Why we loved it: Bennett’s powerful debut weaves social conservatism, racism, and abortion into the growing up of three young women in a small town in America in a beautiful and moving novel about life and the decisions we make.

Why we loved it: Few authors are able to write fiction as poetically as Vera, in a novel that centres the voices of Zimbabweans who navigate life in the 1940s under the colonial regime. A compelling novel ties the importance of hopes, ambitions, and futures to reproduction.

Why we loved it: A book that offers a stark reminder of what family, reproduction, and abortion mean in contexts of oppression. Apartheid is the spectre of this book, omnipresent at all times in the lives of racialised women who must contend with the intersecting injustices in their lives under the violent South African regime.

Why we loved it: Abortion is so much more than just the anti-/pro-choice binaries we see in the news, a point made quietly and beautifully in Huang’s novel of love, family, and politics in the wake of the Tiananmen Square protests in China. A moving novel of intergenerational care and conflict.

Why we loved it: For its engagement with food! Most books linking reproduction and nature fall into essentialist notions - not so, Ozeki, who deftly manages to explore it through the personal with sharp attention to the political.

Why we loved it: While one might be tempted to call this a ‘coming-of-age’ story, Adjapon writes a searing novel of feminist self-discovery of a Ghanaian-Nigeria woman growing up in 1960s, Independence era Ghana.

Why we loved it: Taking us to the seeming ennui of the emerging suburbs of 1950s London, Small Pleasures is a subtle historical romance rife with secrecy, stigma, and the politics of the British racial, gender, and class systems.

Why we loved it: A literary giant, Wicomb’s novel is one of the only apartheid-era fictional works of ‘Coloured’ women’s experiences in South Africa in this brutal and evocative work of art.

Why we loved it: Set in a day in the streets of Buenos Aires, this dark, emotional journey of a woman seeking justice for her deceased daughter is as unmissable as it is moving.

We we loved it: The only graphic novel we have read (so far!), Corman delves into life as a Jewish immigrant in New York’s Lower East Side, navigating antisemitism, sex work, and the drive to live one’s life freely.