Freedom & Resistance

1

The Vegetarian

Han Kang

After dreaming of blood and meat, Yeong-hye decides to stop eating meat, setting off a chain of violent and transgressive events in her family. Han Kang's Man Booker International Prize-winning novel is a disturbing allegory of bodily autonomy and patriarchal control.

South Korea 2007

2

The Book of Laughter and Forgetting

Milan Kundera

Seven loosely connected narratives about Czechs inside and outside their country after 1968, exploring the mechanisms by which totalitarian regimes erase collective memory. Written in exile in France after Kundera's Czech citizenship was revoked.

Czech Republic 1979

3

Beloved

Toni Morrison

Former slave Sethe is haunted — literally — by the ghost of the daughter she killed to spare her from slavery. Morrison's Pulitzer Prize-winning novel confronts the psychological and moral trauma of American slavery with extraordinary force.

United States 1987

4

1984

George Orwell

Winston Smith works for the Party rewriting history in a totalitarian superstate called Oceania. His secret rebellion and doomed love affair with Julia end in the Ministry of Love. The novel gave the world "Big Brother," "doublethink," and "Newspeak."

United Kingdom 1949

5

One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich

Alexander Solzhenitsyn

A single day in the life of a prisoner in a Stalinist labour camp, rendered with minute, unflinching detail. Its 1962 publication in the Soviet literary journal Novy Mir was a landmark event in the cultural thaw.

Russia 1962

6

The Master and Margarita

Mikhail Bulgakov

The Devil visits Soviet Moscow accompanied by a retinue of bizarre attendants, exposing the hypocrisy of its citizens. Interwoven with chapters set in ancient Jerusalem depicting Pontius Pilate and his encounter with Yeshua Ha-Nozri.

Russia 1967