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Certain books have the potential to extend beyond their covers: They can affect readers so dramatically that they spur change, whether in readers’ heads or across society. Some of these titles are well-known. The popularity of Harriet Beecher Stowe’s Uncle Tom’s Cabin made it impossible for many white northerners to ignore the abolitionist cause; Betty Friedan’s The Feminine Mystique put into words women’s stultifying place in society, “the problem that has no name”; George Orwell’s Animal Farm gave the world a rich new metaphorical vocabulary for totalitarianism. Each helped readers recognize conditions they may have taken for granted or assumed were intractable, and gave them the conceptual tools for pushing back on them.

In ways large and small, the nine books on this list also do a version of this consciousness-raising. They examine different aspects of the status quo—the makeup of a country’s highest courts, everyday life under a government in turmoil, even how the art we consume is marketed to us. Then they use those distinctive elements of literature—its varied perspectives, its focus and clarity, the sense of scale it can provide—to illuminate injustice as well as what might just be in our capacity to correct.

Verso

We Want Everything, by Nanni Balestrini (translated by Matt Holden)

Admired by writers such as Umberto Eco and Rachel Kushner, this 1971 cult classic by Balestrini, an Italian novelist and poet, dives deeply into the long hours and stifling working conditions faced by employees at the Fiat factory in Turin that fueled strikes in 1969 that briefly paralyzed Italy and preceded the Years of Lead. The story is told from the perspective of a nameless factory worker originally from the south of Italy, whose narrative I compellingly transforms into a collective we in the novel’s second half as the employees band together in protest. The concern here is with power: who has it, who lacks it, and how the latter might wrest it from the former—in this case, by flooding the streets with the strength that can emerge from acting as a collective. “Now the thing that moved them more than rage was joy,” Balestrini writes triumphantly of the striking crowds toward the book’s end. “The joy of finally being strong. Of discovering that your needs, your struggle, were everyone’s needs, everyone’s struggle.”

[Read: How to make change, slowly]

Zed Books

Woman at Point Zero, by Nawal El Saadawi (translated by Sherif Hetata)

“They said, ‘You are a savage and dangerous woman,’” says Firdaus, an imprisoned woman awaiting execution for murder in a jail just outside of Cairo, to the psychiatrist visiting her in this 1977 novel by El Saadawi, an Egyptian feminist writer and activist. “‘I am speaking the truth. And truth is savage and dangerous.’” Purportedly based on a similar testimony given to El Saadawi by a woman she encountered at the Qanatir Prison while working as a doctor in the early ’70s, Woman at Point Zero follows Firdaus as she describes her impoverished childhood, her disastrous marriage to a man 40 years older than her, and her subsequent escape into a life of sex work. She’s pressed in on all sides by misogyny and desperation; ultimately, when a pimp steals her hard-earned money, she murders him—and ends up imprisoned, though she remains unbowed. The novel portrays how society can grind women into doomed, twinned roles—either a caretaker or a sex object—and use those categories to justify further violence against them. Firdaus’s electric, often disturbing account points out the hypocrisy in that system, and remains chillingly relevant.

Mariner

Three Guineas, by Virginia Woolf

A Room of One’s Own might be the best-known of Woolf’s nonfiction works, but I’ve always been partial to her book-length essay Three Guineas, written on the eve of World War II. Scattered with illustrative photos of men in uniforms, this is a thought-provoking deconstruction of patriarchy in all its various guises—the military, the court systems, the universities. The book is structured as a letter to an unnamed gentleman; the cool anger of its chapters first began as a mixture of alternating fact and fiction, before Woolf would go on to separate the fiction into its own freestanding book, The Years, the last novel she would publish in her lifetime. What is left is Woolf at her most radical, even bordering on anarchic, as she explicitly links the very existence of the state and the institutions that support it to the oppression of women. “As a woman I have no country,” she declares. “As a woman I want no country. As a woman, my country is the whole world.”

[Read: Trauma is everywhere. Write about it anyway.]

