The persecution of LGBTQ people throughout the Nazi regime in Germany is often overlooked when discussing WWII. Given the ongoing (and worsening) persecution of trans people in the United States and elsewhere, this book feels especially important to highlight right now. In it, a trans man and his girlfriend living in Berlin manage to escape capture by assuming fake identities and living in isolation for years. But when a young man stumbles onto their farm on the brink of death, wearing prison garb, Bertie and Sofie know that they have no choice but to help him, even if it means risking the very fate he’s likely just escaped.

When a student uprising in 1980 South Korea is violently suppressed by the government, a young boy, Dong-ho, is killed. Now, as his friend searches for a corpse and his mother desperately seeks answers, Dong-ho’s consciousness still searches for his body. This controversial bestseller by the author of The Vegetarian and We Do Not Part is an act of resistance in itself: a refusal to forget a terrible moment in history that many would rather cover up than remember.

A middle-aged woman overlooked by everyone around her is recruited by British Intelligence to become their first female sabotage agent in France. Yvonne Rudellat thinks her life is over when her apartment is bombed, but somehow she survives. With her home in Britain destroyed and her childhood home of France under Nazi rule, Yvonne decides it’s time to fight back. But no one believes a middle-aged woman will do any good for the war effort, even on the home front. It’s exactly that attitude that will make her the perfect undercover agent. The book is based on the life of a real woman who fought in the French Resistance during WWII, a fact which her family only learned after her death.

While we generally learn about the Underground Railroad in school history classes, as a whole, small and large-scale resistance against enslavers and enslavement in the United States (and abroad) is rarely if ever covered. This book is based on true stories of enslaved people who dared to fight back, even when the consequences could be devastating. From those seeking freedom to those who have already found it in name if not in reality, Burn Down Master’s House is a decisive portrait of resistance in the face of utter brutality.

A woman in solitary confinement reflects on the events that led her to this place, from her birth to Palestinian refugees in 1970s Kuwait to the US invasion of Iraq that made her a refugee once again. How did Nahr find herself locked up in prison in a country she barely knows? She was radicalized by violence, by occupation, by invasion, by the search for a better life for herself and her family. Against the Loveless World is the story of a girl raised in the cross-hairs of warring nation-states and amidst the violence of imperial expansion, a girl who grows into a woman pushed to the very brink.