeaTime's pick for May 2024, and it's one you'll want to grab the popcorn for.

Autumn calls for haunted houses, scary secrets, and chilling revelations — all of which TeaTime's October 2024 pick, "Model Home," by Rivers Solomon, delivered in abundance. Beneath the manicured lawns of one of Dallas' most affluent neighborhoods, dark secrets fester in this novel. Welcome to 677 Acacia Drive.

For Ezri and their sisters — Eve and Emmanuelle Maxwell — it's the childhood home where they grew up as the only Black family in the neighborhood, a place they abandoned in pursuit of something better, leaving their status-conscious parents behind to cling to a life that never truly accepted them. After years of estrangement, cryptic texts lure Ezri back to the family home. There, they discover their parents dead in the garden, with local authorities dismissing the tragedy as a murder-suicide. For the siblings who always believed the house to be cursed, they are left to grapple with the possibilities of dark, inexplicable forces at play.

"Model Home" meets every expectation for a modern Gothic classic. At every turn, the novel peels back to reveal a deeply engrossing reckoning with repression and trauma, psychological torment, and society's immutable ills. Brace yourself for supernatural elements, a brooding aesthetic, and the oppressive pervasion of mortality and decay.

Motherhood, marriage, and the metropolitan outskirts can be stifling, but add in grief and a splash of psychedelics, and you get "We Were the Universe." This is the first novel from a writer who already earned her stripes with her critically acclaimed 2019 short story collection "Black Light." Now, Parsons' neon images of desert nights clash with the muted greys of suburban Dallas, while her protagonist Kit loses her grip on reality.

Kit's life begins to disintegrate under the weight of everyday routine and her sister Julie's death. So, when her freshly dumped best friend insists she join him for a weekend in the Montana mountains, she hopes to return, just momentarily, to the nostalgic hedonism she once knew as a young musician. What Kit finds instead is a mirror held up to her emptiness: the untamed spirit she has since lost, and the ghost of Julie, who lingers in every quiet moment. We see the unraveling of a woman whose sense of the world grows ever more ephemeral.

When your father is a bigoted novelist, is there any better revenge than turning his life into literature? Promising young British writer Jo Hamya asks this very question in her second novel, "The Hypocrite." 

Protagonist Sophia's father, now elderly, sits in a darkened theater watching a matinee performance of a play written by his daughter. As the light dim, he notices an unsettling familiarity in the set: a meticulous replica of the kitchen in his Sicilian holiday home. When the lead actor steps on stage wearing a paisley shirt identical to one from his own wardrobe, the realization dawns. This is no ordinary play: it's a searing satire of his life, penned by the daughter who once acted as his teenage amanuensis. With its weaponized pen, unfettered female rebellion, and complex father-daughter relationship, it's easy to see why Dakota Johnson paired this read with Sofia Coppola's "Somewhere" and Charli XCX's defiant "brat."

Eliza Barry Callahan's "The Hearing Test" is another debut novel Dakota Johnson couldn't get enough of. She picked this one for her book club's second-ever read in April 2024. 

This introspective, autofictional work tells of a young woman's sudden descent into near-deafness. Her world is upended when an autoimmune disorder plunges her into muffled soundscapes and misplaced noises, and she is forced to re-eavulate everything. Through fruitless doctor's appointments, trips to the grocery store, disorienting Zoom calls, and vacations to Europe and Los Angeles, her interior monologue is as vivid as it is fragmented. 

Callahan's observations of routine and relationships are sharp, and as readers, we feel a distinct dissonance walking through an unsteady world. TeaTime's choice was a well-received one, with one fan commenting on Instagram: "As a woman hard of hearing (from birth), I am especially excited for this Deep Dive."

Since the inception of her book club in March 2024, Dakota Johnson has certainly given us plenty of material to choose from, especially when it comes to intriguing new fiction. Our selections for the best books of TeaTime stem from an appreciation of their themes and the strong execution of their messages. 

Knowing the value in diversifying one's reading list, we also wanted to bring an eclectic range of voices and genres to the table. The reception of all of these books — both in the literary world and in popular consumer culture — was also a plus when it came to our choices. Most of all, we hope you find these picks as enjoyable and impactful as we did. With TeaTime also attached to Johnson's production company, with any luck, we'll be seeing these stories play out on the big screen, too!