Here are 55 books that Aya fans have personally recommended if you like
Aya.
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I have spent most of my professional life trying to understand why the criminal justice system so often gets things wrong. For twenty-five years, I served as Director of the California Innocence Project and helped free innocent people from prison, including individuals serving life sentences and facing execution. Along the way, I became fascinated not only by wrongful convictions themselves, but by the larger cultural forces that shape how societies think about crime, punishment, race, fear, and justice. The books on this list deeply influenced both my work and my understanding of the human beings trapped inside the system. They are the books I return to when I want to remember why this work matters.
I love this book because Bryan Stevenson combines moral clarity with genuine compassion, even for people who have done terrible things.
As someone who has spent decades working on wrongful convictions, I recognized so much of the emotional reality in these pages, the exhaustion, the small victories, the moments that restore your faith in humanity, and the crushing setbacks. What stayed with me most was Stevenson’s refusal to reduce anyone to the worst thing they had ever done. I think that perspective is desperately needed in modern discussions about crime and punishment.
This is one of the rare books that can genuinely change the way a reader sees both the legal system and the people trapped inside it.
NOW A MAJOR MOTION PICTURE, STARRING MICHAEL B. JORDAN, JAMIE FOXX, AND BRIE LARSON.
A NEW YORK TIMES, WASHINGTON POST, BOSTON GLOBE, ESQUIRE, AND TIME BOOK OF THE YEAR.
A #1 New York Times bestseller, this is a powerful, true story about the potential for mercy to redeem us, and a clarion call to fix America's broken justice system, as seen in the HBO documentary True Justice.
The US has the highest rate of incarceration in the world. One in every 15 people born there today is expected to go to prison. For black men this figure…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I’m a civil rights attorney, author, and lifelong educator. My work has focused on addressing racial disparities in education and criminal justice. I worked on the Campaign for Prison Phone Justice and created restorative justice programs in schools. As a leadership scholar, I read books on remarkable sheroes and heroes. This provides me with keen insights into the leadership characteristics of changemakers while developing the tools to better understand how to build and sustain social change.
This book is a roadmap on how to be an inclusive leader. It explores the history of race in America through a firsthand account of Dr. Kendi.
In addition, the book explores the interpersonal and intrapersonal dimensions of cultural engagement. By doing so, it offers the tools needed to understand how to challenge your own biases, stereotypes, and prejudices. It also provides the invitation to pause, reflect, and grow by encouraging self-reflection.
NOT BEING RACIST IS NOT ENOUGH. WE HAVE TO BE ANTIRACIST.
'Transformative and revolutionary' ROBIN DIANGELO, author of White Fragility
'So vital' IJEOMA OLUO, author of So You Want to Talk About Race
In this rousing and deeply empathetic book, Ibram X. Kendi, one of the world's most influential scholars of racism, shows that neutrality is not an option: until we become part of the solution, we can only be part of the problem.
Using his extraordinary gifts as a teacher and story-teller, Kendi helps us recognise that everyone is, at times, complicit in racism whether…
I’m a civil rights attorney, author, and lifelong educator. My work has focused on addressing racial disparities in education and criminal justice. I worked on the Campaign for Prison Phone Justice and created restorative justice programs in schools. As a leadership scholar, I read books on remarkable sheroes and heroes. This provides me with keen insights into the leadership characteristics of changemakers while developing the tools to better understand how to build and sustain social change.
General Harriet Tubman provides an in-depth look at Tubman’s leadership legacy.
You discover her passion for justice and commitment to ensuring freedom for all. Most publications on Tubman focus on her role in the Underground Railroad. Her courage and tenacity helped many to break free from the bondage of slavery. This is only one dimension of her life. She was also a spy for the Union Army.
In addition, she helped to organize a community in Canada for hundreds who had escaped from slavery and reclaimed their liberty.
