In Protest

These novels are concerned with protesters and protest movements, with individuals and groups set against each other, with ideological division and political conflict, and with the great personal costs which ensue, whether those protests are effective or not.

· In Seattle in 1999, a father and son find themselves on opposite sides of the barricades during protests against the World Trade Organisation, in Your Heart Is A Muscle The Size Of A Fist by Sunil Yapa.

· A multigenerational saga of activists and activism in America, Dissident Gardens by Jonathan Lethem encompasses communism, the civil rights movement, counterculture, the Sandanistas and the Occupy movement, and demonstrates that the personal and the political are indistinguishable.

· The occupation of tribal lands at Bastion Point by Ngāti Whātua in response to a proposed sale by the government is described in the book for middle readers by Tania Roxborough, Bastion Point: 507 Days on Takaparawha.

· Protesters picket the gate of the Immigration Removal Centre where Brittany works in Ali Smith’s Spring, finding herself a cog in the machine of a post-Brexit Britain which is xenophobic, inhospitable and cruel.

· A family in Vancouver invite into their home a Chinese refugee fleeing the government crackdown after the 1989 Tiananmen Square massacre, in Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing.

· The death of a child during the 1980 uprising in Gwangju, South Korea, is the centre of the multiple narratives which comprise the debut novel Human Acts by Han Kang.

· Protest led directly to independence in A Grain of Wheat by Ngugi wa Thiong’o, set in the wake of the Mau Mau rebellion amid preparations for the celebration of Kenya’s independence from Britain.

· Wall St is overtaken by the Occupy movement in The Not Wives by Carley Moore, and three very different women explore the possibilities of forging themselves anew in the chaotic aftermath of class conflict and economic collapse.

· From the frontlines of a revolution, The City Always Wins by Omar Robert Hamilton is set in Cairo during the uprising of 2011, among characters who burn to change the world.

· A small community resists plans to construct a motorway through sacred lands in Patricia Grace’s Potiki.

· In Jasper Fforde’s whimsical satire, The Constant Rabbit, Britain contains a peaceful population of anthropomorphised rabbits, whose integration in the community is a point of escalating social and political debate, sparking division and brutal violence.