An Ohio love story set in the long shadow of World War II has been named the September pick by Jenna Bush Hager, delivering one of the most literary selections in the book club’s recent history and a defining moment for a writer his peers have long considered one of the finest working in American fiction.

NEW YORK, September 2, 2025 — On this morning’s broadcast of the Today Show, Jenna Bush Hager announced that the September 2025 selection for Read with Jenna is BUCKEYE by Patrick Ryan, a sweeping postwar novel set in a small Ohio town in the months and years following V-E Day. The announcement effectively moves one of the season’s most accomplished literary novels from the quiet corners of the trade-review world into the living rooms of the largest book club audience in American television.

It is a selection that will surprise no one who has been reading Patrick Ryan, and a selection that changes everything for readers who haven’t been.

A Novel That Begins With a Single Afternoon and Spans a Generation

BUCKEYE opens in the jubilant aftermath of Allied victory in Europe, in a moment the country had been praying for and had no idea how to inhabit. Cal Jenkins, a man whose wound is not the kind that earns medals, has spent the war carrying the private humiliation of a body that would not let him serve. Margaret Salt is a woman whose past has followed her farther than she intended and who is working, with the particular concentration of someone running out of time, to outrun it. On one afternoon, in the strange and unguarded air of a world remembering how to breathe, they share a single transgression.

That transgression is the engine of everything that follows, but BUCKEYE is not a novel about a single afternoon. It is a novel about what single afternoons do.

Cal is married to Becky, a woman whose spiritual gifts allow the living to speak to the dead, and whose work gives the novel its most haunted and most human register. Margaret is married to Felix, a sailor believed to be safe at sea until a telegram arrives that will not permit the word safe to mean what it meant yesterday. What begins as a fleeting encounter becomes a secret, and the secret becomes a gravity, and the gravity draws four people into orbits they did not choose and cannot leave. Across the years that follow, as their small Ohio town remakes itself in the prosperity and unease of postwar America, the Salts and Jenkinses remain tangled in one another’s lives. Children are born. Choices echo. The consequences of a single hour reshape a second generation that was not alive to make them.

BUCKEYE is, in this sense, a novel about what families inherit before they know they are inheriting anything.

Why This Selection Matters

Read with Jenna has, over the course of its run, elevated a remarkable range of voices: debut novelists, memoirists, literary stars, and commercial breakouts alike. The club’s selections move books, and they move them at a scale few other platforms in American publishing can match. A Read with Jenna pick is not only a commercial inflection point. It is an editorial judgment delivered to millions of readers who trust it.

BUCKEYE is a particularly meaningful selection within that history. Ryan is not a debut writer. He is a writer’s writer, a short-story craftsman of rare precision (his collection The Dream Life of Astronauts earned the kind of quiet, serious praise that writers recognize and readers sometimes overlook), and BUCKEYE represents the full arrival of his long-form powers. To see a book of this literary register and this emotional scale chosen by the country’s largest televised book club is a statement about what American readers are capable of loving, and what they want from their fiction in a moment that has often seemed to demand less of them.

It is a selection that honors the book and expands the audience for the kind of writing it represents.

A Novel in the Tradition of the Great American Small-Town Story

BUCKEYE sits comfortably alongside the enduring masterworks of small-town American fiction: Kent Haruf’s Plainsong, Elizabeth Strout’s Olive Kitteridge, Richard Russo’s Empire Falls, Marilynne Robinson’s Gilead. Like those novels, it understands that the small town is never a small subject. A single Ohio street, rendered closely enough and patiently enough, contains marriages, secrets, faith, loss, ambition, forgiveness, and the long mathematics of consequence. Ryan writes with the confidence of a novelist who knows this, and with the restraint of a novelist who trusts his readers to know it with him.

What distinguishes BUCKEYE within that tradition is its relationship to the supernatural. Becky Jenkins’s gift, her ability to help the living speak to the dead, is not a gothic flourish and not a magical-realist conceit. It is treated, in Ryan’s hands, as a matter-of-fact feature of the midcentury American religious and spiritual landscape, and it becomes one of the novel’s most affecting elements. BUCKEYE is a book in which grief is a character. In Becky’s hands, grief gets to speak back.

This is the novel’s quiet audacity. In an American fiction landscape often uncomfortable with the spiritual lives of ordinary people, Ryan takes the inner life of a midcentury Ohio housewife entirely seriously. Readers, judging by the earliest reactions, are thanking him for it.

On the Author

Patrick Ryan has spent years writing the kind of carefully made, emotionally serious fiction that earns the admiration of editors and the devotion of a particular kind of reader: the reader who notices sentences, who notices restraint, who notices when a writer has resisted the easier move. BUCKEYE is the book in which that reputation meets a much wider audience, and the match is a correct one. The novel rewards close reading and casual reading alike. It can be read in a weekend or across a month. Book clubs will find in it more to talk about than they have time for.

Ryan is, by the measure of this selection, no longer a secret. He is simply a major American novelist whose moment has arrived.

What Happens Next

Jenna Bush Hager will host her in-depth conversation with Patrick Ryan later this month on the Read with Jenna platform, where hundreds of thousands of readers will be joining the September read. Bookstores and libraries across the country are expected to see immediate and sustained demand for the title. Book clubs meeting in October and November will be reckoning with the novel’s long moral aftershocks, and with the particular kind of reading experience BUCKEYE offers: the kind that does not release you when you close it.

For readers who want a novel that takes love, loyalty, sacrifice, and forgiveness as seriously as the American small town has always taken them, the pick this month could not be better made.

BUCKEYE by Patrick Ryan is available in hardcover, ebook, and audiobook wherever books are sold.

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