Themes
Books About Revolution
From uprisings to seismic social change — books where the old order breaks.
20 books · ranked
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1
Ways of Seeing
How we look at images, and who benefits; a short, radical book that changed art criticism.
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2
Persepolis
A girl grows up during and after the Iranian revolution; a witty, moving graphic memoir.
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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
A Tale of Two Cities
In the years before and during the French Revolution, the fates of the Manette family, the emigre Charles Darnay, and the dissolute English lawyer Sydney Carton converge in Paris and London. Dickens's novel is about resurrection, self-sacrifice and the terror that accompanies revolutions that began with idealism. It contains one of the most famous opening sentences and one of the most famous final lines in English fiction.
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5
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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6
We
D-503, a mathematician in a future totalitarian state called the One State where all citizens live in glass apartments with no privacy, falls in love with the revolutionary I-330. Zamyatin's novel — written in 1924 and suppressed in the Soviet Union — was a direct influence on Huxley's Brave New World and Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four.
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7
Little Women
Four sisters growing up in Civil War New England; warm, wise and quietly radical about what a woman's life can be.
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8
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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9
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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10
The Golden Notebook
Anna Wulf, a writer and communist living in 1950s London, keeps four notebooks — black for Africa, red for politics, yellow for her novel, blue for her ordinary life — and attempts to synthesise them into a golden notebook. Lessing's formally radical novel about female consciousness, creative block and political disillusionment was one of the most important feminist novels of the 20th century.
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11
Pedro Paramo
Juan Preciado travels to the Mexican village of Comala to find his father Pedro Páramo, only to discover that Comala is inhabited entirely by the dead. Rulfo's short, radical novel — only 124 pages — dissolves the boundary between the living and the dead, between past and present, and between the personal and the mythological. García Márquez said it was the novel that taught him how to write.
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12
As I Lay Dying
As Addie Bundren lies dying, fifteen members of her family and community narrate the subsequent chapter — their voices telling the story of carrying her body across Mississippi to bury her in Jefferson. Faulkner's formally radical novel uses stream-of-consciousness and multiple perspectives to create one of the most demanding and most studied works in the American canon.
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13
Dept of Speculation
A marriage under strain is told in fragments — aphorisms, observations, diary entries — by a woman who refers to herself in the third person as 'the wife.' Offill's novel is formally radical and emotionally precise: a portrait of a relationship, a creative crisis and the ordinary catastrophe of trying to live alongside another person.
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14
A Grain of Wheat
On the eve of Kenyan independence in 1963, the residents of a village gather to celebrate — and to reckon with their different experiences of the Mau Mau uprising, the betrayals it produced, and the price paid by those who fought. Ngugi's novel examines what political independence means when it arrives and what it asks of those who survived the struggle.
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15
Cloud Atlas
Six narratives nested inside each other like Russian dolls — spanning 1850 to a post-apocalyptic future — tell connected stories of exploitation, resistance and survival. Mitchell's formally ambitious novel is both a meditation on time, history and human cruelty, and a demonstration of what the novel can structurally achieve.
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16
James
A radical retelling of Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim — rechristened James — who is far more intelligent, self-aware and morally complex than Twain's narrator allows him to be. Everett's Booker Prize-winning novel is a devastating, often darkly funny examination of race, freedom and the authorship of American stories.
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17
Trainspotting
A group of young heroin addicts in 1980s Edinburgh navigate addiction, friendship, violence and the occasional moment of transcendence. Told in Scottish vernacular dialect across multiple narrators, Trainspotting is both a formally radical novel and one of the most visceral portraits of the underclass since Zola.
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18
Human Acts
The Gwangju Uprising of 1980 — when South Korean paratroopers massacred pro-democracy protesters — is told through seven perspectives, living and dead, across different years. Han Kang's formally radical novel asks how a community survives the memory of mass violence — and whether the survivors have any obligation to the dead. Han won the Nobel Prize in 2024.
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19
The Ministry for the Future
In the near future, a new UN body — the Ministry for the Future — attempts to address the climate crisis through financial engineering, geoengineering, political pressure and occasional violence. Robinson's novel is structured as a series of chapters in radically different forms — news reports, speeches, interior monologues — making the case that the systems causing climate change can only be dismantled by the same forces that built them.
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20
In the Time of the Butterflies
The Mirabal sisters — Patria, Dedé, Minerva and María Teresa — are heroines of the Dominican resistance to the Trujillo dictatorship. Three were murdered on Trujillo's orders in 1960; Dedé survived to remember them. Alvarez's novel imagines their inner lives from childhood through to the assassination, telling the story of how ordinary women become revolutionaries.