Reading List 2026
Angela Davis – An Autobiography
A powerful account of Davis's life as a Black activist, academic, and revolutionary — covering her childhood in the segregated American South, her Communist Party membership, and her internationally watched trial. Essential context for understanding her other work.
Angela Davis – Freedom Is a Constant Struggle
Drawing on Ferguson, Palestine, and global liberation movements, Davis argues that freedom is never won once — it must be fought for continuously, and that local struggles are always connected to global ones.
Bookshop.org UK · Penguin UKAngela Davis – The Meaning of Freedom
A collection of Davis's speeches covering race, gender, prison abolition, and the ongoing struggle for civil rights — accessible, urgent, and motivating for anyone seeking hope and direction in activism.
Bookshop.org UK · Blackwell'sAngela Davis – Women, Race & Class
A landmark feminist text tracing how race and class have shaped women's liberation movements in the US, exposing the ways mainstream feminism has historically excluded Black and working-class women.
Bookshop.org UK · Blackwell's
bell hooks – All About Love
hooks was a working-class Black woman who became one of the world's most celebrated cultural theorists and professors. This, her most beloved book, reframes love not as a feeling but as a practice — exploring how a culture built on domination and capitalism undermines our ability to truly love ourselves and each other.
Bookshop.org UK · Daunt Books · Blackwell's
Caroline Criado Perez – Invisible Women
A forensic, data-driven examination of how the world has been designed around a male default — from medical research to urban planning to AI — leaving women systematically exposed to risk, bias, and erasure. Her newest book takes this lens to artificial intelligence.
Bookshop.org UK · Waterstones
Kristen Ghodsee – Why Women Have Better Sex Under Socialism
An accessible, evidence-based argument that when socialist economics is implemented properly, women genuinely benefit — with greater independence, equality, and quality of life. A readable entry point into understanding how economic systems shape women's lives.
Waterstones · Housmans
Naomi Klein – The Shock Doctrine
The book that reframed how millions of people understand global economics. Klein exposes how disaster capitalism exploits crises to push through radical free-market policies — a foundational text for understanding how neoliberalism works against ordinary people, and particularly women.
Bookshop.org UK · Waterstones
Silvia Federici – Caliban and the Witch
A radical feminist history arguing that the witch hunts of early modern Europe were not superstition but a systematic campaign to destroy women's autonomy, control their bodies, and clear the way for capitalism. Explores the devastating crossover between colonialism, land enclosure, and the exploitation of women's labour.
Bookshop.org UK · Pages of Hackney
Simone de Beauvoir – The Second Sex
One of the founding texts of modern feminism. Dense but foundational theory on how woman has been constructed as "the Other" throughout history, philosophy, and culture. De Beauvoir makes the case that female oppression is not natural — it is made.
Bookshop.org UK · Blackwell'sSimone de Beauvoir – The Woman Destroyed
Three novellas exploring women at psychological breaking points — abandoned, overlooked, diminished. A more accessible entry into de Beauvoir than The Second Sex, but equally devastating in its portrayal of how society crushes women's ambitions and sense of self.
Bookshop.org UK · Blackwell's
Sylvia Plath – The Bell Jar
A semi-autobiographical novel following a young woman's descent into mental illness as she collides with a society that has no space for her ambitions. A searing portrait of psychological violence — what happens when a woman's aspirations are not taken seriously.
Bookshop.org UK · Daunt Books · Blackwell's
Toni Morrison – Beloved
Morrison changed the way we see history, the present, and the future. Beloved is her masterwork — a haunting novel about the legacy of slavery told through a mother who makes an unthinkable choice. Essential reading for understanding how generational trauma shapes the lives of women.
Bookshop.org UK
Virginia Woolf – A Room of One's Own
Based on Woolf's landmark lectures, this essay argues that a woman must have money and a room of her own if she is to write — and by extension, to think, create, and exist freely. Still radical, still relevant.
Bookshop.org UK · Waterstones
Wendy Brown – Undoing the Demos
Brown's definitive work on neoliberalism — arguing that free-market logic has quietly hollowed out democracy itself, recasting citizens as economic units and dismantling the political conditions women need to fight for their freedom.
Bookshop.org UK · Blackwell's