Semiotext(e)

Seasonal Associate, by Heike Geissler (translated by Katy Derbyshire)

Like a few of the other titles on this list, the 2014 novel Seasonal Associate, by Geissler, a German writer, is concerned with work, and how our jobs shape our lives. But it’s the rare book that portrays the early days of the gig economy, which has come to define millions of lives. Her protagonist, a woman whose creative labor as a writer isn’t quite paying the bills, starts a decidedly newer sort of job: She’s a seasonal shift worker at the Amazon warehouse in Leipzig. Switching between the first and second person as a way to draw the reader immediately into the tedium of sorting and packing delivery boxes filled with goods, Geissler weaves scenes culled from her own experiences working at the Leipzig Amazon warehouse together with thoughtful meditations concerning the meaning of economics, art, and a life well lived, drawing on writers and thinkers such as Elfriede Jelinek and Karl Marx. Seasonal Associate offers a lucid portrayal of the changing nature of work in the 21st century.

Soft Skull

Broken Glass, by Alain Mabanckou (translated by Helen Stevenson)

When one is faced with an absurd situation, the most logical solution might be to act absurdly in turn. Or so argues the Congolese writer Mabanckou in his 2005 novel, which follows a former schoolteacher known as Broken Glass as he spends his days drinking in a run-down bar in the Republic of the Congo called Credit Gone West, observing the lives of his fellow patrons and riffing on Congolese politics, everyday life, and various works of art. Broken Glass takes a critical view of governmental corruption after the country’s postcolonial independence, although the novel’s fragmented style is satirical and not entirely straightforward: The book details the lives of its working-class characters, such as Printer, whose experiences attempting to gain a better life in Paris lead to humiliation at the hands of his French wife, Robinette, whose literal pissing contest with a male patron turns into a surreal battle of the sexes; and the con artist Mouyeké, whose brief appearances at the bar Broken Glass are comparable to the cameos of Alfred Hitchcock in his own films. Throughout, Mabanckou’s writing seesaws across the page as though it, too, were under the influence.

[Read: Is literature 'the most important weapon of propaganda'?]

Open Letter Books

Thank You for Not Reading, by Dubravka Ugrešić (translated by Celia Hawkesworth and Damion Searls)

The Croatian writer Ugrešić was known for her sharp, sometimes verging on sour, view of the world, in works such as American Fictionary, her series of essays on visiting the United States in the midst of the Yugoslav wars of the ’90s, and novels like the devastating The Ministry of Pain, with its meditations on language, conflict, and placelessness. In her 2003 essay collection, Thank You for Not Reading, Ugrešić lays out a critique of the 21st-century publishing industry and the commercialization of literature, arguing that a world that favors content over literature will lead to a culture that is just as generic as the humdrum best sellers promoted on talk shows. Ugrešić is hilariously rude about the modern publishing industry, targeting book proposals, agents, and blurbs (which are “only apparently innocent”). In a cultural moment in which the pervading critical argument more often than not seems to boil down to “let people enjoy things,” Ugrešić refuses to sit by passively. Twenty years on, her book provides a refreshing, welcome perspective—and asks readers to take up their own provocative and sincere defense of art.

Clydesdale Press

The Jungle, by Upton Sinclair

First published in serial form in 1905 and then as a complete book in 1906, Sinclair’s The Jungle is a muckraking classic, and one that effectively uses some of fiction’s singular strengths—its interiority; its ability to conjure empathy for its characters; and its construction of vivid, detailed scenes, sometimes in the same paragraph—to create a shocking account of Chicago’s early-20th-century meatpacking factories and the labor they exploited. The novel follows a group of Lithuanian immigrants, including the just-married Jurgis and Ona, as they land in America and quickly have their fantasies of a better and easier life dashed: Jurgis, at one point, turns to alcohol to deal with cruelties of factory life, while Ona is sexually assaulted by her boss. The Jungle infamously sparked a federal investigation into the sanitary conditions of Chicago’s meatpacking facilities, and it’s still worth reading today, if only—considering the recent, shocking reports about the amount of child labor in America’s slaughterhouses—to track how little has actually changed.

[Read: Fairy tales for young socialists]

Seven Stories

A Man’s Place and A Woman’s Story, by Annie Ernaux (translated by Tanya Leslie)

Since winning the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2022, the French writer Ernaux’s global popularity has exploded, leading to renewed interest in her intense explorations of her own past. Two titles in particular have received most of the attention: Happening, detailing her illegal abortion in the 1960s, and Simple Passion, a novel based on her affair with a diplomat in the early ’90s. But her books preserving, and mourning, the working-class lives of her parents—A Man’s Place, first published in France in 1983, and A Woman’s Story, which came out five years later—are equally arresting. In both, Ernaux travels back in time to her childhood in Normandy, portraying, in spare, precise sentences, her mother’s push for her daughter to secure a better life than her own and her eventual death from Alzheimer’s, as well as her father’s struggles working in factories and farms before eventually running a local grocery store and café. She transcended their class through education, so in each, Ernaux tracks the familial divide that arose when her path ceased to resemble theirs. And she commits their history to paper as a protest against the slow erasure of their particular milieu: As she said in her Nobel-prize speech, “I will write to avenge my people.”

