Oprah Watching

A new selection of Oprah's Book Club will be announced on September 19th, and that means that people are trying to guess what it will be.

There's an Amazon page for the mystery book -- identified, for now, only as "Oprah Book Club #62 (Hardcover)."

We know that this book was published by HarperCollins, and that it's a $25.95 hardcover. Given that it's only in hardcover, that implies that it's a quite recent book...or that Harper hasn't gotten their paperback ISBN onto Amazon yet.

Using Amazon's search function, I pulled up a list of $25.95 Harper hardcovers that could possibly be the Oprah pick:

• Doris Lessing's Alfred and Emily
• Matilde Ansensi's Everything Under the Sky
• Frances DePontes Peebles's The Seamstress
• Jennifer Haigh's The Condition
• Sichan Siv's Golden Bones
• Philip Margolin's Executive Privilege
• Louise Erdrich's The Plague of Doves
• William Dietrich's The Rosetta Key
• Lisa Scottoline's Lady Killer
• Elizabeth Peters's Laughter of Dead Kings
• Faye Kellerman's The Mercedes Coffin
• J.A. Jance's Damage Control
• David Giffels's All the Way Home
• Dale Brown's Shadow Command
• Andrew Gross's The Dark Tide
• James Morrow's The Philosopher's Apprentice (would that we all could be so lucky)
• Jeffrey Ford's The Shadow Year (ditto)

(James Frey's Bright Shiny Morning, sadly, is $26.95. It would have been nice to have pretended that it had a chance. Similarly, Toby Barlow's wonderful Sharp Teeth -- the werewolf novel in verse -- is $22.95. And the book I'm reading right now -- Lawrence Block's Hit and Run -- is from a Harper imprint, but it's $24.95.)

Several Eos books -- Wrath of a Mad God, The Twisted Citadel, Passage, The Divine Talisman, Hunter's Run -- fit the criteria, but I won't even pretend that they could be "#62."

But it's most likely The Story of Edgar Sawtelle, since that's already a runaway bestseller, and Oprah has been playing it safe with her recent picks.