This week, April 13 to 19, is “Hate Week,” named after the “holiday” in George Orwell’s 1984. The resulting real event is an opportunity to highlight the realities that people who live under dictatorships and totalitarian states face. We asked our usual rec list contributors for their favorite books on this topic – and, given the tensions of the current time and the dangers so many of us face, we did not restrict them to reccing books with queer representation. The resulting list of books was so long that we are splitting it into two posts – April 13th’s post, highlighting fiction books, and today’s, featuring non-fiction books. The contributors to this list are: Nina Waters, boneturtle, Shannon, Linnea Peterson, Meera S., and E. C.

• Rifqa by Mohammed El-Kurd
• Kaffir Boy: The True Story of a Black Youth’s Coming of Age in Apartheid South Africa by Mark Mathabane
• Democracy May Not Exist, But We’ll Miss It When It’s Gone by Astra Taylor
• Our Time is Now: Power, Purpose, and the Fight for a Fair America by Stacey Abrams
• An Underground Life: Memoirs of a Gay Jew in Nazi Berlin by Gad Beck
• The White Rabbit: The Secret Agent the Gestapo Could Not Crack by Bruce Marshall
• Night by Elie Wiesel
• I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings by Maya Angelou
• On Tyranny: Twenty Lessons from the Twentieth Century by Timothy Snyder
• The Road to Unfreedom: Russia, Europe, America by Timothy Snyder
• How to Stand Up to a Dictator by Maria Ressa
• They Called Us Enemy by George Takei, Steven Scott, Justin Eisinger & Harmony Becker

You can view this list as a shelf on the Duck Prints Press Goodreads, or you can browse it in our Bookshop.org affiliate shop and buy the titles!

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