Patriot by Alexei Navalny
Chosen by Katherine Rundell, author
“If they finally do whack me,” the late Russian opposition leader Alexei Navalny wrote in prison, “this book will be my memorial.” He died at the age of 47, in a Russian penal colony in the Arctic Circle. Navalny’s autobiography, Patriot, is a burning testament to what it looks like, in our fast-darkening world, to stand up to malignant corruption, to global bullies, to murderous domination. His writing is fantastically witty, egotistical, warm, swaggering, furious and relentlessly, insistently optimistic. It is his optimism that blasts through the book like a heat furnace. In prison, he tells his wife, Yulia, that he is likely to die there – “even if everything starts falling apart, they will bump me off at the first sign the regime is collapsing. They will poison me.” He says it is better not to pretend. When she agrees, they embrace in joy. “That was great! No tears.” This book reminds us that real resistance is powered by heat and light, by the stubborn belief that things might be otherwise.
Impossible Creatures by Katherine Rundell is published by Bloomsbury.
Chosen by Chris Packham, nature writer
I read this at 14, in the 70s, and it gave me nightmares. It was published in 1932, in the shadow of rising fascism, by a man who feared the rise of the machines. Now, 50 years after I first turned its pages, I have nightmares about the new world: a world living in the shadow of rising fascism and evasive truth, and fearful of AI. A world in the grip of a new dystopia: climate breakdown. But still Aldous Huxley’s novel fuels bravery. I found myself in that book, only as a child I didn’t recognise it. It is the book that made me the imperfect, flawed, brand new savage that I am.
Fingers in the Sparkle Jar by Chris Packham is published by Ebury.
Word for Word by Lilianna Lungina
Chosen by Yulia Navalnaya, campaigner and widow of Alexei Navalny
I love books in which a personal story becomes inseparable from the story of a nation. In Word for Word, Lilianna Lungina recounts her life as a translator in the Soviet Union – and through it, the entire 20th century flows. She seemed to witness everything: the fear, the hope, the silence, the change. She met so many of the people who shaped Russian culture, and lived through every turning point. As I read, I kept learning about my own country – and, unexpectedly, about myself. It made me think deeply about what changed in Russia after the collapse of the Soviet Union – and what, heartbreakingly, stayed exactly the same.
Chosen by Madeleine Thien, author
This book, a reckoning with the carnage we are witnessing in Gaza, does a thousand vital things. It writes into wordlessness and grief; it confronts our complicity. Most of all, it refuses to give up what we hold dear – each other. This is a work whose impetus is love, so fragile a thing in this world.
The Book of Records by Madeleine Thien is published by Granta.
Chosen by Chloe Dalton, author and foreign policy adviser
I was 20 years old and studying English literature at university. There was no way this book was on the syllabus, so I must have stumbled across it. It’s an account of the Rwandan genocide, which left me believing that war crimes can be prevented – we just often choose not to act. Fourteen years later, as adviser to the foreign secretary, I helped create a campaign to require governments to prevent mass rape and sexual violence from being used as weapons of war, as happened in Rwanda and continues in so many countries today. I can trace a line between reading that book and my work.
Raising Hare by Chloe Dalton is published by Canongate.
Chosen by Elif Shafak, author
I read this when I was young, and it inspired and empowered me in so many ways. It tells the story of a writer who keeps notebooks in different colours (black, red, yellow, blue), each reflecting her search for meaning across various aspects of life – personal, political, literary and psychological. Regarded as one of the key texts in the women’s movement, its intellectual and emotional depth is captivating. The tension and harmony between different components of our lives was an important subject in the 1960s, but perhaps even more so in today’s deeply fractured world.
There Are Rivers in the Sky by Elif Shafak is published by Viking.
Chosen by Kehinde Andrews, academic and author
I was lucky enough to grow up in the legacy of British Black Power, so my house was filled with revolutionary material. But I only picked up Stokely Speaks because of its hilarious cover, with Stokely Carmichael with a mini-afro, brandishing a gun. At the time, I was struggling with my identity, attending a school that made it clear that to be Black was to be labelled as unruly and placed in a lower set. Stokely Speaks opened my eyes, and made me unafraid to challenge the system that had tried to break me. His book set me on the path I am on today.
Nobody Can Give You Freedom by Kehinde Andrews is published by Allen Lane.
Chosen by Philippe Sands, author and lawyer
“Twenty-four calculating machines at the gates of Hell.” Thus does Éric Vuillard characterise the industrialists who gathered in February 1933 to pay homage to Germany’s new regime. The Order of the Day, which won France’s Prix Goncourt in 2017, came to mind with images of tech titans standing to attention at the recent US inauguration, and accounts of the capitulation by American law firms to presidential threat that followed. History may not repeat itself exactly, but its insights – and those of the literary imagination – will offer clues if we want to see them.
