The Best Picks From Natalie Portman's Book Club

There's no shortage of celebrity book clubs these days, each with its own literary sensibility. Some spotlight breezy contemporary fiction, like Reese Witherspoon's which champions page-turning novels centered on women's stories. Others, like Oprah's, lean into profound, transformative reads. Emma Roberts's Belletrist favors under-the-radar literary gems, and Dua Lipa's book club reflects the offerings of contemporary fiction with a fresh, modern edge. These have become as much about fostering community as they are about reading, harboring the powers of "Bookstagram" to turn feeds into sprawling virtual bookshelves. But what does Natalie Portman read? The answer may surprise you.

As many book clubs embrace bestselling fiction, the "Black Swan" star's selections lean toward the kind of books that wouldn't be out of place on a university syllabus (just without the tuition fees). They are rich, cerebral, and often unexpected. One month, she's highlighting the cutting satire of "Heartburn" by Nora Ephron; the next, she's inviting followers to sit with the philosophical solitude of 19th-century philosopher, Henry David Thoreau. She champions contemporary voices pushing literary boundaries, whilst also revisiting enduring classics.

There is no algorithm and no trend-chasing — just books that ask something of you. Portman's book club challenges readers to think deeply and read widely. We shouldn't expect anything less from Hollywood's own Harvard alum, and while she's not assigning homework, you might feel compelled to take notes. Class is in session, and you won't regret signing up for this one.

Why don't more wives kill their husbands? With this matter-of-fact question, "The Dry Heart" announces itself as something colder, sharper, and more precise than a mere tale of marital misery. Natalia Ginzburg begins her work with a woman calmly pulling a gun from a drawer and shooting her husband between the eyes. No hesitation, no spectacle, just a clean, decisive act. Ginzburg strips murder of its theatrics, reducing it to a move as stark and inevitable as turning off a light. Then, with the same undaunting clarity, she tells us why. 

This is not a descent into madness, but an ascent to clarity. Our unnamed narrator recalls years spent orbiting an indifferent man who fed her just enough affection to keep her tethered, and carried on an affair as though she should just accept it as part of his nature. But when love has rotted away, what's left to hold on to except the trigger? The once-trending audio — "I support women's rights, but more importantly, I support women's wrongs" — feels particularly fitting here.  

We are fortunate to have this plucky little 1940s novella from a writer of Ginzburg's caliber — reissued as it was by New Directions in 2019. A darkly comic story of simmering fury, it charts the dull accumulation of neglect and the slow calcification of a woman's hope. Until, of course, that hope hardens into something sharper, something final. 

Roe v. Wade changed America. Its fall changed it again. Now, in a post-roe world, reckoning with its origins has never been more urgent. That's where "The Family Roe" comes in — a careful excavation of the case's human collateral, and the ideological machinery behind its repercussions.

Laws shape lives, but rarely do we stop to consider whose lives shape laws. Known to history as Jane Roe, Norma McCorvey was a volatile figure. Author Joshua Prager strips away the mythology to reveal her contradictions: a plaintiff in the fight for abortion rights who later became a pro-life advocate. And though it was her name on the suit, "The Family Roe" does not let her stand alone. Prager's lens widens to capture the lesser-known figures whose choices helped shape Roe: Linda Coffee, the unheralded lawyer who filed the case; Curtis Boyd, a former fundamentalist-turned-abortion provide; and Mildred Jefferson, the first Black woman to graduate from Harvard Medical School, whose opposition to abortion gave the pro-life movement one of its strongest leaders.

A decade of rigorous research went into this Pulitzer Prize finalist, and it shows. It's epic in scope. In expanding beyond the legal arguments to explore the personal, political, medical and ethical dimensions of the issue, Prager illuminates how a single court case became, and continues to be, the fault line of a culture war. With Roe gone, the murky terrain of abortion access has shifted again, but the battle remains the same.

If watching AI evolve in real time feels like witnessing humanity fast-track its own obsolescence, you're not alone. Science, once unleashed, can rarely be contained. It's with this in mind that Benjamín Labatut's "The Maniac" spins a hypnotic, unnerving portrait of John von Neumann — the Hungarian genius whose mind shaped the atom bomb, modern computing, and artificial intelligence. Told through the voices of his contemporaries, this fictional biography pieces together a portrait of a man whose brilliance was inseparable from his obsession with control.

The book opens with a chilling act of neurotic despair. Austrian physicist Paul Ehrenfest — terrified to watch the very laws of nature shatter under von Neumann's quantum mechanics — murders his disabled son before turning the gun on himself. From there, Labatut follows the ripple effects of von Neumann's mind; his cold, dazzling, logic-fueling innovations that pushed civilization toward both unimaginable progress and existential dread.

Labatut's prose pulses with an anxious energy — much like the breathless acceleration of the scientific breakthroughs at play. He perfectly captures the vertigo of scientific discovery, the feeling that once an idea is set in motion, there's no stopping where it might lead. The future isn't waiting for us to catch up, and Labatut doesn't offer a solution — only the unsettling sense that we may already be too late.

Money can't buy taste, but taste can buy power — as the protagonist of Yasmin Zaher's "The Coin" knows all too well. Newly arrived in New York from Palestine, the unnamed narrator has money, but not enough to move freely in the elite spaces she covets. Instead, she relies on something more valuable: her fluency in luxury. Armed with an inherited Birkin bag and a wardrobe of carefully curated designer pieces, she maneuvers through a world where appearance is currency. 

