‘The House of Broken Angels’ is our July book club pick

We’re excited to announce that Luis Alberto Urrea’s novel “The House of Broken Angels” is the July pick for the PBS NewsHour-New York Times book club, “Now Read This.”

It’s the story of what happens when one Mexican American family living on the border comes together for a party — and a funeral. It’s a tender, joyous and intimate novel. And it’s especially timely as questions are being raised about how immigrant families are being treated in the U.S.

In the New York Times Book Review, novelist Viet Thanh Nguyen calls it an “exuberant love letter to a Mexican-American clan,” quoting one of the book’s characters, Little Angel, as saying that, “if only the dominant culture could see these small moments, they would see their own human lives reflected in the other.”

Urrea’s 2004 nonfiction book, “The Devil’s Highway,” about a group of Mexican immigrants lost in a deadly desert region in Arizona, was a finalist for the Pulitzer Prize.

In the coming days, we’ll post discussion questions for “The House of Broken Angels,” an annotated excerpt from the book, and writing advice from Urrea. At the end of the month, he will answer your questions on the PBS NewsHour. We hope you’ll join us and read along.

Just joining? Become a member of the book club by joining our Facebook group, or by signing up for our newsletter. You can find all of our book club content here, or look back at our conversations about previous selections for the book club below:

• N.K. Jemisin’s fantasy book “The Fifth Season”
• Daniel Mendelsohn’s memoir and literary critique “An Odyssey“
• Emily Chang’s exposé “Brotopia“
• Naomi Alderman’s sci-fi story “The Power““
• Meg Wolitzer’s novel “The Wife““
• Sandeep Jauhar’s medical history “Heart”“
• Casey Gerald’s political memoir “There Will Be No Miracles Here“
• Katie Kitamura’s psychological thriller, “A Separation“
• Nate Blakeslee’s tale of wolves and the West, “American Wolf“
• Robert Kaplan’s mix of road trip and political analysis “Earning the Rockies“
• Lesley Nneka Arimah’s short story collection “What It Means When A Man Falls From The Sky“
• Min Jin Lee’s historical family saga “Pachinko“
• Andrew Sean Greer’s comic novel “Less“
• Tara Westover’s memoir “Educated‘
• Dan Egan’s environmental portrait “The Death and Life of the Great Lakes“
• Mohsin Hamid’s magical novel “Exit West“
• David Grann’s true crime tale “Killers of the Flower Moon“
• Jesmyn Ward’s lyrical “Sing, Unburied, Sing“