While many people still see fiction and non-fiction books beyond textbooks as entertainment, storytelling is and can be a vehicle for framing, reinforcing and transmitting culture and beliefs. More than that, stories have the power to fire the imagination and inspire new thoughts and ideas and thus to shape – or reshape – the perspective of individuals, communities, and cultures about everything from tradition to gender.
In recognition of the power of storytelling to catalyse change, The Pixel Project has curated our seventh annual selection of 16 books that tackle the issue of violence against women and girls. Some of these are popular genre fiction novels while others are hard-hitting non-fiction books. All of them will educate the reader in some way about sexism, misogyny, and violence against women in the past, present, and sometimes even the future.
Our 2025 recommended books feature courageous female protagonists who have experienced VAW and whose stories show the aftermath of the violence in their lives and how they cope with it. This year’s list is a mix of memoirs, general non-fiction, contemporary young adult, fantasy, true crime, murder mystery, children’s fiction, and contemporary women’s fiction.
This list is by no means complete as there are hundreds of books out there that deal with violence against women in its various forms. However, we hope that these 16 books and series will be a starting point for you, as they have for others over the years, to push for change in your community and culture.
Introduction by Regina Yau; Written and compiled by Anushia Kandasivam and Regina Yau.
Inspired to support The Pixel Project’s anti-violence against women work? Make a donation to us today OR buy our 1st poetry collection, Under Her Eye. All donations and net proceeds from book sales go towards supporting our campaigns, programmes, and initiatives.
Book Selection #1: A Fine Day for Hanging: The Real Ruth Ellis Story (2013) by Carol Ann Lee
In 1955, London nightclub manager Ruth Ellis shot and killed her lover David Blakely in front of witnesses and then confessed to the police. Eills was convicted of his murder and given the mandatory death sentence. She was the last woman in the UK to be hanged. This book looks at the facts behind the case, including Ellis’ and Blakely’s abusive relationship and how that led to the killing. Through interviews and research, it also examines how the glamourous Ellis defied society’s expectations of how an abused woman and murderer should look and behave – she was calm and composed throughout the trial – and how the media at the time sensationalised the case’s circumstances, painting Ellis as a “scarlet woman” and “brassy blonde” because of her background. The case also caused widespread controversy in the UK at the time because of its circumstances and strengthened support for the abolition of the death penalty.
Book Selection #2: Easy (2012) by Tammara Webber
When Jacqueline follows her boyfriend to the college of his choice, she ends up trying to pick up the pieces after they break up in their sophomore year, leaving her single, socially ostracised, struggling academically, and rueing the fact that she is stuck at a state university instead of attending a music conservatory. What was already a stress-filled year turns into a nightmare when she is assaulted by her ex’s frat brother and rescued by a stranger who seems to be in the right place at the right time. Then her attacker turns stalker and Jacqueline is faced with a choice: crumble in defeat or fight back. This novel takes a long, hard, and nuanced look at the issue of rape and the myths of rape culture on campus through the eyes of a heroine who refuses to back down after being brutalised.
Book Selection #3: Hurricane Season (2017) by Fernanda Melchor, translated by Sophie Hughes
The Witch of La Matosa is dead, brutally murdered, and this sets off a hurricane of truth, lies, and violence in the fictional Mexican village where this murder mystery is set. For years, the Witch has helped the locals with anything they need, from drugs to abortions, and though everyone is afraid of her and the men resent her, they still use her. Following her murder there is a storm of hearsay; the story is told by a series of unreliable narrators who gossip, bad-mouth, insult, and blame each other. The meandering narratives build a picture of a poverty-stricken community rife with violence, where “machismo is a prison,” families are broken by violence, and “girls are cruelly denied their ambitions, railroaded into household service or worse, and the depravity of boys for whom desire comes fatally muddled with power and humiliation.” Based on a real-life murder of a witch in a small town in the author’s home state in Mexico, this novel has won multiple local and international awards.
