Here are 100 books that Imperfect Victims fans have personally recommended if you like
Imperfect Victims.
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When my sister was suddenly arrested in 2017, I was thrust into an upside-down world where I had to quickly understand the severe domestic violence that she had been hiding, while also understanding the criminal legal system that was prosecuting her for killing her abuser. In order to do so, I immersed myself in experts and literature, eventually writing a memoir about the experience. These five books personally helped me understand the full scope of violence against women, whether perpetrated by an abusive person or an abusive system.
The more I learned about the social structures and constructs that perpetuate violence against women, the more I saw how deeply rooted the ideas are in the stories that we tell—the stories that we’ve been telling for centuries. Why aren’t women believed? Where do the misogynistic tropes come from?
This book shows how our culture’s origin stories have been shaped by men, and as Lesser writes, “embedded in the stories are the values and priorities we live by, and what we believe about women and men, power and war, sex and love.” What I love about this book is that it reimagines if women had been the storytellers, and empowers readers to redefine women and power.
What story would Eve have told about picking the apple? Why is Pandora blamed for opening the box? And what about the fate of Cassandra who was blessed with knowing the future but cursed so that no one believed her? What if women had been the storytellers?
Elizabeth Lesser believes that if women's voices had been equally heard and respected throughout history, humankind would have followed different hero myths and guiding stories-stories that value caretaking, champion compassion, and elevate communication over vengeance and violence.
Cassandra Speaks is about the stories we tell and how those stories become the culture. It's…
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
When my sister was suddenly arrested in 2017, I was thrust into an upside-down world where I had to quickly understand the severe domestic violence that she had been hiding, while also understanding the criminal legal system that was prosecuting her for killing her abuser. In order to do so, I immersed myself in experts and literature, eventually writing a memoir about the experience. These five books personally helped me understand the full scope of violence against women, whether perpetrated by an abusive person or an abusive system.
This is another book that personally enlightened me to the core of my sister’s prosecution: misogyny. Before reading Kate Manne’s book, I had a broad and incomplete understanding of “misogyny,” despite it affecting every aspect of our society.
After reading this book—and understanding that misogyny is the way that women are controlled and punished in a patriarchal system—I couldn’t unsee the evidence of misogyny all around me. We cannot challenge gender-based violence without first understanding its fundamental building blocks.
Misogyny is a hot topic, yet it's often misunderstood. What is misogyny, exactly? Who deserves to be called a misogynist? How does misogyny contrast with sexism, and why is it prone to persist - or increase - even when sexist gender roles are waning? This book is an exploration of misogyny in public life and politics, by the moral philosopher and writer Kate Manne. It argues that misogyny should not be understood primarily in terms of the hatred or hostility some men feel toward all or most women. Rather, it's primarily about controlling, policing, punishing, and exiling the "bad" women…
When my sister was suddenly arrested in 2017, I was thrust into an upside-down world where I had to quickly understand the severe domestic violence that she had been hiding, while also understanding the criminal legal system that was prosecuting her for killing her abuser. In order to do so, I immersed myself in experts and literature, eventually writing a memoir about the experience. These five books personally helped me understand the full scope of violence against women, whether perpetrated by an abusive person or an abusive system.
Mariama Kaba’s book stands alongside Emily L. Thuma’s All Our Trials as essential reading to understand the long history of ordinary people taking action to help liberate women from a system designed to punish those who dare to survive men’s violence.
This book is instructive, inspirational, and urgently needed in our current political climate. It’s a reminder that collective organizing is where citizens hold power, and Mariame Kaba is a leader who can help show us the way.
"Organizing is both science and art. It is thinking through a vision, a strategy, and then figuring out who your targets are, always being concerned about power, always being concerned about how you're going to actually build power in order to be able to push your issues, in order to be able to get the target to actually move in the way that you want to."
What if social transformation and liberation isn't about waiting for someone else to come along and save us? What if ordinary people have the power to collectively free ourselves? In…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
When my sister was suddenly arrested in 2017, I was thrust into an upside-down world where I had to quickly understand the severe domestic violence that she had been hiding, while also understanding the criminal legal system that was prosecuting her for killing her abuser. In order to do so, I immersed myself in experts and literature, eventually writing a memoir about the experience. These five books personally helped me understand the full scope of violence against women, whether perpetrated by an abusive person or an abusive system.
This book is the most captivating exploration into the domestic violence epidemic I’ve ever read. Published at the same time as my sister’s high-profile case, this book served as both validation and a deep education into the full scope of intimate partner violence, putting my sister’s experience into a larger context.
With page-turning writing, journalist Rachel Louise Snyder expertly challenges common domestic violence myths and makes readers aware of the signs and symptoms that allow abuse to continue. I think it is a vital reading for every person in our society.