Whether it’s because we destroy their habitats, discombobulate them with city lights, or allow cats into their midst, most wild birds want nothing to do with humans. But purple martins—shimmery, blackish-bluish swallows native to North America—just can’t get enough. For centuries, the species has gradually abandoned its homes in the wild for birdhouses we’ve built. An entire subspecies of the bird now nests exclusively in human-made boxes; east of the Rocky Mountains, “there are officially no purple-martin colonies that exist outside of that,” says Joe Siegrist, the president of the Purple Martin Conservation Association.

Modern martins have become downright trusting of people. Some will even let humans reach into their nest and pick up their chicks—an intrusion that would send other birds into a screeching, pecking rage. “They’re the most docile species I’ve ever worked with,” says Blake Grisham, a wildlife biologist at Texas Tech University. And the more we build birdhouses and interact with martins, the more they seem to thrive. “It’s totally the opposite of our default in wildlife management,” Grisham told me. The martins’ reliance on us is a bit bizarre, but it’s also a boon: As habitat destruction, environmental contaminants, and invasive species continue to threaten wildlife across the world, an affinity for humans very well may have saved the purple martin.

But the birds’ attachment to us now seems to be transforming into a liability. With the birds facing more dangers in the natural world, their need for human-made homes has grown. At the same time, experts told me, fervor for building and maintaining martin birdhouses appears to be waning, especially as those most enthusiastic about the practice continue to age and die. The martins’ dependence on our structures is, at its heart, a dependence on our behavior. Their precarious housing situation is now many experts’ “No. 1 concern,” Grisham told me—and it threatens to hasten the species’ decline.

[Read: The quiet disappearance of birds in North America]

Martins have never been the architects of their own homes. As so-called secondary cavity nesters, they evolved to be tenants of tree cavities carved by woodpeckers and other birds, or crevices in the faces of cliffs. But at some point, the birds began to occupy structures hollowed out by humans.

Most experts believe that the shift began in precolonial North America, perhaps near the homes of the Choctaw, Chickasaw, and other Native American tribes that would hollow out gourds and hang them to dry for later storage use. For whatever reason, our proximity didn’t seem to much bother the birds. And humans may have quickly found good reason to embrace their new tenants: “We used them to ward off black birds and other species that would interfere with our gardens,” Deanna L. Byrd, of the Choctaw Nation of Oklahoma’s historic-preservation department, wrote to me in an email. The insect-munching martins may have also served important roles in pest control, Byrd said.

By the early 1800s, building nesting enclosures for martins had become commonplace among Indigenous people as well as colonists. But it was likely the Europeans that cemented the martins’ preference for us into dependence. They practiced unsustainable land-management practices that destroyed acres of forested habitat. They introduced invasive species, such as starlings and sparrows, that began to aggressively compete with martins for cavities. By 1900 or so, human-made houses weren’t just some of martins’ best options; they were, especially in eastern regions, some of the birds’ only options. (Western populations of the birds, though also keen on human-built boxes, still happily nest the old-fashioned way.) Purple martins might not be around today had they not had humans and their birdhouses to fall back on, Siegrist told me.

[Read: Animals are avoiding us]

The martins seem fine with this outcome—maybe in part because, at the houses we build for them, they tend to encounter fewer competitor species and far more opportunities to mate, Grisham told me. Over the years, they’ve even grown to actively prefer living within about 100 feet of human housing; go too much farther than that, Siegrist said, and the birds will turn up their beaks. Although martins are not formally domesticated, behaviorally speaking, “it kind of feels like they’ve domesticated themselves,” says Heather Williams, an ecologist at the University at Buffalo.

And yet, purple martins may also be in trouble. Worldwide, “we’ve lost about a third of purple martins in the last 50 years,” Siegrist told me. The reasons are manifold, and probably include a decline in insects and increased migration perils on the way to the birds’ winter habitats in South America. Clarissa Oliveira Santos, a biologist studying purple martins at the University of São Paulo, is also investigating whether they may be imperiled by potential exposures to mercury, pesticides, and other contaminants. But Siegrist and others told me that, given just how much of the birds’ life cycle hinges on humans, a shortage of housing, especially for eastern martins, is probably playing an important role too.

