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.”