Book Selection #4: I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again: Turning Our Family Trauma of Sexual Assault and Chemical Submission into a Collective Fight (2025) by Caroline Darian
Caroline Darian received a call from the French police in November 2020 that shattered her family forever: since 2013, her father Dominique Pelicot had repeatedly drugged Gisèle Pelicot (his wife and her mother) before handing her over to dozens of men from the areas surrounding their home to be raped while unconscious. In this harrowing memoir, Darian provides a courageous personal account from the inside of a rape case that shook France and the world’s attitude towards rape survivors. Most importantly, she shares the remarkable story of her mother who became the touchstone for long overdue change that dealt a mighty blow to rape culture in her country and beyond.
Book Selection #5: Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice (2024) by Cristina Rivera Garza
When Liliana Rivera Garza was murdered by her abusive ex-boyfriend on 16 July 1990, her case, like so many others, was quickly and predictably failed by Mexico’s corrupt criminal justice system. Liliana’s sister, Pulitzer Prize-winning novelist Cristina Rivera Garza, decided to ensure that her story would not fade into obscurity like the stories of so many femicide and domestic violence victims in Mexico. To accomplish this, Garza returned to Mexico from the United States to collect and curate evidence of her sister’s life and the crime that ended it, including handwritten letters, police reports, school notebooks, and architectural blueprints. What resulted is a memoir of sisterhood, growing up under the shadow of the patriarchy of Central Mexico, and Liliana’s relationship with the violent and possessive man who would eventually take her life.
Book Selection #6: Madwoman (2024) by Chelsea Bieker
This novel is a twist on the fiction trope of the madwoman, providing a few candidates for the title role. First is the protagonist Clove, a woman who has built the perfect life and family for herself and a “wall against her perilous childhood” with a violent father and a terrible memory of a past incident that shattered her world. Then there is her estranged mother who contacts Clove from prison insisting on telling her the entire story of the past, and Jane, the charismatic and intense friend Clove makes after something happens to make the past and present collide. Told in first person, the reader accompanies Clove as she battles through anxiety and unaddressed PTSD, digs her way through the lies her parents told her – at one point she reminds her mother that her father hit her because “It was your fault for talking in passing about the guy who’d taken you to your senior prom” – and, as she examines how her life and choices mirror her parents’, whether the police should be held accountable for failing her all those years ago.
Book Selection #7: Men Explain Things to Me and Other Essays (2015) by Rebecca Solnit
This book is a collection of eight essays by American writer and activist Rebecca Solnit, with each chapter containing a separate essay that examines a key aspect of the world of women living under patriarchy. The eponymous essay about the silencing of women, specifically by men who think that they know better, birthed the term ‘mansplaining’ (though this term was not used by Solnit). The second essay examines violence against women, especially by men they know while the third is about how imperialism, colonisation, and capitalism take advantage of women in less fortunate situations. Other essays are about marriage equality, the erasure of women from history, how the credibility of women is treated by the public, and the power of words and naming the violence. The collection acts as a call to action to the fight for women’s rights. Solnit said that the initial idea for the first essay came about from a conversation with a friend who said that “[y]oung women needed to know that being belittled wasn’t the result of their own secret failings; it was the boring old gender wars” and the rest grew from there.
Book Selection #8: Mothertrucker: Finding Joy on the Loneliest Road in America (2021) by Amy Butcher
This autobiography is an unusual story of transformation and redemption, with author Amy Butcher recounting her adventure through Alaska with Joy “Mothertrucker” Wiebe, the USA’s only female ice road trucker. Along the way, Wiebe tells Butcher about her history surviving domestic violence, causing Butcher to reveal that she too lives a dual life of an accomplished college professor and victim of domestic abuse. It was her desire to escape that led her to contact Wiebe through social media and jump to accept Wiebe’s invitation to ride with her. Throughout the book, Butcher explores the duality of existence many women live with – being independent, educated, skilled, and fearless in many ways while fighting for their lives against abusive men and the patriarchal system. She also explores wider issues of violence against women, Indigenous women’s rights, religious hypocrisy, and environmental concerns.