Written by Earl Conrad and originally published by Carter G. Woodson and the The Associated Publishers in 1943 and 1990, General Harriet Tubman is a well-researched and documented biography. It draws on the accounts of Tubman's living relatives and others with expert knowledge of the period in which she lived. Perhaps, for this reason, in his Acknowledgements for the first edition, Conrad likened the book to Tubman herself: "Scores of people have contributed to the information, the understanding, and diverse other assistance that has been necessary in effecting this complete life of Harriet Tubman. I could not possibly call it…
Delve into this internationally best-selling series, now complete! A fast paced laugh-out-loud mix of Urban Fantasy and Mystery.
I can tell when you’re lying. Every. Single. Time. I’m Jinx, a PI hired to find a missing university student, I hope to find her propped up at a bar–yet my gut…
I’m a civil rights attorney, author, and lifelong educator. My work has focused on addressing racial disparities in education and criminal justice. I worked on the Campaign for Prison Phone Justice and created restorative justice programs in schools. As a leadership scholar, I read books on remarkable sheroes and heroes. This provides me with keen insights into the leadership characteristics of changemakers while developing the tools to better understand how to build and sustain social change.
Moses was her name because she was determined to see her people set free.
Drawing upon the biblical Moses, the book outlines the parallels between the lives of Moses (who led his people to the Promised Land) and Harriet Tubman (who was guided to freedom by the North Star). This book provides children with the inspiration to serve as leaders. They recognize that they too can combine faith and freedom to make a difference in the world.
A Caldecott Honor Book A Coretta Scott King Award Winner
From a highly acclaimed author and bestselling artist comes a resounding, reverent tribute to Harriet Tubman, the woman who earned the name Moses for her heroic role in the Underground Railroad.
I set the North Star in the heavens and I mean for you to be free...
Born into slavery, Harriet Tubman hears these words from God one summer night and decides to leave her husband and family behind and escape. Taking with her only her faith, she must creep through woods with hounds at her feet, sleep for…
I was attending graduate school in Mankato, Minnesota when I first discovered that 38 Dakota men were hanged there on December 26, 1862. I was shocked to find out that the largest simultaneous mass execution in United States history happened right where I lived and I knew nothing about it. Since then, I’ve dedicated myself to learning, understanding, and sharing the history of the U.S. – Dakota War of 1862. Over the years, I’ve discovered not just the history, but the legacy of that history for us today. Someday, I hope we all come to understand, and eventually break down, that legacy.
In Rez Life, David Treuer, an Ojibwe from the Leech Lake Reservation, shows us the real-life consequences of historical events and policy. Through scholarship and anecdote, Treuer teaches readers what it really means to be Native American in a country that has tried, time and again, to erase them. Rez Life is not the history book rendition of past wrongs and tragic events. Instead, it is an articulate, expressive look at the people who live with the legacy of those past wrongs and tragic events. It shows readers the Native Americans they won’t see in history books—the ones that exist today, fighting to overcome the trauma thrust upon them.
A prize-winning writer offers “an affecting portrait of his childhood home, Leech Lake Indian Reservation, and his people, the Ojibwe” (The New York Times).
A member of the Ojibwe of northern Minnesota, David Treuer grew up on Leech Lake Reservation, but was educated in mainstream America. Exploring crime and poverty, casinos and wealth, and the preservation of native language and culture, Rez Life is a strikingly original blend of history, memoir, and journalism, a must read for anyone interested in the Native American story. With authoritative research and reportage, he illuminates issues of sovereignty, treaty rights, and natural-resource conservation.…
I am a writer of true crime, which makes me keenly aware of the credibility of police procedural books. I also write crime fiction and am drawn to series that provide an interesting and thought-provoking protagonist in the framework of excellent writing. I survived an attempted abduction as a child and have had an interest in crime books since then, starting with the Jane Withers mystery my dad brought home from Goodwill and, of course, the Nancy Drew series.