The decline in human-made houses has been difficult to document and quantify. But Lori Jervis, an anthropologist at the University of Oklahoma, has found that purple-martin “landlords”—as the most enthusiastic housing providers describe themselves—are concerned that their practice is a dying art. The community—which surveys suggest is predominantly white, southern, and male—is also very much on the older side: Two recent surveys showed that a firm majority of landlords were over 50 years old.

[Read: The quest to build a better birdhouse]

Organizations such as the Purple Martin Conservation Association are actively trying to bring younger generations on board. But in a world where so many young people are moving frequently and settling down later, landlording—an activity that usually involves establishing and maintaining multiple-occupancy birdhouses on a tract of land that you probably need to own—is perhaps no longer as easy or palatable as it once was. Jervis told me that landlording can be quite a bit of work too: The birds’ boxes are usually elaborate, multi-room complexes that must be cleaned and inspected regularly; starlings and sparrows must be kept away. (Jervis and her colleagues have, through their work, interviewed people who are so hard-core about protecting their martins that they’ll shoot and strangle the invasive species that try to squat.) And as urbanization has increased, martins have also developed an unfortunate reputation as pests. Flocks of the migratory birds, sometimes as many as 100,000 strong, will occasionally congregate near city centers, leaving behind an unsightly mess.

On a landscape where wild, untouched habitats have grown only scarcer, a species able to wean itself off those venues might seem poised to survive. But from the beginning, purple martins were tying their fates to human caprice. The species could, in theory, revert to its old ways: Grisham is now trying to experiment with coaxing martins back into wild nests. But after so many centuries getting up close and personal with us, they might not know how to live on their own anymore.

Chinese leader Xi Jinping welcomed delegations from across the developing world to Beijing on Tuesday to celebrate his pet project, the Belt and Road Initiative. The forum, the third of its kind, is meant to display China’s influence in the global South and show that Washington’s efforts to isolate and pressure Beijing can’t succeed: China simply has too many friends.

But one very important person was absent. Indian Prime Minister Narendra Modi and his government have steadfastly refused to join Xi’s infrastructure-building program and have promoted alternatives instead. Just last month, Modi and U.S. President Joe Biden announced a joint project to connect India to Europe through the Middle East by rail and ship.

Modi’s absence from the Belt and Road forum is a sign that the rivalry between the United States and China is not the only one shaping global affairs. Another, between India and China, may have geopolitical consequences that are equally important. At stake are the shape of the global South and its role in international governance. Whose vision prevails—Xi’s or Modi’s—will help determine the future of the world order and American global power.

Xi’s goal is to build a bloc of supporters in the global South that he can use to expand Chinese influence and challenge American primacy. But New Delhi is not much more eager than Washington to usher in a China-centric world system. Modi has therefore intensified his diplomacy in the global South, so that India can serve as a counterweight to China.

For Washington, Modi’s new assertiveness presents an opportunity. With India by its side, the U.S. can make the case that the South will benefit less from joining forces with Beijing to upend the American-led global order than from participating in partnerships with the United States and India.

Still, Biden and Modi are playing from behind. Xi has long recognized the aspirations and frustrations of the global South, and his foreign policy is designed to capitalize on those sentiments for China’s own geopolitical benefit. The Belt and Road Initiative is the premier pillar of that effort. The program, launched a decade ago, provided an alternative source of development financing to that offered by the institutions of the West, such as the World Bank. Xi has also fostered forums to promote the interests of developing countries, such as the Shanghai Cooperation Organization and the BRICS group of emerging economies, which includes Brazil, Russia, India, China, and South Africa. Ideologically, Xi introduced a framework of principles, called the Global Development Initiative, aimed at refocusing international discourse on economic inequality and more evenly spreading the benefits of growth. Earlier this year, Qin Gang, then China’s foreign minister, framed global affairs as an international class struggle. “The principal contradiction in today’s world is not at all a so-called ‘democracy versus autocracy’ played up by a handful of countries,” he argued, “but a struggle between development and containment of development.”

[Read: Xi Jinping is done with the established world order]

The money and attention have paid off. At a BRICS summit in August, Xi overcame Modi’s opposition and won agreement to invite six new members—most, if not all, likely to support China’s interests.