WINNER OF THE HILLMAN PRIZE FOR BOOK JOURNALISM, THE HELEN BERNSTEIN BOOK AWARD, AND THE LUKAS WORK-IN-PROGRESS AWARD * A NEW YORK TIMES TOP 10 BOOKS OF THE YEAR * NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FINALIST * LOS ANGELES TIMES BOOK PRIZE FINALIST * ABA SILVER GAVEL AWARD FINALIST * KIRKUS PRIZE FINALIST
NAMED ONE OF THE BEST BOOKS OF 2019 BY: Esquire, Amazon, Kirkus, Library Journal, Publishers Weekly, BookPage, BookRiot, Economist, New York Times Staff Critics
“A seminal and breathtaking account of why home is the most dangerous place to be a woman . . . A tour de…
People experiencing intimate partner and other forms of violence have been taught that police, prosecutors, and courts are there to respond when they are harmed and to keep them safe. But in my practice representing survivors of gender-based violence, I have both heard about and witnessed first-hand the many ways that the criminal system punishes the survivors that it promised to protect. Survivors are harassed, harmed, and arrested by police. Their experiences of trauma are minimized and denied by prosecutors and judges. They are held criminally responsible for acting in self-defense and for the actions of the people who abuse them.
We don’t usually hear about the toll that incarcerating a mother, a daughter, or a sister takes on the family left behind. Michelle Horton’s beautiful memoir gives us access to that experience. Horton’s life was upended after her sister, Nicole Addimando, was arrested for killing her partner in self-defense.
Horton documents the next several years of their lives as she, her parents, her son, and Nicole’s children (who Horton took guardianship of while Nicole was in prison) navigated Nicole’s arrest, trial, and imprisonment. Illustrative in the mechanics of putting together a successful survivor-defense campaign, it is heartbreaking and infuriating in its description of the toll Nicole’s prosecution took on the family.
In September 2017, a knock on the door upends Michelle Horton's life forever: her sister had just shot her partner and was now in jail. During the investigation that follows, Michelle learns that Nikki had been hiding horrific abuse for years. Stunned to find herself in a situation she'd only ever encountered on television and true crime podcasts, Michelle rearranges her life to care for Nikki's children and simultaneously launches a fight to bring Nikki home, squaring off against a criminal justice system seemingly designed to punish the entire family.
In this exquisite memoir, Michelle retraces the sisters' childhood and…
I’ve lived in the same place for a long time—a complicated yet beautiful place that I love and love to observe. I’ve seen a lot of change, and a lot of folks come and go in my neighborhood and within the walls of my own house. Looking at a building down the street, I can see it two paint jobs ago, the moods of former owners and friends still imprinted there. I’m becoming a relative old-timer here—while the neighborhood sees repeated turnover, I dig in harder. My long track of settledness has nurtured a tendency to chronicle this humble place, to write one version of its story.
I’ll never quite wrap my head around what Machado has done in this memoir about an abusive relationship. It’s written in the second person, which imbues it with a chilling immediacy. The setting is a home the two women share: a cabin in Indiana, the Dream House of the title.
The Dream House is also the concept of an idealized queer relationship and family life that are not available to the narrator, try as she might, in the context of this relationship. Machado takes fever-dream diversions to places where the narrator is gaslit by a charismatic, emotionally vampiric partner. The Dream House is many-chambered; each holds a vision of the narrator denying her very being, and she has to fight to recover it.
'Ravishingly beautiful' Observer 'Excruciatingly honest and yet vibrantly creative' Irish Times 'Provocative and rich' Economist 'Daring, chilling, and unlike anything else you've ever read' Esquire 'An absolute must-read' Stylist
WINNER OF THE RATHBONES FOLIO PRIZE 2021
In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado's engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing experience with a charismatic but volatile woman, this is a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse.
Each chapter views the relationship through a different lens, as Machado holds events up to the light and…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
People experiencing intimate partner and other forms of violence have been taught that police, prosecutors, and courts are there to respond when they are harmed and to keep them safe. But in my practice representing survivors of gender-based violence, I have both heard about and witnessed first-hand the many ways that the criminal system punishes the survivors that it promised to protect. Survivors are harassed, harmed, and arrested by police. Their experiences of trauma are minimized and denied by prosecutors and judges. They are held criminally responsible for acting in self-defense and for the actions of the people who abuse them.
Until I read this book, I didn’t realize that my work with criminalized survivors had a rich historical context. One example: I didn’t know about Joan Little, who stabbed the correctional officer who sexually assaulted her with an ice pick, or about the grassroots survivor defense campaign that sprang up around her.
I could not have situated that specific campaign in the broader context of a non-carceral anti-violence movement that opposed the build-up of the criminal response to intimate partner violence (a battle they ultimately lost). Emily Thuma gave me that historical context—and a lot more to be angry about.
During the 1970s, grassroots women activists in and outside of prisons forged a radical politics against gender violence and incarceration. Emily L. Thuma traces the making of this anticarceral feminism at the intersections of struggles for racial and economic justice, prisoners' and psychiatric patients' rights, and gender and sexual liberation.