38 Londres Street by Philippe Sands is published by W&N.
Chosen by Laura Bates, author and feminist activist
This powerful book upends centuries of economic theory by pointing out a fundamental flaw: that throughout history, most economists have failed to acknowledge the hidden, neglected, unpaid labour of women. If they fail to include the myriad ways in which women’s work underpins our societies and our economies, doesn’t that make their calculations useless? Katrine Marçal’s willingness to ask bold questions, and to question ideas that have long been considered the bedrock of our economic and societal systems, is as refreshing as it is inspiring. Best of all, it empowers readers to start asking difficult questions of their own.
The New Age of Sexism by Laura Bates is published by Simon & Schuster.
Chosen by Mike Berners-Lee, author and climate professor
This life story of Indian-British activist Satish Kumar tells of his inner and outer journeys as a peace campaigner and environmentalist. He walked around the world without money, delivering packs of tea to world leaders with the message: “If you are thinking of pressing the nuclear button, stop and have a cup of tea first.” He founded Resurgence & Ecologist magazine and Schumacher College for ecological studies in Devon, where he now lives. What is inspirational is his universal respect, his clarity of purpose, his colossal sense of adventure and his appreciation of the moment.
A Climate of Truth by Mike Berners-Lee is published by Cambridge.
Chosen by Tessa Hadley, author
When I was trying and failing to write fiction as a young woman, a lot of the 20th-century male writers I most admired seemed to have finished with realism and the novel, as if its illusionism and its aim at lifelikeness were childishly naive, belonging to an unsophisticated earlier time. When I first read Elizabeth Bowen’s The Death of the Heart, what joy and confirmation to find her sweating, in the 1930s, over every sentence, in her magnificent effort to capture the effects of the real, so solid and so fleeting – swans on frozen water in the park, a drunken fumbling in a seaside cinema, an airless London bourgeois home. This truth to life was what I always wanted as a reader; she gave me heart that it was worth striving for as a writer.
The Party by Tessa Hadley is published by Jonathan Cape.
Chosen by Ferdia Lennon, author
I first picked up this book on the recommendation of George Orwell, which is pretty solid as book recommendations go. At the turn of the century, Jack London, best known for Call of the Wild and White Fang, travelled to London to explore its East End. What he encountered there disturbed him. In the largest city of the richest and most powerful nation in the world, he found poverty on an unimaginable scale. Through the personal stories of factory workers, vagabonds, workhouse inmates and discharged soldiers, the other side of the empire is achingly and compellingly revealed. As an Irish person, you take it as given that the British empire is not something to be celebrated, but until I’d read this book, I think I held quite a binary view of who the winners and losers were. What I hadn’t quite grasped, until London brought it home to me in such a vivid and humane way, was the terrible cost of keeping the vast machine of an industrialised empire running, not just for those who were colonised, but also for the great masses at the heart of the empire who had supposedly won.
Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon is published by Fig Tree.
Chosen by Kate Mosse, author
Growing up in rural Sussex in the 1960s and 70s, living very much the same kind of narrow provincial life my parents and grandparents had lived before me, it was only through the BBC’s Six O’Clock News that I got glimpses of worlds very different from my own. The Bluest Eye, Toni Morrison’s beautiful and uncompromising debut novel, changed all that. Not only did it make me look beyond my own experience to the realities of a more complicated, more varied world, but it showed the power of fiction. Set in 1941 in rural Ohio in the years following the Great Depression, the narrative is centred around Pecola and the hardships, abuses and misunderstandings she suffers. It’s heart-breaking – a story of powerlessness, race, dislocation, survival and poverty, and what it means to be female. Essential reading and a novel that changes each time you return to it.
The Map of Bones by Kate Mosse is published by Mantle.
Chosen by Len Pennie, poet
I never used to think that I might fit into poetry, or that poetry might fit into me. It was to be studied, not enjoyed; analysed, but never truly understood. Poetry in the school context provided me with a list of concepts and techniques, allowing me to successfully pick at the bones of someone else’s imagination, readily regurgitating what I’d gleaned in the exam hall. Anything I didn’t really get was due to a lack of intellect, and anything I didn’t really like, a lack of taste. I’ve read and reread this anthology many times since my parents gave it to me; every time I find something new to chew on.
poyums by Len Pennie is published by Canongate.
Chosen by Joanne Harris, author
I first met Dan Ariely on a tour of the US, and read his book out of curiosity. Nearly 20 years later, I still have my copy and revisit it regularly: it made me completely reassess the decision-making process I used to take for granted, and which I (wrongly, like most people) assumed was based on rational thinking. In fact, as Ariely says in the book, humans often make impulsive, irrational decisions, and once we understand how this works, we can sometimes avoid the pitfalls into which such thinking can lead us. It’s an upbeat, accessible book, with a genuinely revolutionary message: and once I’d learned to identify some of the behaviours described, I started to see them everywhere.
Vianne by Joanne Harris is published by Orion.