Indian policy makers are worried. They see China usurping the role that India has historically sought to play, as the champion of the postcolonial developing world. China has even intruded into South Asia in ways that undercut Indian primacy in its own neighborhood—particularly through Beijing’s heavy support for Pakistan, India’s arch nemesis.

China’s actions have fostered “a feeling in Delhi that we are being replaced, that we are getting pushed out of our traditional spheres of influence,” Happymon Jacob, a specialist in Indian foreign policy at Jawaharlal Nehru University, in New Delhi, told me. “That feeling is palpable when you talk to the policy makers in Delhi, and they want to do something about it.”

New Delhi, much like Washington, has come to fear that Chinese influence will shape a new world order hostile to its interests. Indian policy makers feel that “rather than China’s integration into the globalized world benefiting the globalized world, that globalized world is being used by China to advance its own national interests,” Dhruva Jaishankar, the executive director of the Washington-based think tank Observer Research Foundation America, told me. “On almost every issue of the global governance agenda, China and India are at odds with each other.”

Xi has further inflamed tensions with an ever more assertive foreign policy. Aggressively pressing territorial claims along its disputed border with India, China helped spark a deadly Himalayan brawl between Chinese and Indian soldiers in 2020. Just last month, Xi snubbed Modi by opting not to show at the latest Group of 20 summit that the Indian prime minister hosted in New Delhi.

Modi took advantage of Xi’s absence. He burnished his credentials as an advocate for the global South by pushing for the inclusion of the African Union in the G20. (Previously, South Africa was the continent’s sole representative.) In the days before the summit, Modi darted off to Indonesia to attend a conference of Southeast Asian nations (which Xi also skipped, instead sending his No. 2, Premier Li Qiang). Indonesian President Joko Widodo altered the meeting’s schedule to accommodate him. And New Delhi has attempted to capitalize on Xi’s missteps in other ways—most notably by calling out the Chinese government for its resistance to offering significant debt relief to economically troubled low-income countries.  

But however canny its appeal, New Delhi’s capacity to counterbalance Beijing is limited. With an economy one-fifth the size of China’s, Modi cannot match Xi in financial resources with which to woo wallets in the global South. He will need to work with partners that have deeper pockets, such as the United States.

By doing so, Modi is sending a message to the Global South: Poor and marginalized countries can attain greater sway in world affairs through cooperation rather than confrontation with the West. He made this case by deftly managing the G20, where he worked closely with Biden and other Western leaders to offer the prospect of inclusive partnership to countries of the global South within expanded and reformed institutions of the current order. By contrast, this week’s Belt and Road forum showcases Xi’s intention to build a different, competing order. The Communist Party–run news outlet Global Times, citing the conflict between Israel and Hamas, claimed that the Belt and Road is evidence that as the United States “fans the flames of war, China exports peace and development.”

Some 140 countries are sending delegations to Xi’s forum, suggesting that the Chinese leader’s vision for a new world order does have global appeal. But that vision is also China-centric, and therefore divisive. By expecting governments to repeatedly send high-level representatives to Beijing for such events, Xi is treating members of the global South more like supplicants than partners. And Modi isn’t alone in steering clear. Past forums attracted prominent representatives from the West, including Italy’s prime minister in 2017. This year’s event will include Russian President Vladimir Putin, as welcome in China as ever, and a representative from Afghanistan’s Taliban. But Western leaders have generally stayed away, and overall, the delegates at this forum are of lower stature. By the Chinese government’s count, 37 national leaders attended 2019’s forum; this year, roughly half that number showed up.

[Read: China doesn’t want to compete. It wants to win.]

Xi may attract crowds, but many countries remain wary of choosing sides in a great-power standoff, and Modi’s approach will likely appeal to them. Rama Yade, the senior director of the Atlantic Council’s Africa Center and a former French secretary of state for foreign affairs and human rights, told me that “behind India, you have the Western allies, and that is something that is very important for Africans” because “they want to preserve or keep their partnerships with the West as well as the Chinese.” That, she continued, is why “the Indians seriously challenge the Chinese” in Africa.

With India in the mix, Xi can’t so easily claim that the future depends on conflict between the West and the rest. Not only are multiple centers of power emerging in the developing world, but they speak with diverse voices and promote different visions for a more balanced future. Xi, however, doesn’t seem interested in listening. He appears to believe that he can marshal the global South to isolate the West—but in pushing his partners to side against the United States, he might ultimately end up isolating China.