Themes
Books About Power
Stories of authority, empire, oppression and the people who resist them.
20 books · ranked
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1
Maus
Spiegelman recounts his father Vladek's experience as a Polish Jew who survived Auschwitz, told through interviews in the present day and rendered as comics in which Jews are mice and Nazis are cats. The two-volume work won a Pulitzer Prize and is one of the most powerful accounts of the Holocaust in any medium, as well as a meditation on the act of bearing witness.
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2
The Power of Now
A guide to living in the present moment; the bestselling cornerstone of modern mindfulness.
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3
The New Jim Crow
How mass incarceration recreates racial caste in America; a powerful, much-cited argument.
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4
Sapiens
A sweeping history of humanity from the emergence of Homo sapiens in Africa to the present, arguing that what made humans uniquely powerful was the ability to create and believe in shared fictions — nations, religions, money — that allowed large-scale social cooperation impossible for other species. One of the bestselling non-fiction books of the 21st century.
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5
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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6
The Hate U Give
A teenager witnesses a police shooting and finds her voice; urgent, powerful and humane.
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7
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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8
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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9
The Name of the Rose
In a 14th-century Italian monastery, the English friar William of Baskerville investigates a series of murders whose resolution turns on a forbidden book. Eco's debut novel is simultaneously a medieval detective story, a meditation on heresy and textual interpretation, and a literary novel about the relationship between truth, authority and the books that preserve or destroy both.
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10
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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11
The Fifth Season
On a planet racked by catastrophic geological events — the Fifth Seasons that periodically end civilisations — a woman searches for her daughter across a world that fears and enslaves people with the power to control the earth itself. Jemisin's first Broken Earth novel won the Hugo Award and announced the arrival of one of the most important voices in speculative fiction.
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12
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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13
The Last Cuentista
Petra Peña, one of the children chosen to journey to a new world after Earth's destruction, wakes from cryosleep to find her memories have been erased by the ship's new ruling order — except for the stories her grandmother told her, which become the only thing she has left of where she came from. Higuera's Newbery Medal-winning novel uses science fiction to explore cultural erasure, memory and the power of storytelling to preserve identity.
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14
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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15
King Lear
An ageing king divides his kingdom between his daughters in exchange for declarations of love, disinheriting the one who refuses to perform. What follows is one of literature's most devastating explorations of power, age, loyalty, ingratitude and the cruelty that families inflict on each other.
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16
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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17
The Tempest
The magician Prospero, exiled on an island with his daughter Miranda and two servants, orchestrates the arrival of the enemies who usurped his Milanese dukedom. Shakespeare's last solo play meditates on power, art, forgiveness and the ambiguous freedom of the imagination.
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18
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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19
Julius Caesar
The Roman senator Cassius persuades the noble Brutus to join a conspiracy against Julius Caesar, whose growing power seems to threaten the Republic. The assassination and its turbulent political aftermath — particularly Mark Antony's speech to the crowd — test whether honourable motives can survive the realities of power.
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20
Matilda
Matilda Wormwood is a precocious five-year-old with parents who ignore her brilliance. She teaches herself to read, devours the local library, and eventually discovers she has telekinetic powers — which she uses to bring justice to her terrifying headmistress Miss Trunchbull. Dahl's most beloved novel for children is about the power of intelligence, reading and kindness in a world that prefers children to be seen and not heard.