Book Selection #9: Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice (2025) by Virginia Roberts Giuffre
Virigina Giuffre was an American and Australian advocate for survivors of sex trafficking and one of the accusers of the child sex offender Jeffrey Epstein. In this posthumously-published memoir, Giuffre recounts the period when she worked at Mar-a-Lago where her grooming and abuse by Ghislaine Maxwell and Jeffrey Epstein began. Guiffre lays out the facts of the abuse over the years, naming Andrew Mountbatten-Windsor (then Prince Andrew) and referencing famous politicians. She also examines power and corruption, and how victims of sexual violence are pitied and/or reviled by the media and general public. It is not an easy read, and Guiffre often breaks the fourth wall to acknowledge that. But it is worth the read for the insights into the famous case and how sex traffickers operate, and to breathe life into the voice of a victim and survivor you may only have read about.
Book Selection #10: Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women (2021) by Christina Lamb
Award-winning journalist Christina Lamb OBE has covered wars and combat zones from Iraq to Libya, and Angola to Syria, and has reported on Pakistan and Afghanistan for more than thirty years. To shed light on the brutality and trauma of wartime rape on women and girls, she wrote Our Bodies, Their Battlefield which is based on her extensive first-hand interviews with survivors across the world including ‘comfort women’ of World War II, women who were raped during the Rwandan genocide, the Yazidi women and girls who were enslaved by ISIS, and the Bosnian survivors who have hunted down war criminals. This is not an easy read but a vital one because while being witness to these stories will not take away the pain and trauma suffered by survivors, it ensures that there is no longer any excuse for anyone to not know about it.
Book Selection #11: Some Boys (2014) by Patty Blount
When Grace is raped by Zac, the golden boy of the town’s lacrosse team, everyone including her family and classmates turn against her because Zac posted a video of the attack on social media that made it seem as if she had given him consent. When Grace is made to clean lockers as punishment for lashing out against everyone slut-shaming and berating her for accusing Zac, she is joined by Zac’s best friend Ian who takes on that chore while he recovers from a concussion which caused behavioural issues that got him suspended from the lacrosse team. As they perform their punishment together, Ian eventually comes to believe Grace and to grow a spine to stand up for her. This contemporary young adult novel is a romance novel that tackles the hard truths about rape culture, victim-blaming, and doing the right thing.
Book Selection #12: The Breadwinner (2015) by Deborah Ellis
Eleven-year-old Parvana lives with her family in Kabul during the Taliban’s rule in Afghanistan in the 1990s. Her father, a former college professor, ekes out a living reading letters for people who cannot read. One day, he is arrested for the crime of having a foreign education, and as women are not allowed to work or leave the home without being escorted by a male family member, the family is left without anyone who can earn money or even go out to buy food. Desperate, Parvana does the only thing she can – disguise herself as a boy and become the breadwinner. Along the way, she meets brave and resourceful women and girls and uses her wits to help her family survive. The first book in The Breadwinner series, this book is suitable for readers 10 to 13 years old, and introduces them to the conditions of people living in war-torn areas and the impact of war on women, the history of Afghanistan, and the concept of the oppression of women.
Book Selection #13: The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World (2024) by Nawal El Saadawi
Inspired by her experiences working as a doctor in rural Egypt and her life as a women’s rights activist, Nawal El Saadawi writes about the injustices and violence faced by women in the society she grew up and worked in, from legal inequality to female genital mutilation. Though a scathing look at the oppression of women in the Arab world, El Saadawi makes it clear that she does not believe that it is caused by Islam, pointing out that it exists in many other religions and cultures throughout the world. Rather, she examines the “patriarchal system which came into being when society had reached a certain stage of development” and how men distort religion to preserve their own interests and justify their oppression of women.
Book Selection #14: The Seventh Bride (2014) by T. Kingfisher
In this novel about the dark side of romantic fairy tales, a mysterious nobleman, Lord Crevan, shows up at the doorstep of Rhea, a miller’s daughter, and proposes marriage. Rhea is forced to agree to the engagement because of the power differentials stemming from the disparities in their respective class standings – commoners simply did not turn down such a demand from nobility for fear of dire consequences. When Lord Crevan insists that she visit his remote manor before their wedding, Rhea discovers that not only was he married six times before, but his previous wives are all imprisoned in his enchanted castle. Determined to avoid this fate which would ultimately lead to her demise, Rhea strikes a bargain with Lord Crevan –he would give her a series of magical tasks to complete, with the threat “Come back before dawn, or else I’ll marry you.” In this novel, Kingfisher pulls back the sanitised glamour of romances in traditional fairy tales to show aspects of its dark underbelly, including violence against women that manifests in tropes such as the Imprisoned Wife or Maiden, the forced marriage, and the violent alpha male figure.