But beneath the carefully curated façade, something festers. As she teaches English at a Manhattan boys' school, she spirals into an obsessive cleaning regimen, convinced that a coin she swallowed as a child is now lodged in her back, rusting. Her fixation with purity — moral, physical, financial — leads her down increasingly unstable paths, from bending the truth with her students to a high-stakes Birkin resale (pyramid) scheme in Paris with a grifter named Trenchcoat. 

The narrator claims to be a moral woman, but in a world built on pretense, can morality exist without a price tag? Zaher's sharp, observational prose skewers capitalism, class, and gender with a deft bite — all to unravel a creeping psychological spiral. Fans of Ottessa Moshfegh and Rachel Cusk will no doubt warm to her wry first-person voice. As Natalie Portman mused on Instagram: "I love the way Yasmin Zaher writes about the tension between the body and mind and hope you'll join me in reading!" 

To write about passion is to try to pin down something inherently ephemeral. Annie Ernaux's "Simple Passion" doesn't seek to explain or justify — only to simply record, with brutal clarity, what it means to live entirely enthralled with desire. 

This book tracks the obsessive undertow of Ernaux's two-year affair with a married man. Her world contracts around him; every thought, every action is either in anticipation of his presence or in the absence he leaves behind. Time no longer moves forward, but coils around anticipation, each fleeting encounter sharpening rather than sating desire. Love becomes narcotic; its scarcity heightens its potency and its withdrawal brings the worst kind of comedown, leaving her hollowed out. 

Coolly detached but devastatingly intimate, Ernaux lays bare the mechanics of obsession: the exquisite agony of longing, the ritualistic surrender, the voluntary erosion of the self. Love here is not rapturous but degrading, a transaction where the more she desires, the less of herself remains. This is the unbearable paradox of passion: to crave is to relinquish control, and to love is to self-annihilate. 

Portman picked this after a recommendation from the Parisian bookshop Shakespeare and Co. It's a slim volume — fewer than 50 pages — but Ernaux's prose does the heavy lifting of a novel. For anyone who has ever lived in the grip of longing, its brevity makes it no less impactful. Read it in an afternoon, but expect it to stay with you far longer.

"I remember that life in that room ... Beneath the joy, of course, was anguish and beneath the amazement was fear." Natalie Portman herself singled out this line from James Baldwin's "Giovanni's Room," a novel regarded as one of the greatest of the 20th century. Few sentences capture a novel's essence so precisely.

First published in 1956, "Giovanni's Room" tells the story of David, an American expatriate in Paris, and his affair with Giovanni, an Italian bartender. Though set in the City of Love, their love offers no sanctuary. It does not set free, it only tightens the noose. David, paralyzed by fear of his own queerness, projects his self-loathing outward. The novel begins at its end, then retraces the ruin, pulling us back into quiet devastation: the flickering joy of forbidden intimacy and the dull ache of an identity refused.

Baldwin's prose is devastatingly elegant, stripped of excess yet rich in emotion. Each word and sentence carries the weight of what is spoken and, perhaps more importantly, what is left unsaid. He bends time with remarkable fluidity, collapsing past into present and memory into regret — allowing the novel to move with a dreamlike inevitability. Nearly 70 years after its publication, the novel remains singular in its beauty and brutality — an elegy for the lives that might have lived. Conflating desire with denial, Baldwin writes peerlessly of the hands we let go of before accepting they were the only ones we wanted to hold.

They say revenge is a dish best-served cold. In Nora Ephron's "Heartburn," it's tossed with vinaigrette. Seven months pregnant and blindsided by the infidelity of her husband, Rachel Samstat does what any self-respecting food writer might: she takes stock, seasons her misery with words, and weaponizes a key lime pie. Her wayward spouse, Mark, has fallen for another woman and Rachel, toggling between rage and reluctant affection, narrates the slow-motion implosion of her marriage with a wit sharp enough to julienne despair.

"Heartburn" has only ripened with age. Now a staple on bookshelves everywhere, it's revisited for its blistering humor and shrewd rendering of heartbreak as both tragedy and farce. This is Ephron before she became the undisputed queen of romcom, but the voice is already unmistakable: wry and incisive and unsparingly self-aware. It's also Ephron at her most personal. The novel stems directly from her calamitous marriage so much so that Carl Bernstein (Watergate journalist and the philanderer in question) considered suing.

Recipes punctuate the chaos, as Rachel tries to impose order on the mess of her life. Decades after its release, "Heartburn" remains just as delicious — best enjoyed in the company of Meryl's velvety audiobook narration, a stiff drink, and something buttery to take the edge off.

All of these selections have come from Natalie Portman's book club, which she runs exclusively on Instagram. Her reading circle is not bound by genre — fiction, non-fiction, memoir, or classic. The only real requirement is that the writing stands apart. We have followed Portman's lead when deciding on these titles.

Each selection has been chosen for its literary merit, and the legacy it has left, or will leave, behind. These are books that stand the test of time, whether through their literary excellence, cultural significance, or emotional depth. We also believe their topics and themes will resonate well with the interests of Women readers, and we hope you enjoy reading them as much as we did.