I loved the imaginative characters, from Detective Lucas Davenport to the brilliant serial killer. Their unique characteristics kept me flipping the pages as fast as I could.
The perpetrator followed a list of rules for his sick, violent games of death. With each body, he left a note describing one of them. Davenport is determined, principled, and ready to take on any foe in his pursuit of justice, even if it means breaking a few rules of his own.
**Don't miss John Sandford's brand-new thriller Ocean Prey - out now**
#1 New York Times bestselling author John Sandford's 'haunting, unforgettable, ice-blooded thriller' - first in the Lucas Davenport series!
The killer was mad but brilliant.
He left notes with every woman he killed. Rules of murder: Never have a motive. Never follow a discernible pattern. Never carry a weapon after it has been used...So many rules to his sick, violent games of death.
But Lucas Davenport, the cop who's out to get him, isn't playing by the rules.
On the morning of December 26, 2004, an undersea earthquake struck off the coast of Sumatra in the Indian Ocean. The resulting tsunami killed an estimated 230,000 people across fourteen countries, from Indonesia to Sri Lanka to Thailand to the Maldives to India and all the way to East Africa.…
I'm an avid reader, lover of history, and newly-published author of The Real History of Thanksgiving (with more projects in the works!). I'm a mother of two and come from a large family at Gaa-waabigaanikaag, White Earth Reservation. I'm enrolled citizen of the White Earth Band of Ojibwe. I'm also an Oneida descendent with Irish, French, and Black ancestry. Much of my journey as a writer has been exploring the threads of our humanity and histories. It's powerful to think that we are still here, through time, distance, love, pain, and survival. There is immense beauty in being human and being Indigenous, and these books have been a source of connection and learning in my journey.
This book explores blood quantum, a faulty metric of “Indian blood” used to determine who is eligible for citizenship in a Native American tribe.
Blood quantum is a hot topic of discussion and continues to be controversial in Indian Country. Doerfler frames the issue expertly when she explores the real history of how White Earth Anishinaabeg at different periods of time conceive of identity. Or rather, who belongs, which is at the root of being Native American, both politically and personally.
My own feelings about blood quantum, once waffling and unsure, have evolved over the years. This book solidified my belief that blood quantum is built to destroy tribal nations and Indigenous identity.
Despite the central role blood quantum played in political formations of American Indian identity in the late nineteenth and twentieth centuries, there are few studies that explore how tribal nations have contended with this transformation of tribal citizenship.
Those Who Belong explores how White Earth Anishinaabeg understood identity and blood quantum in the early twentieth century, how it was employed and manipulated by the U.S. government, how it came to be the sole requirement for tribal citizenship in 1961, and how a contemporary effort for constitutional reform sought a return to citizenship criteria rooted in Anishinaabe kinship, replacing the blood…
My first books were set in and around San Francisco, an area I knew well and with plenty of opportunities for crime stories. When we moved to Montana twenty years ago, people asked when I’d write one there. I resisted setting dark stories in my own city, where my kids were growing up. Reading about the Bakken Oil Formation in North Dakota, a boom of wealth and expansion and a subsequent bust, offered a perfect storm—the kind that drives desperation, where locals conflict with newcomers, where money—new and old—drives people to make bad decisions. After a visit to the area, the fictional town of Hagen, North Dakota, and the Badlands Thriller Series was born.
Unspeakable Things is based on a true crime from Jess Lourey’s own small, Minnesota hometown.
Set in the 1980s, Cassie McDowell’s life on a farm with her sister and parents looks like a perfect childhood. She loves school, has a crush on the nicest boy… But when local boys start to go missing and the haunting crimes become a pall over this idyllic childhood and the more Cassie learns about what is happening, the more she realizes that the monster she feared under the bed may be real.
The point of view of 13-year-old Cassie draws you back to the age when we make that subtle but permanent shift from childhood into the brutal reality of the adult world. Fraught and tense, this is the kind of story that stayed with me long after I read the final page.
