Freedom & Resistance

Voices of resistance, liberation, and the fight for justice.

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Time of the Flies

Time of the Flies

Claudia Piñeiro

The Time of the Flies follows Inés, a woman rebuilding her life after spending fifteen years in prison for murdering her former husband’s lover. Released into a society that has changed considerably during her imprisonment, Inés struggles to understand the new social landscape, including shifting attitudes toward gender, sexuality, and women’s rights. She establishes a small fumigation business with another formerly imprisoned woman, hoping to achieve independence and leave her troubled past behind. However, an unexpected request draws her into a new mystery that threatens the fragile stability she has created. Blending crime fiction, dark humour, and social commentary, Piñeiro explores punishment, reintegration, and the difficulties women face when attempting to begin again. The novel asks whether freedom is simply the absence of prison walls or the more complicated ability to shape one’s own future.

Kaikeyi

Vaishnavi Patel

Kaikeyi reimagines the story of a controversial queen from the ancient Indian epic Ramayana, giving voice to a woman traditionally remembered as the villain responsible for Rama’s exile. Growing up as the only daughter of a king, Kaikeyi questions the restrictions placed upon women and longs to shape her own destiny. After discovering a mysterious power that allows her to influence the minds of others, she begins to challenge the patriarchal structures governing her world. Her marriage to King Dasharatha brings her into the centre of royal politics, where her ambitions and relationships become increasingly complicated. As she navigates motherhood, power, and loyalty, Kaikeyi must make decisions that will transform her family and the kingdom. Patel explores female agency, ambition, and the tension between personal freedom and social expectations, offering a nuanced portrait of a woman whose story has long been told by others.

Woman of Endurance

Woman of Endurance

Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa

Set in nineteenth-century Puerto Rico, A Woman of Endurance follows Pola, an African woman kidnapped from her homeland and forced into slavery on a sugar plantation. Subjected to horrific violence and forced to bear children who are taken from her and sold, she gradually loses her faith and trust in others. After escaping and being transferred to another plantation, Pola encounters a community of enslaved women who offer her compassion, friendship, and the possibility of healing. As she develops a bond with an orphaned girl and begins to trust those around her, she slowly reclaims her sense of humanity and reconnects with her Yoruba spiritual heritage. Through Pola’s journey, Dahlma Llanos-Figueroa explores the brutality of slavery, the resilience of women, and the power of solidarity, cultural identity, and hope in the face of oppression.

Puerto Rico 2022

Every Rising Sun: A Retelling of The One Thousand and One Nights

Every Rising Sun: A Retelling of The One Thousand and One Nights

Before Shaherazade became the legendary storyteller who captivated a king for a thousand and one nights, she was a young woman whose words set an empire ablaze. In twelfth-century Persia, Shaherazade discovers a dangerous secret about the king’s wife, Fataneh. When she reveals the truth, the king’s fury unleashes a wave of executions, as he begins marrying and beheading a new bride each night. Haunted by the consequences of her actions, Shaherazade volunteers to become his next wife, determined to stop the bloodshed. Armed with her intelligence, political instincts, and extraordinary gift for storytelling, she begins weaving tales that keep the king listening until dawn. But survival demands more than captivating stories: as courtly intrigues intensify and the Crusades threaten the region, Shaherazade must navigate a world of shifting alliances, dangerous desires, and ruthless power. Reimagining one of literature’s most enduring legends, Every Rising Sun celebrates the power of storytelling, the resilience of women, and the courage to challenge a fate that seems inevitable.

The Cursed Friend

The Cursed Friend

Beatrice Salvioni

Italy, 1935. Francesca is a respectable girl from a bourgeois family, but she longs for a life beyond the suffocating rules of her small town. Her attention is drawn to Maddalena, a fearless outsider whom everyone calls the Cursed One. When Francesca lies to protect her, an unexpected friendship begins—one that will challenge everything she has been taught about obedience, morality, and what it means to be a girl. As fascism tightens its grip on Italy, the two friends confront prejudice, violence, and a society determined to keep women in their place. Fierce and emotionally charged, this novel explores the transformative power of female friendship and the courage it takes to resist injustice.

When the Museum is Closed

When the Museum is Closed

Rika Horauchi has spent much of her life hiding from the world behind an invisible yellow raincoat, an imaginary barrier that protects her from unwanted attention and human interaction. Working in a frozen-food warehouse and spending her evenings watching livestreams, she leads a quiet, isolated existence. Everything changes when she accepts an unusual part-time job at a museum: conversing in Latin with a statue of Venus on Mondays, when the museum is closed. Initially intimidated by the goddess’s beauty, Rika gradually discovers a surprising connection with her. As their conversations deepen, Venus becomes a companion who challenges Rika’s assumptions about beauty, desire, and the way women are perceived by others. Their relationship develops into an unconventional love story that opens up new possibilities for Rika, encouraging her to reconsider her isolation and imagine a different kind of freedom. Blending surrealism, dark humour, and feminist commentary, Emi Yagi’s novel explores loneliness, queer desire, and the transformative power of being understood. Beneath its whimsical premise lies a thoughtful examination of how society shapes women’s identities and how intimacy can help us break free from expectations.

