Most Read Politics & Society Books

Born a Crime (2016) is Trevor Noah's sharp, funny, and moving memoir of growing up mixed-race in South Africa during the final years of apartheid and the turbulent decade that followed. The son of a Black Xhosa mother and a white Swiss father, Noah was born when such a union was literally illegal — his very existence was evidence of a crime. He recounts a childhood spent partly in hiding, navigating the absurd and brutal logic of a system built on racial classification, and the poverty, violence, and improvised survival of township life after apartheid's fall. At the center of every story is his mother, Patricia — fearless, devout, stubborn, and endlessly resourceful — whose tough love and refusal to be limited shaped the man Noah became. Told in vivid, self-deprecating vignettes, the book is by turns hilarious and harrowing, a portrait of a singular family and a country remaking itself.

• coming of age

Sixteen-year-old Starr Carter lives between two worlds: Garden Heights, the poor, mostly Black neighborhood where she grew up, and Williamson Prep, the wealthy, mostly white school where she keeps that self carefully hidden. She has spent years code-switching between them — until one night forces the two worlds to collide. Driving home from a party, Starr is the only witness when a white police officer pulls over her childhood best friend, Khalil, and shoots him dead. Unarmed, Khalil becomes a headline, a hashtag, and a symbol, and Starr becomes the one person who knows what really happened. As protests build and a grand jury convenes, she has to decide whether to stay silent and safe, or to speak — even as doing so puts her family, her friendships, and her own sense of self on the line. Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, Angie Thomas's award-winning debut is a powerful, deeply human story about grief, courage, community, and finding your voice in the face of injustice.

• coming of age

In 1920s Oklahoma, members of the oil-rich Osage Nation were murdered one by one in a conspiracy that reached into their own families and the institutions meant to protect them. David Grann's acclaimed investigation follows Osage survivor Mollie Burkhart and FBI agent Tom White through one of the most chilling and consequential crimes in American history.

In May 1980, a student uprising in the South Korean city of Gwangju is crushed by the military, and a young boy searches the makeshift morgues for his missing friend. From that centre, Han Kang moves across decades and narrators — survivors, the bereaved, an editor, a prisoner, the dead — tracing how a week of state violence keeps reverberating through ordinary lives. Translated by Deborah Smith, Human Acts is a spare, harrowing meditation on grief, conscience, and memory.

• multiple povs
• dual timeline

First published in 1962, Ghassan Kanafani's landmark short novel follows three Palestinian refugees of different generations who pay to be smuggled across the desert into Kuwait, hidden inside the empty water tank of a lorry. As the truck crawls through border checkpoints under a brutal sun, the tank becomes both a vessel of hope and a trap. A spare, devastating cornerstone of modern Palestinian literature about exile, powerlessness, and lives spent chasing an escape.

In 1968, when the border briefly opens, Said and Safiyya return to the Haifa home they fled in 1948 — and to the infant son they left behind in the chaos of their escape. They find the house lived in by another family, and the boy grown into a young man who no longer knows them. A short, unflinching novel about displacement, homeland, and belonging, and a landmark of modern Palestinian literature.

• dual timeline

Written in 1513 and circulated in manuscript during Machiavelli's lifetime, The Prince is the most famous — and most notorious — work of political philosophy in the Western canon. Composed after the author's fall from office in Florence, it is a compact, unsentimental manual on how rulers seize power, hold it, and keep their states intact. Breaking sharply with the classical tradition that treated politics as a branch of ethics, Machiavelli argues that a ruler must be prepared to act against conventional morality when necessity demands it. He weighs whether it is better to be feared or loved, why appearing virtuous can matter more than being virtuous, how fortune must be mastered rather than trusted, and why a prince's first concern must be the strength of his own arms. Drawing on the recent history of Italy's city-states and figures such as Cesare Borgia, he illustrates his maxims with cold, concrete examples. Published in 1532, five years after his death, The Prince has been read ever since as everything from a cynical handbook for tyrants to a clear-eyed diagnosis of how power actually works.

The 48 Laws of Power lays out its argument in 48 self-contained chapters, each built around a single principle — "never outshine the master," "conceal your intentions," "crush your enemy totally" — and supported by historical vignettes drawn from centuries of courts, wars, and negotiations. Robert Greene's approach is descriptive rather than prescriptive in tone: he presents power as a game with its own rules, regardless of whether the reader approves of them, and draws his case studies from figures as varied as European monarchs, con artists, and 20th-century political operators. The book has found a lasting audience well outside its original history-and-strategy niche, cited frequently in business and self-help circles, and remains one of Greene's most widely read works — read either as a practical playbook or as a study of how power has historically been won and lost.

