Next year’s all campus read? Here’s how to add your pick.

Northwestern University’s One Book One Northwestern selection committee is seeking recommendations for the 2025-2026 academic year. Housed in the Office of the Provost, this 20-year tradition brings together the Chicago and Evanston campuses through discussion and activities surrounding a different selected book each year.

Book suggestions should include the title, author, number of pages, a summary and brief description of why this book would make a great common read. 

The book should be available in paperback and digital formats by May 2025. Make suggestions by Monday, Nov. 11 2024, through the One Book submission form. Questions about the selection progress and program can be emailed to onebook@northwestern.edu.

Past One Book titles include this year’s “The Night Watchman” by Louise Erdrich. Based on the extraordinary life of the National Book Award-winning author’s grandfather who worked as a night watchman and carried the fight against Native dispossession from rural North Dakota all the way to Washington, D.C., this powerful novel explores themes of love and death with lightness and gravity and unfolds with the elegant prose, sly humor, and depth of feeling of a master craftsman.

Other titles include “Crying in H Mart” by Michelle Zauner; “How the Word is Passed: A Reckoning with the History of Slavery Across America,” by Clint Smith; “The Story of More: How We Got to Climate Change and Where to Go From Here,” by Hope Jahren; “Just Mercy: A Story of Justice and Redemption” by Bryan Stevenson; “Hidden Figures, the American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race” by Margot Lee Shetterly; and the “The Handmaid’s Tale” by Margaret Atwood.  

For more information about the programming offered in conversation with the books chosen each year, visit the One Book One Northwestern website.