GMA Selects Author Daniel Mason's 'Joyful' New Novel 'Country People' as Book Club Pick For July 2026
Good Morning Americahas officially selected best-selling writer Daniel Mason's new book, Country People, as its pick for July 2026's GMA Book Club, providing readers with their next beach book read of the season, according to People.
The publisher's description for Country People reads, "Miles Krzelewski is a devoted husband, a doting father beloved for his outlandish bedtime stories, and the proud owner of a truffle-hunting dog in a land with no truffles. He is also a bit lost, twelve years late with his PhD on Russian folktales and increasingly haunted by a sense that he's become a disappointment to his family."
"So when his wife, Kate, accepts a visiting professorship at a prestigious college in the faraway forests of Vermont, he decides that this will be the year to finally move forward with his life," the descirption continues. "No sooner does he arrive than he finds himself entangled with a cast of characters as colorful as those of any of his folktales, from a ghostly tree surgeon to a scythe-mad biochemist, from a Shakespearean temptress to a photographer of snowflakes obsessed with chronicling, on thousands of index cards, the world's delusions in an Inventory of Wrong Ideas."
Arriving in bookstores nationwide on July 7, Country People has already won significant renown from mainstream readers and critics, with many favorably comparing it to Mason's critically well-received 2023 novel North Woods.
"This is, put simply, a joyful book – and the deeper you dig, the more joyful it becomes," deemed The Guardian.
Discussing his new book with People, Mason said that he believes Country People taps into the tradition of Alice in Wonderland and other transformative works, something he believes will help transport readers to a world beyond their wildest imaginations.
"Miles is a folklore scholar and he comes to Vermont thinking it's gonna to help him with his research into Russian folktales," Mason said. "What happens, though, is he encounters a real-life legend of southern Vermont [and] meets a group of enthusiasts who believe that somewhere in the mountains there's a kind of portal, almost like a magical portal, into an underworld and really into an earth that is somehow hollow."
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This story was originally published July 7, 2026 at 8:36 AM.