Book Selection #15: The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service (1996) by Laura Kaplan
In the years before the Supreme Court’s 1973 Roe vs. Wade decision, women who needed abortions had to subject themselves to illegal, unregulated abortionists whose methods might be fatal. In 1971, Laura Kaplan stumbled across a secret organisation code-named ‘Jane’ and staffed by a group of women who helped women obtain safe and affordable abortions from doctors who believed that women should have a choice. In this book, Kaplan pieces together the histories of the anonymous (here identified only by pseudonyms), average-sounding women who transformed themselves into outlaws. Through the voices and memories of her former co-workers, she recounts how the group initially focused on counselling women and helping them find reliable, reasonably priced doctors but ultimately took it upon themselves to step up for women and girls who needed urgent reproductive healthcare in the form of abortions.
Book Selection #16: We Can Be Heroes (2021) by Kyrie McCauley
Beck and Vivian are two teen girls who can barely tolerate each other, but always did so for their mutual friend, Cassie. After Cassie’s murder in a school shooting seemed to be forgotten by their town too quickly, they refused to let Cassie be forgotten, keeping her in public view by secretly painting murals of her across town with Cassie’s ghost in tow. When their murals attract the attention of a podcaster covering Cassie’s case, the girls become the catalyst for a debate that Bell Firearms – the manufacturer of the gun used by Cassie’s killer – can no longer ignore. As law enforcement closes in on them, Beck and Vivian hurry to give Cassie the closure she needs by delivering justice to those responsible for her killing. In this novel, McCauley tackles a very American form of gender-based violence – that of the mass school shootings by young incels whose misogyny drives them to violence against women and the community around them. More importantly, it adroitly shows how the trauma inflicted by such violence reverberates on the community around them and how difficult it is to counter the patriarchy and gun culture that constantly seeks to excuse male perpetrators.
The Top Photo is a Creative Commons image by Nam Phong Bùi from Pexels.
Book Cover Credits
- A Fine Day for Hanging: the Real Ruth Ellis Story – From “A Fine Day for a Hanging: The true story of the last woman to be executed in Britain, soon to be a major TV series, A Cruel Love” (Amazon.com)
- Easy – “Easy” (Goodreads.com)
- Hurricane Season – From “Hurricane Season” (Goodreads.com)
- I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again: Turning Our Family Trauma of Sexual Assault and Chemical Submission into a Collective Fight – From “I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again: Turning Our Family Trauma of Sexual Assault and Chemical Submission into a Collective Fight” (Goodreads.com)
- Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice – From “Liliana’s Invincible Summer: A Sister’s Search for Justice” (Goodreads.com)
- Madwoman – From “Madwoman” (Amazon.com)
- Men Explain Things to Me: And Other Essays- From “Men Explain Things to Me and Other Essays” (Amazon.com)
- Mothertrucker: Finding Joy on the Loneliest Road in America – From “Mothertrucker: Finding Joy on the Loneliest Road in America” (Amazon.com)
- Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice – From “Nobody’s Girl: A Memoir of Surviving Abuse and Fighting for Justice” (Amazon.com)
- Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women – From “Our Bodies, Their Battlefield: What War Does to Women” (Goodreads.com)
- Some Boys – From “Some Boys” (Goodreads.com)
- The Breadwinner – From “The Breadwinner (Breadwinner Series, 1)” (Amazon.com)
- The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World – From “The Hidden Face of Eve: Women in the Arab World” (Goodreads.com)
- The Seventh Bride – From “The Seventh Bride” (Goodreads.com)
- The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service – From “The Story of Jane: The Legendary Underground Feminist Abortion Service” (Goodreads.com)
- We Can Be Heroes – From “We Can Be Heroes” (Goodreads.com)