Society & Self

Books across every Society & Self genre

• Anne of the Island — L. M. Montgomery
• Batman: The Long Halloween — Jeph Loeb
• La Historia de Los Vertebrados — Mar García Puig
• Fire and Hemlock — Diana Wynne Jones
• There There — Tommy Orange
• She haunts me still
• Lumberjanes: The Mystery of History — Brooke A. Allen / ND Stevenson / Shannon Watters
• An Oral Fixation — Piper Vaughn
• Root Rot — Saskia Nislow
• Cribsheet: A Data-Driven Guide to Better, More Relaxed Parenting, from Birth to Preschool — Emily Oster
• Vile Lady Villains — Danai Christopoulou
• Spear — Nicola Griffith
• Hatchet Girls
• The Bright Sword — Lev Grossman
• El librero de Gaza — Rachid Benzine
• Cuando el agua se acabe — Aitor Sáez
• The River Has Roots — Amal El-Mohtar
• Brave New World — Aldous Huxley
• Bastard Out of Carolina — Dorothy Allison
• The Tombs of Atuan (Earthsea Cycle, #2) — Ursula K. Le Guin
• Sputnik Sweetheart — Haruki Murakami
• The Library at Hellebore — Cassandra Khaw
• The Memory Tree — Joseph Pittman
• Lumberjanes: Pungeon Master — Grace Ellis / Brooklyn Allen / ND Stevenson

Every genre on this shelf

• LGBTQ+ Fiction — Lives lived outside the default, on their own terms. Queer fiction across every genre — coming out and long after, chosen family, and stories where being queer is simply the given.
• Coming of Age — The crossing from one version of yourself to another. Loss, discovery, first loves, and the slow, sometimes brutal process of figuring out who you are.
• Family Drama — The people you cannot resign from. Fiction about inheritance, obligation and long-running injury within a family, across a generation or several.
• Social Commentary — Fiction with an argument. Novels that hold class, race, gender and the everyday arrangements of a society up for inspection — critique carried by ordinary lives rather than by governments.
• Parenting & Motherhood — The self before and after. These books take seriously what it means to become a parent — the love, the loss of self, the ambivalence that nobody warns you about.
• Feminist Fiction — Written with the assumption that women are the subject. Fiction that takes women's interiority, labour and constraint as its central material rather than its backdrop.
• War Fiction — What it was actually like, insofar as that can be written. Combat and its long aftermath — the soldier's war, the civilian's war, and the decades that follow both.
• Identity & Belonging — Where you are from, and whether it will have you. Fiction about diaspora, assimilation and the negotiation between the self you were given and the one you are building.
• Political Fiction — Power, and who pays for it. Fiction about the machinery of governance and its human cost — written from inside the argument, not above it.
• Sapphic Fiction — Desire between women, across every genre and era. Fiction where women love women — not as subtext but as the animating fact of the story, from nineteenth-century Paris to time-travelling subway romances.
• Music Fiction — Bands, records, and the noise in between. Fiction about making and loving music — scenes, tours, and the particular way a song attaches to a life.
• Addiction — The thing you need is the thing destroying you. Fiction centred on dependency and its consequences — the spiral, the damage to everyone nearby, and the question of whether recovery is possible or even wanted.

The private life, and the public one pressing on it.

All sixteen shelves · The Books Oracle