Former First Lady Michelle Obama's candid, best-selling memoir traces her life from a working-class childhood on the South Side of Chicago, through Princeton and Harvard Law, to marriage, motherhood, and the White House. Structured as "Becoming Me," "Becoming Us," and "Becoming More," it's an intimate meditation on identity, resilience, and finding your voice.

Winston Smith works at the Ministry of Truth in Oceania, one of three perpetually warring super-states, where his job is to rewrite the historical record so that the Party is never wrong. Everywhere he goes, the face of Big Brother watches from posters and the ever-present telescreen watches back, recording every word and expression. Even a private thought against the Party is a crime punishable by death. Worn down by hunger, surveillance, and the deliberate poverty of daily life, Winston begins to keep a secret diary and to nurse a quiet, dangerous conviction that the past was different and the truth still exists somewhere outside the Party's control. When he falls into a forbidden love affair with a bold young woman named Julia, the two carve out a small world of their own and let themselves imagine resistance. Their rebellion draws the attention of the inner Party and the enigmatic official O'Brien, and Winston is forced to confront just how far a total state will go to own not only a person's actions but their mind. George Orwell's 1949 novel gave the language "Big Brother," "doublethink," "thoughtcrime," and "Newspeak," and remains one of the most influential warnings ever written about totalitarianism, propaganda, and the manipulation of truth. Bleak, exact, and unsparing, it is a study of how power sustains itself by controlling memory, language, and love.

In All About Love: New Visions, cultural critic and feminist theorist bell hooks argues that our society's confusion and cynicism about love stem from a failure to understand what love truly is. Rejecting the idea of love as a mere feeling, she insists that love is an action — a practice rooted in care, commitment, trust, responsibility, respect, and honesty — and one that cannot be separated from justice. Across a series of clear, personal, and searching essays, hooks examines how a culture shaped by patriarchy, consumerism, and domination distorts our capacity to love, from childhood and family to romance, friendship, community, and spiritual life. Blending memoir, criticism, and ethics, All About Love is both a diagnosis of a loveless culture and a hopeful blueprint for change. It is the first book in hooks's Love Song to the Nation trilogy.

Drought and mechanization strip a tenant-farming family of their Oklahoma land, forcing them onto Route 66 toward the false promise of work in California.

• family saga
• survival

A young Black man leaves the South for Harlem, seeking opportunity but finding a complex world of racial tension. After an expulsion from college, he becomes a political speaker, only to grapple with his identity and societal pressures. This novel follows his search for self, leading to a solitary realization.

• coming of age
• fish out of water

The first part of Marjane Satrapi's celebrated graphic memoir. Marji is a bright, headstrong girl in Tehran when the 1979 Islamic Revolution overturns her world. As the regime tightens and war with Iraq begins, she witnesses arrests, bombings, and the gap between public conformity and private life — until her parents make the wrenching decision to send her abroad. A coming-of-age story told in bold black-and-white artwork, balancing humour and horror.

• coming of age

Financier Bill Browder made a fortune in post-Soviet Russia — until exposing corruption got him expelled and marked as an enemy of the state. When his lawyer Sergei Magnitsky uncovered a $230 million fraud and was beaten to death in a Moscow prison, Browder became a full-time justice campaigner behind the Magnitsky Act. A true story of high finance, corruption, and murder, told with the pace of a thriller.

Livre-entretien recueilli par Annick Cojean, Une farouche liberté rassemble le testament militant de Gisèle Halimi : de son enfance tunisienne à la défense des Algériens torturés, du procès de Bobigny au combat pour l'avortement, l'avocate féministe raconte soixante-dix ans de luttes et passe le flambeau aux nouvelles générations.

French publisher Vanessa Springora's memoir returns to the relationship that scarred her adolescence: at fourteen she was drawn in by a celebrated writer decades her senior, whose fame shielded him as he abused her. With clarity and control, she reconstructs the mechanics of that grooming and indicts the literary world that looked away — reclaiming her story from the man who made her his subject.

In a near-future America, Dr. Jean McClellan faces a terrifying new reality when women are limited to speaking only one hundred words a day. As this oppressive decree escalates, stripping women of their jobs, education, and fundamental rights, Jean realizes the fight for her voice is a fight for all women. She must find a way to resist and reclaim what has been taken, not just for herself and her daughter, but for every silenced woman.

• survival

Adapted from her celebrated TEDx talk, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's short essay makes a warm, clear-eyed case for feminism as the simple belief that everyone should be treated equally. Drawing on her life in Nigeria and beyond, she examines how gender expectations shape us from childhood — an accessible, quotable primer that has become a touchstone of modern conversations about equality.