Recollections of My Nonexistence by Rebecca Solnit

This memoir by the cultural and political commentator Rebecca Solnit traces her formation as a writer, from her student years in San Francisco in 1981 and throughout her life and career. The author catapulted into the mainstream in 2008, with her pice Men Explain Things To Me, and gave rise to the term ‘mansplaining’ — one story retelling a party in a ski chalet, at which she told the owner that she had just written a book about the photographer Eadweard Muybridge and he begins telling her about the book she has written. Her body of work, which spans topics as art to environmental concerns, language and gender, how communities recover from disaster; and the impact of urban geography on creativity and quality of life. But throughout her career she’s carefully explored how misogynist speech and violence are on a spectrum, long before mainstream acceptance of the idea. $127, bookdepository.com

Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot by Mikki Kendall

Mikki Kendall’s debut essay collection, Hood Feminism: Notes from the Women That a Movement Forgot, explores how the urgent needs of women of colour are often ignored and hidden by mainstream feminism. The chapters examine topics such as gun violence, poverty, hunger education, housing and reproductive justicevare all feminist issues, as she attempts to challenge harmful myths that can lead to young women of colour not getting the support they need and perpetuate race- and class-based stereotypes. Ther prose is direct and Kendall is forthright about the purpose of the book — there is no “tiptoeing around mainstream feminism’s dreams, no grateful acceptance of a black space that is in the gift of white proprietors,” the Guardian writes about the book. $166, bookdepository.com

The Resisters: A Novel by  Gish Jen

Set in America in the near future, where bugged houses, surveillance drones, and an all-powerful Internet entity called ‘Aunt Nettie’ form the basis of Gish Jen’s dystopian novel: The Resisters, which NPR calls “a sly mash-up of 1984’s ‘Big Brother’ and those sinister aunts who enforced order in The Handmaid’s Tale.” The novel follows a family of three: the dad, Grant, of Afro-Caribbean descent was once a teacher but, in the newly automated America, in which they live, he is involuntarily unemployed, or “Surplus.” His wife Eleanor is leading a legal fight against Auntie Nettie for toxic chemicals in the food, while the couple’s mixed race daughter emerges as a baseball star. It’s the story of one family struggling to maintain its humanity in circumstances that threaten their every value–even their very existence. $148, bookdepository.com

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid

A poignant and timely commentary on the immigrant crisis of recent years, Mohsin Hamid’s work of fiction is centred around a couple residing in an unidentified Middle Eastern country as it breaks into civil war and insurgency. One day, when rumours start circulating in text messages about ordinary doors that gain the ability to randomly transport whoever walks through them to other countries, our protagonists find themselves thrown into a world order gone amok, as conventional borders become meaningless overnight. Tinged with hopeful undertones, Exit West is a thought-provoking look through the lens of magic realism at the state of the increasingly fragmented world we live in today. $96, bookdepository.com

Circe by Madeline Miller

Following the hugely successful The Song of Achilles, Madeline Miller continues her formula for rewriting Greek myths with a sympathetic modern eye in Circe. The eponymous sorceress, first mentioned in Homer’s Odyssey, is painted by Miller as a much more relatable character, an outsider among gods who turns to the world of mortals for companionship. We see Circe fend off sexual predators, fight off inner demons, as well as undergo the complex mix of emotions that comes with becoming a mother, in the process revealing herself as a fully fleshed out person and a feminist icon for the ages. $174, bookdepository.com