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Novelist\'s Debut Is Newest Pick for Oprah\'s Book Club

Ayana Mathis.Elena Seibert Ayana Mathis.

It is a dream come true for a first-time novelist: a call from Oprah Winfrey with the news that your novel has been chosen for her book club. That dream recently came true for Ayana Mathis, the author of “The Twelve Tribes of Hattie,” (Alfred A. Knopf). Ms. Winfrey announced Wednesday that she has chosen the novel for the book club famously associated with her former TV talk show. In response to the endorsement, the publishers increased the book's first printing to 125,000 copies.

Now called Oprah's Book Club 2.0, the club was revived earlier this year with Cheryl Stray ed's memoir “Wild.” Dozens of books over the past 20 years became best-sellers because of Ms. Winfrey's endorsements, and Ms. Strayed's followed that trajectory. In a statement, Ms. Winfrey likened Ms. Mathis's book to the fiction of Toni Morrison.

“The opening pages of Ayana's debut took my breath away,” said Ms.Winfrey, now the chief executive officer of OWN, her television network. “I can't remember when I read anything that moved me in quite this way, besides the work of Toni Morrison.”

Ms. Mathis' novel - which goes on sale on Thursday - tells the story of the Great Migration through the life of an African-American teenager named Hattie Shepherd. Hattie leaves the racial terrorism of Georgia in 1923 for a new life in Philadelphi a. The 12 tribes are Hattie's children and the book follows their lives over the decades that follow. The novel has earned starred pre-publication reviews from Publishers Weekly, Kirkus and Booklist.

The book initially had a January publication date. But Paul Bogaards, a spokesman for Knopf said Wednesday that the endorsement changed everything. “We obviously had to advance our on-sale date,” he said. “The books with the Oprah sticker will be landing today. This is a book that everyone at Knopf is completely enamored of. As a result of Oprah's endorsement we took our printing up to 125,000, from 50,000. All kinds of retail windows have opened.”

An interview with Ms. Mathis will be broadcast on Feb. 3 on Ms. Winfrey's OWN network.