NEW YORK — From the very first sentence, Oprah Winfrey loved what became her latest book club pick.

“I thought, ‘Wow, this is so good I have to wait until I actually have the time to absorb the language,”’ said Winfrey, during a recent telephone interview about Cynthia Bond’s novel “Ruby.”

“I put it down and waited until I was in bed with the flu to start reading it. I found the language and descriptions so vividly compelling that sometimes I would have to take a breath and repeat the sentences out loud.”

Winfrey’s choice, coming out in paperback Tuesday, is a debut novel published last year to positive reviews and moderate sales. Bond’s publisher, Hogarth, understandably expects that to change and has commissioned a paperback printing of 250,000 copies. The hardcover currently has 20,000 copies in print, according to Hogarth, an imprint of Penguin Random House, and is available as an e-book. As with Winfrey’s three previous picks since relaunching her club as “Oprah’s Book Club 2.0” in 2012, she will focus on online promotion, through her own website (www.oprah.com) and through Twitter, Instagram and other social media.

By late Tuesday afternoon, “Ruby” was in the top 50 on Amazon.com and in the top 10 on Barnes & Noble.com.

Winfrey also has acquired film and television rights for the novel through her Harpo Films. Her interview with Bond will appear in the March issue of “O” magazine, which comes out Feb. 17.

A Barnes & Noble “Discover” pick in 2014 and a favorite of the editors of “O,” Bond’s book is set in the author’s native Texas and tells a fierce and poetic tale of a worldly, beautiful black woman, Ruby Bell, and her struggle not to be destroyed by her home community of Liberty Township. Bond sets the scene right away, for Winfrey and, presumably, for many others: “Ruby Bell was a constant reminder of what could befall a woman whose shoe heels were too high.”

Bond, now a resident of Los Angeles, studied journalism at Northwestern University and lived for years in New York, where she acted with the Negro Ensemble Company. During a recent telephone interview, she said that she worked on the novel for more than a decade and that it will likely be the first of a trilogy. She had written 900 pages for “Ruby,” but decided to separate it into three books after her mother, then her agent, suggested it.