Here are some of the best books you can pick up this holiday season to make your year-end break fun and fascinating.​

This story takes us on a journey through the lives of two young women as they navigate their culture and history in Nigeria. A sequel to Abi Daré’s The Girl with the Louding Voice, this book gives voice to women across Nigeria who are struggling to find the freedom to live a better life in a patriarchal society.​​

This collection of three novellas and a short novel dives into the world of romance, absurdity, and a wonderful meandering into the trans experience. This kaleidoscopic follow-up to Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby, is funny, provoking, unsettling, and fascinating.

From the titular story, Stag Dance, about a lumberjack who yearns to be feminine and desired, to one of the short stories, Infect Your Friends and Loved Ones, about a dystopian civil war created by artificial hormones, this collection will keep you laughing and crying through all the absurd, wild, and touching moments.

See the world through the eyes of a brilliant and captivating neurodivergent child, who is trying her best to make sense of the chaos that is her family. Through ten-year-old Vera, we’re drawn into the tensions and tenderness of a multicultural, multi-ethnic household where love and dysfunction exist side by side.

The story invites you to step into Jewish-Korean Vera’s world — one shaped by an alcoholic father, a left-leaning mother, and a blonde, blue-eyed brother who play their roles perfectly within their affluent community. Yet beneath their polished surfaces, Vera sees the cracks forming, and her perspective becomes a gripping guide to the family’s unraveling.​​

Armed with just a flashlight, a father and his young daughter take a walk on the breakwater one summer night. When the young girl is found washed up on the shore the next morning and her father nowhere to be found, this book begins its exploration of the challenges of an interracial marriage, parenthood, immigration, opportunity, and loss.

In our world, where the one percent rule over the others, Evan Osnos writes a thought-provoking collection of essays about the alarming disparity that is easy to see in society. The Haves and Have-Yachts is an amalgamation of anecdotes from the top echelon of the capitalistic society in America.

Exploring topics of generational wealth, tax fraud, philanthropy, ponzi schemes, and more, this collection of essays about the lives of the uber-rich in the USA is a must-read in today’s political and economic climate.

This absorbing read is the perfect flavour for all those who enjoy reading about the lives and triumphs of great tech leaders of this century. Following the life, journey, and success of one of the most valuable companies in current times, Nvidia, a company that makes video game equipment, and its CEO, Jensen Huang.

This book tells the story of the company, from its humble beginnings at a Denny’s in San Jose to its meteoric rise conquering the AI hardware markets worldwide. Stephen Witt’s writing is insightful, informative, and inspirational. A must-read for all the Silicon Valley fanboys out there.​

​Don’t know whether you want to pick up a romance, a sci-fi novel, a thriller, or a comedy this holiday season? This book ends that dilemma by mashing all those genres together to bring a wholly original and exhilarating novel about time travel, a confused civil servant, and an adventurer right out of the annals of history.

With fantastic world-building and eccentric characters, this book sucks you right into its weird and wonderful world of unlikely roommates and genre-defying fiction.

​Swinging between Los Angeles and New York, Angela Flournoy’s magnetic novel manages to capture the living heartbeat of both cities in her prose, as well as the confusing, complicated, intimate lives of five women who are making their way through the ‘wilderness’ of adulthood.​

A humorous, heartbreaking, addictive story about five black women navigating their ‘after 20s’, The Wilderness is a collage of female friendships, found family, personal successes, and confusing romance. This is a book that you won’t be able to put down till the very end.

The history of America is steeped in violence, protest, and resistance. In her exploration of Black voices, Rita Omokha shines a bright light on the history of black activism in the US. Resist is a collection of heartrending and empowering stories spanning the last century of young civil rights activists across the country.

A memoir encompassing a walk down important, often forgotten history, this book is a powerful reminder of the ongoing racial struggle that still rages across the 50 states. An incredibly powerful read, Resist will stay with you long after you’ve turned the last page.

​Is a River Alive? invites you to journey with it down three rivers in Ecuador, India, and Canada, and petitions for the recognition of rivers as living beings in popular imagination as well as the law. Amidst the current climate of change, capitalism, and environmental disasters, this book follows the author’s journey collaborating with a diverse group of people and learning about the impact of humans on nature.

This holiday season, as we slow down and gather with loved ones, it’s the perfect time to curl up with books that can inspire change. Literature has the power to shape the way we think, feel, and act. From And So I Roar by Abi Daré, which showcases strong women using their voices to uplift others, to Is A River Alive, a moving reminder to treat nature as a living being rather than a mere resource, these titles invite us to reflect, empathize, and engage with the world around us more thoughtfully.