UWCSEA IBDP Recommended Reading: 25 Books for High School Thinkers

Maya Angelou's landmark autobiography follows her childhood in rural Arkansas through racism, trauma, and the discovery of her own voice. One of the most important memoirs in American literature — raw, lyrical, and unforgettable.

Beryl Markham grew up in Kenya, trained racehorses, and became the first person to fly solo across the Atlantic from east to west. Her memoir reads like a novel — luminous prose about courage, solitude, and Africa.

A Pulitzer Prize-winning memoir about friendship, identity, and loss. Hua Hsu writes about his best friend Ken, murdered in a carjacking in 1998, and what it means to be young, Asian-American, and trying to figure out who you are.

Marjane Satrapi's graphic memoir of growing up in Iran during the Islamic Revolution. Funny, heartbreaking, and politically sharp — told entirely in black-and-white panels that capture both childhood innocence and adult horror.

The founder of Nike tells the story of building one of the world's most iconic brands from a $50 loan. Part business memoir, part coming-of-age story — surprisingly vulnerable and honest about failure, doubt, and obsession.

Robin Swift is brought from Canton to Oxford to study translation — and discovers that the British Empire runs on the magic of silver bars powered by the gaps between languages. A fantasy novel that is also a devastating critique of colonialism, academic privilege, and the violence of translation.

Balram Halwai writes a letter to the Chinese Premier explaining how he murdered his employer and became an entrepreneur. Man Booker Prize winner — darkly comic, savage, and one of the sharpest novels about class and capitalism in modern India.

A modern retelling of David Copperfield set in the opioid-ravaged mountains of Appalachia. Pulitzer Prize winner — funny, furious, and heartbreaking. Barbara Kingsolver's best novel, and one of the great American novels of this century.

Twelve characters — mostly Black British women — whose lives intersect across decades of British history. Joint Booker Prize winner with a form that breaks every rule: no full stops, fluid identities, stories that flow into each other like water. Challenging and exhilarating.

The true story of a racist social media account run by students at a California high school — and the teenagers who exposed it, fought back, and forced their community to confront its own complicity. Essential reading on digital ethics, accountability, and what happens when a school tries to look away.

Piranesi lives in a House with infinite halls, full of statues and tides. He knows every room, every bird, every skeleton. But he is starting to suspect that his world is not what it seems. A short, luminous, philosophical novel about knowledge, wonder, and the prisons we build without knowing.

The British government develops time travel and brings historical figures to the present as an experiment. A civil servant is assigned to help a Victorian Arctic explorer adjust to modern life. What follows is a love story, a spy thriller, and a meditation on empire, displacement, and belonging.

In a near-future world, people buy networked toy animals called kentukis. You can either be a keeper or a dweller who sees through its camera from anywhere in the world. What starts as a cute premise becomes a deeply unsettling exploration of surveillance, intimacy, and control.

Ken Liu's debut short story collection spans science fiction, fantasy, and historical fiction — often in the same story. The title story, about a Chinese mother who folds origami animals that come alive, won the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy Awards simultaneously. Stories about immigration, technology, mythology, and the weight of history.

In a dystopian future, a family in a developing country sells the rights to their organs to a wealthy buyer in the West. A play about globalisation, bodily autonomy, and the economy of desperation — written in 1997 but more relevant every year.

How do you give negative feedback to a Dutch colleague versus a Japanese one? Why do Americans trust contracts while Chinese business culture relies on relationships? Erin Meyer maps cultural differences across eight dimensions. Essential for any student about to enter an international environment.

Kate Raworth argues that 21st-century economics should aim not for endless GDP growth but for a sweet spot between human needs and planetary boundaries — shaped like a doughnut. A book that has influenced policymakers from Amsterdam to New Zealand.

Henrietta Lacks was a Black tobacco farmer whose cancer cells were taken without her knowledge in 1951. Those cells — called HeLa — became one of the most important tools in medicine. Her family didn't know for decades. A book about race, science, ethics, and who benefits from medical progress.

What is a human life worth? Jenny Kleeman investigates the people and industries that put a price tag on existence — from life insurance algorithms to organ markets to the business of death. Provocative, unsettling, and exactly the kind of book that sparks TOK discussions.

Matt Parker makes the case that trigonometry is everywhere — in music, architecture, GPS, and even the shape of a guitar. A joyful, funny book that proves mathematics is creative, beautiful, and far more interesting than your textbook suggests.

Four characters navigate love, politics, and philosophy in the shadow of the 1968 Soviet invasion of Czechoslovakia. Kundera asks whether our lives are defined by heaviness (commitment, meaning) or lightness (freedom, insignificance). One of the great European novels of the 20th century.

Elio, seventeen, falls in love with Oliver, a graduate student staying at his family's villa in northern Italy for the summer. A novel about desire, identity, and the memory of a single season that shapes an entire life. Luminous, sensual prose.

Eli Bell grows up in 1980s Brisbane with a heroin-dealing stepfather, a mother in prison, and a mute brother who writes messages in the air. Based on the author's own childhood — violent, tender, magical, and one of the best Australian novels in decades.

A middle-aged man returns to his childhood home and remembers the Hempstock family — three women who might be goddesses — and the terrifying events of his seventh year. A short, dark fairy tale about memory, childhood, and the things adults forget but children know.

Two stories of displacement connected across eighty years: a Jewish boy sent from Vienna on the Kindertransport in 1938, and a Salvadoran girl separated from her mother at the US-Mexico border in 2019. Isabel Allende weaves war, music, and migration into a story about the endurance of love across generations.