Books like The Women's House of Detention — picked by fans

This is hands-down a standout for me in its unique portrayal of the Asian-American immigrant story. Set during the California Gold Rush, the novel tells the tale of Lucy, a young, orphaned Chinese-American woman, and the adventure she and her sister embark on to carve a new, secure future for themselves.

It is at once an unforgettable adventure and an unflinching exploration of sisterhood that made me consider how the female bildungsroman is often not so much about a woman growing up but rather growing into the self she wants to be, despite the confines of the society in which she lives. Plus, Zhang’s original, gleaming prose is just a delight to read.

An Unkindness of Ghosts opens with the dedication, “To my mother and her mother all the way back to Eve.” While the other four books on this list emphasize the queer and genderqueer people we might choose to recognize as ancestors, this book focuses on Aster’s relationship with her mother, revealing the way that biological family can, in certain instances, support and affirm genderqueer identity.

Jordy Rosenberg does something clever and innovative with the historical fiction genre and reimagines the historical figure of Jack Sheppard as a transgender man. This is a bit of a two-for-one as there’s also the metatextual story, told through footnotes, of a contemporary trans academic who comes across the ‘confessions’ of Jack. It’s playful, knowing, and slippery. It made me think a lot about the nature of history and what we project onto the people of the past. It pairs beautifully with the Bad Gays podcast. 

I’ve never been to the marsh and fenlands of East England, but the descriptions of them in this book have made me really want to visit them!

Among the more insidious and tragic consequences of colonialism and its assimilationist policies is the eradication of indigenous conventions around gender and sexuality. In many indigenous communities, gender and sexuality do not operate in as binary as a fashion as they do in European societies.

Highlighting these historical and contemporary possibilities for what we might call queer identities (or “two-spirit” in some communities), is Joshua Whithead’s breathtaking “Indigiqueer” anthology, Love After the End. Contributors amend the provocation, the future is indigenous, to consider how the future is also queer or indigiqueer. 

Weaving between the traditional and the contemporary, the past and the future, the ancestral and the posthuman, these tales of queer joy, love, and thriving remind us of what was lost and what is still possible as we strive toward mass decolonization.

Audrey Edmunds, a Wisconsin mother providing home daycare, was convicted of killing an infant in her care after the child died and doctors said the child had been shaken to death—Shaken Baby Syndrome.

Edmunds spent over a decade in prison before being exonerated and proving that the evidence used to convict her was flawed and faulty. Some of my own clients, including Tasha Shelby in Mississippi, were wrongly convicted based on Shaken Baby Syndrome when their child tragically died.

If losing your child isn’t tragedy enough, imagine being blamed and punished for it. Audrey’s memoir traces her wrongful conviction, imprisonment, and her reunion with her children, and is a clear example of an accidental tragedy recast as a homicide through faulty forensic science.

I read Queer (In)justice when it first came out in 2012, and it’s still one of the best, and only, books on how the criminal legal system has historically targeted queer people.

I was a staff attorney at the Mississippi Innocence Project at the time, and I was so taken with the book that I immediately reached out to the lead author about our case with Leigh Stubbs and Tami Vance, two women who were wrongly convicted based on their sexual orientation. On June 27, 2012, Leigh and Tami were exonerated after ten years wrongfully in prison.

Queer (In)Justice will, for me, always be connected with their exonerations. The book provided a framework for understanding how queer people have been falsely labeled as dangerous, deviant, and deceptive, and how the criminal legal system has punished us for our identities. 

Every year, the Innocence Network hosts a national conference, gathering nearly 1000 people to learn about and fight against wrongful convictions.

I met Jessica Henry at the conference when she was writing Smoke But No Fire, and it is the first book to give a name to no-crime wrongful convictions. While women are only a part of the book, Jessica informs readers of the phenomenon where people are arrested, convicted, and punished, even though literally no crime occurred. Jessica shares how suicides are mislabeled and punished as homicides, and corrupt police plant drugs on innocent suspects.

The book lays the groundwork to understand that people are punished in our criminal legal system who have not committed any criminal acts. As we’ve learned in the time since her book, 75% of exonerated women were wrongly convicted when no crime occurred, which makes her book crucial reading for understanding the wrongful… show more.

Kent Roach, co-founder of the Canadian Registry of Wrongful Convictions, has spent his career as a lawyer and law professor fighting against wrongful convictions in Canada.

Most known for his best-seller Wrongfully Convicted, Kent recently published Justice for Some, an open-access book comparing wrongful convictions and miscarriages of justice internationally, from the U.S. and Canada to China and India. This robust guide (over 650 pages) is one of the first books to explicitly examine the role of gender and stereotypes in wrongful convictions internationally, and to bring attention to the wrongful convictions of Indigenous women.

Kent and I met and bonded over how a legal remedy called “miscarriage of justice” can free innocent women in no-crime cases by asking whether the state can uphold the integrity of the conviction. A miscarriage of justice standard can bring relief where there is false testimony by police, hidden exculpatory evidence by… show more.

It takes courage to name your book that. Especially in the 90s before self-publishing became a thing. Which did not stop its renegade author from selling xeroxed copies of it in the streets.

Its titular protagonist, who is jobless and homeless after his girlfriend kicks him out, is based on the author himself. He struggles with feelings of inadequacy and a sense of purposelessness. He works odd jobs, writes an occasional poem, meets eccentric strangers, engages in substance abuse, and gets into sticky situations on account of his bad decisions.

While I don’t know about you, I can strongly relate to the character. The book's dark humor is also enough to make it one of my favorites.

Joseph Mitchell was the city reporter for the New Yorker for about half a century. This is a collection of his magazine stories. Many of them involve the old Fulton Fish Market, but he also wrote about weird things like dime museums, gypsies, and stag banquets. 

To me, every story in this collection is like a time capsule. This is the book that made me want to write about New York City because it suggests there is a history on every block there worth recording. If you don’t like a chapter or two, then skip to the next one, but I’ll vouch for 80% of this book being the best non-fiction writing that I have ever read (and I practically read for a living).