Oprah Announces New Oprah's Book Club Pick: Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker
The latest Oprah's Book Club pick is here: Hidden Valley Road by Robert Kolker.
Hidden Valley Road is the 84th-ever selection for Oprah's book club, and her fourth since her partnership with Apple.
Previous selections include The Water Dancer by Ta-Nehisi Coates, Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout, and American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins.
According to the National Institutes for Mental Health, nearly one in five U.S. adults suffer from mental illness. But few families have ever been as hard hit as the Galvins, a Colorado family who seemed to have it all—until one after another, six of their twelve children were diagnosed with schizophrenia.
Robert Kolker chronicles their momentous non-fiction saga in Hidden Valley Road: Inside the Mind of an American Family, which has just been selected for Oprah’s Book Club.
“This is a riveting true story of an American family that reads like a medical detective journey,” said Oprah Winfrey of her 84th pick, and her fourth in partnership with Apple. “It reveals the shame, denial, shock, confusion and misunderstanding of mental illness at a time when no one was really sure what schizophrenia was or how to treat it,” she said.
Mental health has long been an area of interest for Oprah. Her Apple+ television series on mental wellness, co-executive produced by Prince Harry, is currently in production.
In this moment when so many are are anxious and physically isolated from one another, gathering together in conversation around topics of concern to us all is more important than ever— which is why Oprah will be regularly engaging with readers for the next eight weeks to discuss the themes that emerge from Hidden Valley Road.
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Readers will be able to participate with Oprah over the coming weeks on Instagram at @oprahsbookclub. Expect discussions on whether mental illness is a product of nature or nurture or some combination of the two; inroads that have been made in the study of schizophrenia; and how the Galvins have contributed to advances in the field.
The author, Robert Kolker, is an award-winning investigative reporter whose previous book, the New York Times bestseller Lost Girls: An Unsolved American Mystery, was recently adapted into a Netflix miniseries of the same name starring Amy Ryan. The nonfiction narrative revolves around a Long Island serial on killer who targeted sex workers, yet Kolker’s book (and its Netflix adaptation) has won much acclaim for centering the story on the victims rather than sensationalizing the crime.
Hidden Valley Road is the fourth selection in Oprah's recently-launched Book Club with Apple, a partnership created to connect readers around the world through the books they can access immediately on their devices. The first pick in this new iteration was Ta-Nehisi Coates’s The Water Dancer, second was Olive, Again by Elizabeth Strout, and the most recent selection was Jeanine Cummins’s American Dirt.
Get Hidden Valley Road in the Apple Books app on your iPhone or iPad.
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