Ursula Le Guin parachutes you straight into the world of Gethen with little by way of introduction. I floundered for a while, trying to get my head around the political intrigue as well as understanding the fantasy world. But there was enough to compel me until I gained sure footing. I read the second half of the novel in a couple of sittings, fully immersed in the journey across the ice.

Eve L. Ewing moves effortlessly between past and present, reimagined past and visions of a future all connected by the Chicago Race Riot of 1919. Lines of poetry made me gasp and so to did statements of fact. This book contains so much: history, sociology, sorrow and anger. Most of all it bursts with Ewing‘s love for her people - the one‘s who‘ve gone before her, those here now and those yet to be born.

“The world is always being made and is never finished.” Read this book to believe that a better world is possible and that the work that is done towards achieving it is never wasted.

I‘d listened to so many interviews with Rebecca Traister before I got my hands on her book that I was beginning to wonder if I needed to read it at all. Of course I did. It was exactly what I need to read. Anger at injustice and oppression is exactly what we need to feel. Using anger to drive action and change is perfectly legitimate. This book helped me feel less alone in my anger and more empowered to use it.

Utterly compelling. Sparse and opaque, Kwon‘s prose requires focus, but it is far from a chore. I‘m still astonished at how she managed to alter my perspective with a single sentence in the final pages of the book.

It‘s already four years since this book was released - how has it taken me this long to read it? I‘ve no doubt this book is timeless. Coates is often criticised for not offering any hope (he shouldn‘t have to), but there is so much power and pride here as he reflects on how he grew to understand what it is and how to be black in America: “They made us into a race. We made ourselves into a people.”

Devastating. All of the beauty, restrained passion and righteous anger you would expect from Baldwin.

Having recently lost a loved one to cancer, this may seem like a punishing choice of reading material. But the insight into the mind of a people with cancer (albeit in a 1950s Russian cancer ward) was something I welcomed. For all its focus on living with and dying from cancer and allusions to the difficulties of life under Stalin, Solzhenitsyn has a light touch and the humanity of all his characters is at the heart of this extraordinary novel.

An unsettling collection of short stories that brings the violence of capitalism and systemic racism to the fore through characters I could always empathise with and will not forget in a hurry.

“Grief turns out to be a place none of us know until you reach it.”