by Trevor Noah (2016)
Trevor Noah’s unlikely path from apartheid South Africa to the desk of The Daily Show began with a criminal act: his birth. Born to a white Swiss father and a Black Xhosa mother at a time when such a union was punishable by five years in prison, Trevor was kept mostly indoors by his fiercely religious mother to protect him from the government.
Nelson Mandela
The unforgettable autobiography of one of the moral and political titans of our time. Nelson Mandela recounts his twenty-seven-year imprisonment on Robben Island and his triumphant journey to lead South Africa to multiracial democracy.
J.K. Rowling
Harry Potter has never even heard of Hogwarts when the letters start dropping on the doormat at number four, Privet Drive. Addressed in green ink on yellowish parchment with a purple seal, they are swiftly confiscated by his grisly aunt and uncle. Then, on Harry’s eleventh birthday, a great beetle-eyed giant of a man called Rubeus Hagrid bursts in with some astonishing news: Harry Potter is a wizard, and he has a place at Hogwarts School of Witchcraft and Wizardry.
V.C. Andrews
Flowers in the Attic is a 1979 Gothic novel by V. C. Andrews. It is the first book in the Dollanganger Series. The novel is written in the first-person, from the point of view of Cathy Dollanganger. In 1993, Flowers in the Attic was awarded the Secondary BILBY Award. In 2003 the book was listed on the BBC's The Big Read poll of the UK's 200 "best-loved novels." Also contained in: Flowers in the Attic / Petals on the Wind
Randa Jarrar
Nidali, the rebellious daughter of an Egyptian-Greek mother and a Palestinian father, narrates her story from her childhood in Kuwait, her early teenage years in Egypt (to where she and her family fled the 1990 Iraqi invasion), to her family's last flight to Texas.