All Our Trials explores the organizing, ideas, and influence of those who placed criminalized and marginalized women at the heart of their antiviolence mobilizations. This activism confronted a "tough on crime" political agenda and clashed with the mainstream women's movement's strategy of resorting to the criminal legal system as a…
I have been fascinated with people’s minds since probably my second psychology class in college. It was when I heard a professor say that all creatives were crazy. I argued that one with her. You don’t have to be creative to be crazy; trust me on this, I was right. Yes, many gifted people are borderline, and there really are savants in this world, but I truly believe they are rare. So, I have studied and been up close and personal with people who have psychological issues. I’ve also met some fascinating people who have managed to become successful. Others, not so much.
This book is a debut novel that could have been ripped from the headlines of any newspaper! I was as terrified as Grace through most of this book. I felt her personal terror for herself and her sister. I knew she was on her own with her parents in another country. When someone seems too perfect, there is a flaw somewhere. Please find it before you make any long term committments.
I saw myself in Grace. I could see myself making the same mistakes, overlooking things, because on the surface, everything seemed right. It’s all in the details. This was another book that quickly pulled me in.
THE INSTANT NEW YORK TIMES AND USA TODAY BESTSELLING DEBUT PSYCHOLOGICAL THRILLER YOU CAN'T MISS!
The perfect marriage? Or the perfect lie?
“A hair-raising debut, both unsettling and addictive...A chilling thriller that will keep you reading long into the night.” ―Mary Kubica, New York Times and USA Today bestselling author of The Good Girl
“This is one readers won’t be able to put down.” ―Booklist (starred review)
"A can’t-put-down psychological thriller.” ―Library Journal (starred review)
“This debut is guaranteed to haunt you...Warning: brace yourself.” ―Bustle (10 New Thrillers to Read This Summer)
You thought I was going to list travel guides, didn’t you? Heck no! When I’m planning an adventure, I like to read literature from authors who live there. I wish I had read more Japanese fiction before I moved to Japan for a semester of law school. I studied the language and culture in college and spent an entire spring semester of law school in Japan. I plan to visit my old school in 2025, but even if I don’t, I will continue to read books by Japanese authors because I find the cultural and societal demands of being Japanese fascinating. I wrote a book about my time in Japan.
All of Higashino’s books are great, but this is one of the best, and it happens to be the first novel in the Detective Galileo series, where a physics professor helps a detective solve crimes. Imagine Sherlock Holmes, except set on the streets of Tokyo. We follow Detective Kusanagi of the Tokyo Police as he tries to piece together the mysterious events surrounding a murder where we, the reader, already know who committed the crime.
The format is so very different from your normal crime novel, and that is one of the truly interesting things about this book. It’s still a marvel to me that Higashino keeps you wondering the whole time, even as you already know key parts of the outcome. If you want to understand the Japanese mind in advance of a trip (or move) to Japan, this is a great place to start!
Yasuko Hanaoka is a divorced, single mother who thought she had finally escaped her abusive ex-husband Togashi. When he shows up one day to extort money from her, threatening both her and her teenaged daughter Misato, the situation quickly escalates into violence and Togashi ends up dead on her apartment floor. Overhearing the commotion, Yasuko's next door neighbor, middle-aged high school mathematics teacher Ishigami, offers his help, disposing not only of the body but plotting the cover-up step-by-step. When the body turns up and is identified, Detective Kusanagi draws the case…
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
I have always loved crime fiction, especially those where justice is served. I love crime stories where ordinary people doing their jobs triumph over evil. But so many crime stories are riddled with profanity, sex, and gratuitous violence. Over the last few years, I’ve searched for books that satisfy my need to read about justice but do it cleanly and in such a way that the story is not compromised. Oh, by the way, I’m also a writer of crime fiction and try to stay true to both justice over evil and telling stories in a clean but realistic way.
This is an intense story and kept me on edge while reading, wondering what would happen next. Shannon upped the thrills as the book went on.
I really appreciated the two main characters, Jason and Addison, who are Christians. Unlike many Christian novels, not everyone around them was also a Christian. This book was a realistic example of people who try to live a Christ-like life, but can get caught up in things out of their control.
The romance between Jason and Addison is fascinating as both come into it with so much baggage. I found myself rooting for them and Shannon does a great job building that suspense as well.
The wounds on Jason Gonzalez’s body are nothing compared to the ones on his heart. The former Marine avoids getting close to anyone new, especially his gorgeous next-door neighbor. Until he hears a scream coming from her house in the middle of the night.
Her enemies are too numerous to count.
Addison Foster escaped an abusive marriage and has become an advocate for others. When an intruder breaks into her home and nearly kills her, Addison is rescued by an unlikely protector. But the threats against her aren’t over and she needs help.…