A Death in Malta: An Assassination and a Family's Quest for Justice

A Death in Malta: An Assassination and a Family's Quest for Justice

Paul Caruana Galizia

In this powerful memoir and work of investigative journalism, Paul Caruana Galizia recounts the assassination of his mother, Daphne Caruana Galizia, a Maltese investigative journalist known for exposing corruption and misconduct among the country’s powerful figures. On 16 October 2017, Daphne was killed by a car bomb near her home, following years of intimidation linked to her work. Her death transformed her family’s lives. Paul and his brothers, together with their father, embarked on a determined search for the truth, seeking to uncover who was responsible for the murder and who had benefited from silencing their mother. Their pursuit of justice reveals the complex relationships between political power, financial interests, and corruption in Malta. Combining personal grief with investigative reporting, the book is both a tribute to a courageous journalist and an examination of the challenges facing democracy and press freedom. It explores the cost of speaking truth to power and the determination required to hold powerful institutions accountable.

Dictator Calls

A Dictator Calls explores the relationship between literature and political power through a fictionalised account of the Soviet writer Boris Pasternak and his interactions with Joseph Stalin. After Pasternak receives an unexpected telephone call from the Soviet dictator, the episode becomes a defining moment in his life, exposing the dangerous uncertainty faced by writers under authoritarian rule. Kadare examines how a seemingly brief conversation can reveal the enormous imbalance between an artist and a political leader whose decisions can determine a person’s survival. Blending historical detail with literary reflection, the novel considers the compromises writers make to continue working under censorship and the ways political authority attempts to control artistic expression. Kadare also reflects on the complicated relationship between writers and the regimes that both suppress and exploit them. The book examines fear, conscience, and the enduring struggle to preserve intellectual freedom under dictatorship.

Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

Recognizing the Stranger: On Palestine and Narrative

Isabella Hammad

Who gets to tell a people’s story—and what happens when the world refuses to listen? In this powerful essay, Isabella Hammad examines how narratives shape our understanding of Palestine, political violence, and the struggle for freedom. Drawing on the work of Palestinian intellectual Edward Said, she explores how literature can challenge dominant perspectives, complicate simplistic political narratives, and make space for experiences that are too often overlooked. The book brings together Hammad’s 2023 Edward W. Said Memorial Lecture at Columbia University and a subsequent afterword written in early 2024, reflecting on the war in Gaza and the urgent struggle over how it is represented. A thoughtful meditation on storytelling, power, and moral responsibility, it asks readers to reconsider not only the stories they hear, but also the voices they may have learned not to recognize.

Sister Deborah

Scholastique Mukasonga

In 1930s Rwanda, a mysterious American evangelist arrives with a revolutionary message: the coming Messiah will be a Black woman, and women will finally be liberated from centuries of suffering. Known as Sister Deborah, she is both a healer and a prophetess, attracting women who long for a world beyond colonial domination and patriarchal authority. Her teachings unsettle not only the European missionaries but also the colonial administration, which fears the growing power of her movement. When Sister Deborah suddenly disappears, rumours multiply: was she murdered, or did she escape to begin a new life elsewhere? Years later, Ikirezi, a woman who was healed by Sister Deborah as a child, sets out to uncover the truth. Moving between historical records, folklore, and competing memories, Scholastique Mukasonga weaves a haunting tale about the struggle to reclaim forgotten histories. The novel explores how religion can become both an instrument of oppression and a language of resistance, particularly for women whose voices have been silenced.

Birds, Beasts and a World Made New

Birds, Beasts and a World Made New

Velimir Khlebnikov

What happens when poetry refuses to obey the rules of language, logic, and reality? This collection brings together two visionary poets who helped reshape modern literature: Russian Futurist Velimir Khlebnikov and French avant-garde writer Guillaume Apollinaire. Moving between animals, art, love, revolution, war, and the mysteries of time, their poems reveal radically different ways of seeing the world. Khlebnikov experiments with language and explores the hidden patterns of history, while Apollinaire blends lyrical beauty with daring modernist invention. Translated by Robert Chandler, this collection invites readers into a world where words become experiments, familiar things turn strange, and poetry imagines entirely new possibilities for human experience.

Prophet Song

Prophet Song follows Eilish Stack, a mother of four living in Dublin as Ireland descends into authoritarianism. When a newly empowered secret police force begins targeting political opponents, Eilish’s husband, a trade unionist, disappears into state custody. As restrictions tighten and violence spreads, Eilish struggles to protect her children while navigating a society where ordinary institutions can no longer guarantee safety or justice. Her efforts to maintain a semblance of normal life become increasingly desperate as neighbours disappear, public services collapse, and the possibility of escape grows more complicated. Lynch presents the crisis through Eilish’s increasingly claustrophobic perspective, capturing the emotional exhaustion of a parent forced to make impossible choices. The novel explores authoritarianism, displacement, and the cost of resisting political oppression, showing how democracy can erode gradually until private life becomes inseparable from the struggle for survival.

About this theme

Books: 107
Countries: 45

Countries with this theme

Central African Republic

Dominican Republic