Themes
Books About Colonialism and Empire
Fiction and non-fiction examining the history, psychology and aftermath of colonial power.
20 books · ranked
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1
Beloved
A formerly enslaved mother is haunted, literally, by the past she escaped; a towering, harrowing masterpiece.
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2
Foundation
A mathematician predicts the fall of a galactic empire and plans to shorten the dark age that follows; grand-scale ideas SF.
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3
Mistborn: The Final Empire
A street thief joins a crew plotting to overthrow an immortal god-emperor, using a brilliantly worked magic of metals.
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4
Braiding Sweetgrass
A botanist and member of the Citizen Potawatomi Nation weaves together Indigenous plant knowledge, scientific botany and memoir to argue that plants are not passive objects but beings with gifts to offer, and that reciprocity — not extraction — is the proper relationship between humans and the living world. One of the most-read works of nature writing in recent years.
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5
Half of a Yellow Sun
The Nigeria-Biafra war of 1967-70 — one of the defining catastrophes of postcolonial Africa — is seen through four perspectives: an educated Nigerian couple, their houseboy and a British journalist. Adichie's Booker Prize-shortlisted novel is about the specific collapse of a world that thought itself modern and secure.
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6
Kindred
A Black woman in 1976 is pulled back in time to a slave plantation; time travel used to devastating effect.
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7
The Children of Men
In 2021, no child has been born anywhere on Earth for twenty-five years, and humanity is dying in a fog of despair and authoritarian order under the Warden of England. Theo Faron, a historian, is drawn reluctantly into a resistance group that may have discovered a woman who is pregnant. James's dystopian novel is also a theological meditation on hope, despair and what makes life meaningful.
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8
A Small Place
A long, fierce essay addressed directly to the European tourist arriving in Antigua, Kincaid's essay is one of the most powerful pieces of postcolonial writing in English — about the relationship between tourism and colonialism, about the corruption that replaced British colonial rule, and about what it means to live in a place that others only visit.
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9
Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass
Frederick Douglass's account of his life in slavery — learning to read despite prohibition, the brutal violence of the system, and his eventual escape. Written to prove that he had indeed been enslaved (some doubted his account given his eloquence), the Narrative is one of the foundational texts of American literature and abolitionism.
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10
A Memory Called Empire
Mahit Dzmare arrives as ambassador to the vast Teixcalaanli Empire carrying the memories of her predecessor — who has died under suspicious circumstances — implanted in her brain. Martine's Hugo Award-winning novel is space opera built on questions of cultural assimilation, imperial seduction and what it means to love the empire that is erasing your home.
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11
The Nightingale
Two sisters in German-occupied France take different paths through the war: Vianne shelters Jewish children in her home while her husband is a prisoner of war; Isabelle joins the Resistance and guides downed Allied airmen over the Pyrenees. Hannah's novel about women's wartime experience became one of the most-read historical novels of the decade.
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12
The Tainted Cup
In an empire defended from monstrous leviathans by genetically and magically altered humans, investigator Ana Dolabra and her assistant Dinios Kol are called to solve the murder of an imperial officer killed by a tree that grew through his body overnight. Bennett's Hugo and World Fantasy Award-winning novel combines fantasy worldbuilding with a genuine Holmes-and-Watson detective dynamic and a richly imagined bureaucratic empire.
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13
A Song for a New Day
In a near-future America where mass gatherings have been banned after a wave of attacks and a pandemic, a touring musician who refuses to stop performing live encounters a young scout for a tech company that has built an empire on virtual concerts. Pinsker's Nebula Award-winning novel — written before COVID-19 but eerily predictive — is about live music, isolation and what gets lost when everything moves online.
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14
The Volunteer
Witold Pilecki, a Polish resistance officer, volunteered to be captured and sent to Auschwitz in 1940 specifically to gather intelligence and build a resistance network from inside the camp. Fairweather's Costa Book of the Year-winning biography tells one of the most extraordinary and least-known stories of WWII resistance — a man who chose to enter the camp the rest of the world was trying to escape.
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15
The City in the Middle of the Night
On a tidally locked planet where one side burns and the other freezes, two cities cling to survival in the narrow habitable zone — and a young woman exiled from one of them encounters the planet's indigenous, possibly sentient inhabitants. Anders's Locus Award-finalist novel is about colonialism, communication across genuinely alien difference, and what survival costs a society over generations.
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16
The Mercy of Gods
Humanity, having spread to a distant world, is conquered by the Carryx — an ancient, incomprehensible alien empire that absorbs species into its vast collection of subject civilisations. The Mercy of Gods, by the writing team behind The Expanse, begins a new space opera series about survival under genuinely alien, indifferent conquest — won the Locus Award for Best Science Fiction Novel.
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17
Heart of Darkness
Marlow, a riverboat captain, travels deep into the Belgian Congo to find the ivory trader Kurtz, whose methods have become legendary for their horror. One of the most debated texts in English literature — a study of colonialism and the human capacity for evil that has itself been accused of reproducing the racism it critiques.
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18
Wide Sargasso Sea
Set in Jamaica and Dominica in the 1830s, Bertha Mason — the mad wife in the attic of Jane Eyre — tells her own story before she is silenced and imprisoned by Rochester. Rhys's novel is one of the foundational texts of postcolonial fiction, a fierce rewriting of Charlotte Brontë's portrait of Creole womanhood from the inside.
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19
Adventures of Huckleberry Finn
Huck Finn escapes his abusive father and floats down the Mississippi River with Jim, an enslaved man seeking freedom. Through a series of adventures and moral tests, Huck must choose between following the conventions of a society built on slavery and following his own conscience. Both the great American adventure story and one of the most debated texts in the country's literary history.
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20
Sons and Lovers
Paul Morel, a sensitive young man in a Nottinghamshire mining town, is bound to his mother by an attachment that makes it almost impossible for him to love any other woman. Lawrence's semi-autobiographical novel charts Paul's struggle toward independence and is one of the foundational texts of psychological realism in English fiction.