Inspired by a terrifying true story from the author's hometown, a heart-pounding novel of suspense about a small Minnesota community where nothing is as quiet-or as safe-as it seems.
Cassie McDowell's life in 1980s Minnesota seems perfectly wholesome. She lives on a farm, loves school, and has a crush on the nicest boy in class. Yes, there are her parents' strange parties and their parade of deviant guests, but she's grown accustomed to them.
All that changes when someone comes hunting in Lilydale.
One by one, local boys go missing. One by one, they return changed-violent, moody, and withdrawn. What…
As author and editor of six books about cemeteries, I have visited gravesites all around the world, from the world-famous to little family burial grounds to tombs tucked inside churches. On my travels, I’ve collected more than 300 books about cemeteries. My absolute favorites are the memoirs in which people—who are as passionate about cemeteries as I am—take me along on their graveyard adventures. I want to know what cemeteries mean to people, whether they’re travelers like me, or grew up in cemeteries, or worked in them, or are fiercely curious about the inequities that follow us to the grave. So many cemeteries, so little time!
I grew up down the road from the small-town cemetery where my family was buried.
In contrast, Rachael Hanel's father was a small-town cemetery caretaker. As a child, she helped him collect the silk flowers so he could mow around gravestones. Rachael studied other people's grief and thought she was comfortable with it. Then her father suddenly died of cancer, and her perfect family disintegrated.
Hanel's Midwestern distrust of emotions is very familiar to me. Rereading this book—before and after my own father's death—completely altered the way it affected me. Be prepared if your own grief is still fresh.
Rachael Hanel's name was inscribed on a gravestone when she was eleven years old. Yet this wasn't at all unusual in her world: her father was a gravedigger in the small Minnesota town of Waseca, and death was her family's business. Her parents were forty-two years old and in good health when they erected their gravestone-Rachael's name was simply a branch on the sprawling family tree etched on the back of the stone. As she puts it: I grew up in cemeteries.
And you don't grow up in cemeteries-surrounded by headstones and stories, questions, curiosity-without becoming an adept and sensitive…
Nelson West, a former Chicago homicide detective, is hired by wealthy heir Lionel Bing to discreetly help “fix” scandals and legal problems for his father’s wealthy friends.
Bing, a brilliant but troubled investigator, suffers from PTSD symptoms as a result of being kidnapped and witnessing the murder of his mother…
After more than 30 years in daily journalism in Minnesota, I moved to a trout stream near Durango, Colo., to stage a second act. Editors at the Minneapolis Star Tribune, where I worked for 26 years, gave me a freelance contract to write a Minnesota History column every Sunday. It’s morphed into a popular crowd-sourcing of history with readers feeding me delicious family stories. I’m the lucky one who gets to weave these stories—enriching my knowledge of what being Minnesotans is all about.
A master of nonfiction crime writing, William Swanson uses his W.A. Winter pen name for fictional works, including this 2022 book that clung to my thoughts weeks after the last page. Based loosely on a Minnesota crime spree in the 1950s, Winter takes readers into the mind of Joe Lavoie—the wheelchair-bound lone survivor of three brothers who engaged in a shootout with police in 1953. Set in 1991, 38 years after the crippling police gunshot, the taut writing takes you into Joe’s mind and explores his dysfunctional family on what turns out to be his last stand.
Minneapolis, 1953—A wild crime spree stuns the Upper Midwest, leaving a trail of blood and betrayal that terrifies a region and shatters the family at its core.
Thirty-eight years later, the tattered remnants of the notorious LaVoie crime family—sisters, brothers, and children too young to remember or understand—gather for an edgy reunion in a Minneapolis suburb. Among the guests is Joe LaVoie, sole survivor of the fraternal gang behind the ’50s bloodshed, a convicted cop-killer crippled by a police bullet during the final shootout. Now, an old man facing his own death, Joe is both desperate and terrified to…
