100 books like To Kill a Man

I recall reading it in my late teens, less as the classic it was on the barbarous Spanish Civil War of the 1930s, and more as a personal discovery by Orwell of how his democratic socialist instincts were sharpened and shaped by the buffeting swirl of ideological clashes and bitter sectarian struggles within the inspirational resistance to Franco’s fascism in Spain. As he witnessed the heroism and the horror, the passion and sometimes the ulterior purposes of these competing groups, Homage to Catalonia for me was a gripping narrative, climaxing in the internecine firefight in Barcelona where the left helped defeat itself, and thereby opened the door to Franco’s murderous victory and equally murderous rule. 

Like Orwell’s, the socialism that I had come to believe in during the first ten years of my life in Britain was instinctively ‘libertarian’ rather than ‘statist’, favouring democracy and liberty rather than central control… show more.

Nelson Mandel’s autobiography from his early life through the 27 years he spent in prison before becoming South Africa's first democratically elected President.

This book taught me about trying to be a better person despite your circumstances and being wronged by others. It also gave me hope that my imprisonment could be just a chapter in my journey and didn’t need to be the defining experience of my life.

A master thriller writer, his characters are invariably fascinating – the ‘good’ ones complex with frailties yet often quietly heroic, the ‘bad’ ones, not just villains but people. His plots take you on a page-turning journey in credible geo-contemporary theatres, combining gripping tensions and insights. I first met him in 1969-70 when he was a television reporter covering the anti-apartheid struggle in Britain.

I enjoyed commenting on early drafts of this dramatic Georgian historical fiction written by my wife Elizabeth about her great-great-great-grandmother: painstakingly researched and vividly portrayed, it’s about love, betrayal, and survival. Lucy, strong-willed daughter of English landed gentry, born in the late 18th century, married Sam Lord, a plantation owner and fortune hunter from Barbados, at a time when women were their husband’s chattels with no rights even over the children. Abused and imprisoned by him in Barbados, she escaped with the help of enslaved people after giving birth at sea, braving disease and cruelty, and witnessing the abject misery of slavery in her descent from a life of pampered luxury to a struggle for survival in a far-off land.  

Kate Manne offers the best definitions of sexism (men thinking they’re better than women) and misogyny (men punishing women for displeasing them) that I’ve ever read. And she brings receipts, showing examples of how these two things play out in everything from novels to politics to crimes to classrooms.

Once I read her book, it was impossible for me not to spot more examples pretty much everywhere I went in the world.

"This book is about what happens when women are the storytellers too – when we speak from our authentic voices, when we flex our values, when we become protagonists in the tales we tell about what it is to be human."

I reference this wonderful, non-fiction book in my novel several times. Once when Odessa the main character sees it on her bookshelf.

Another time when Odessa talks about the shocking myth of Cassandra, who was given the gift of prophecy by Apollo but when she wouldn’t sleep with him he cursed her that no one would believe her.

And the third reference is at the end of my novel, Odessa’s dog bears Casandra as her mighty name. As an embodiment of all that will be listened to and believed. Cassandra Speaks had a profound impact on me as a woman, a mother, a sister, a human, and as a… show more.

I suspect that I was led to take The Malady of Death from my shelf by a subconscious directive. I admit that I am afraid of this book, its relentless probing, afraid I will never understand it however much I struggle. Confounded by it twenty-five years ago, I put it aside until my consciousness could mature. (Ha!) The fault must be mine, since her style, language, and structure are as limpid as Ernaux’s or Davis’s, although Duras’s prose carries a poetical charge deliberately absent in the other two writers. I begin to think that the trouble lies in my sex, that as a man, an Other to women, I can’t possibly know what Duras’s narrator is being made to gradually reveal not with the leer of a striptease artist but with the solemnity of a priestess presiding over ancient feminine mysteries.

Would feminists accuse me of being obtuse and,… show more.

This novel was once lauded as an “ultimate feminist fantasy” and is about Bella, a woman who’s eventually had enough of being a victim and sets about murdering sleazy men.

I remember how this novel and author lost some respect when the book was picked up by film director Michael Winner (of Death Wish movies fame).

Winner went on to play fast and loose, adapting it into serial killer schlock. But. Don’t let that put you off as this novel is far better, more witty, and funny than any Winner movie.

It fulfils the fantasy of what (every now and then) a woman might love to do to any man who “done her wrong”. Surely a blueprint for serial killer and assassin Villanelle?

Mikki Kendall’s account of what Black women and girls are up against in America left me angry and devastated. Her description of how Black girls are sexualized at shockingly young ages and how portraying them this way enables sexual abuse absolutely gutted me.

For me, this book was a powerful reminder of why no woman is safe in a culture that says you have to be viewed as respectable in order to be worthy of protection from violence.

Bailey originated the term “misogynoir” in 2008 to describe, she writes, “the anti-Black racist misogyny that Black women experience, particularly in US visual and digital culture.” The controlling image of the “Mammy” has long been a hyper-visible, toxic presence in this milieu. In this book, Bailey examines the digital resistance and social media-based activisms of Black women—particularly queer and trans women—who seize representational power to dismantle the distorting stereotypes, expose their systemic impacts, and make spaces for telling their own diverse, gendered Black stories and enable others to do so as well. Throughout, Bailey makes clear that cultural representations have material, life-and-death effects, but also the capacity to create new and better worlds.