UWCSEA IBDP Recommended Reading: 25 Books for High School Thinkers

Angelou's account of her childhood between Stamps, Arkansas, St Louis and San Francisco: racism, a childhood sexual assault, and the slow recovery of her own voice. It ends with the birth of her son when she is sixteen. The first of her seven autobiographies, and one of the most important memoirs in American literature.

Beryl Markham grew up in Kenya, trained racehorses, and flew the bush. In September 1936 she became the first woman to fly the Atlantic solo east to west, running out of fuel and crash-landing in Nova Scotia short of her New York target. 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.

The omnibus edition, collecting both parts of Satrapi's graphic memoir and told entirely in black-and-white panels. Part one is growing up in Iran through the revolution and the war. Part two follows her from fourteen, sent alone to school in Vienna, through drug dealing and use, a spell of homelessness, and the hard return to Tehran, a marriage at 21 and a divorce at 24. Funny, heartbreaking, and politically sharp, and a longer and more adult book than part one on its own.

Knight's memoir of the shoe-import business he started in 1964 on a $50 loan from his father and built with his old University of Oregon track coach, Bill Bowerman, into Nike: the near-bankruptcies, the fights with banks, the people around him. Part business memoir, part coming-of-age story, and surprisingly 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 private racist Instagram account run by one student at a California high school, followed by about a dozen classmates, and what happened afterwards to the student who ran it, the followers who said nothing, and the Black classmates it targeted. Slater follows all of them through the discovery, the expulsions, the lawsuits, the protests, and a restorative justice process that did not work. Essential reading on digital ethics and accountability.

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 first collection gathers fifteen stories, published from 2002 onwards, across science fiction, fantasy and alternate history, often in the same story. The title story, about a Chinese mother who folds origami animals that come alive, won the Nebula Award for Best Short Story (2011), the Hugo Award for Best Short Story (2012) and the World Fantasy Award for Short Fiction (2012): three separate award cycles, and the first time any work of fiction had won all three. 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 reports from the places where a cash figure actually gets put on one: the price of hiring a hitman, the cost of saving a child's life through aid work, the price of an IVF baby, and the compensation paid to UK terrorism victims. Provocative, unsettling, and exactly the kind of book that sparks TOK discussions.

Matt Parker's case that triangles and trigonometry run through everything, from engineering and navigation to computing and design. 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.

Northern Italy, summer 1983. Elio, seventeen, falls in love with Oliver, a twenty-four-year-old visiting scholar housed by Elio's father for six weeks. A novel about desire, identity, and the twenty years of memory that follow a single season. 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: Samuel Adler, a Viennese Jewish boy sent to England on a Kindertransport after Kristallnacht in 1938, and Anita Diaz, a blind Salvadoran girl separated from her mother at the US border in 2019. The two lines converge in present-day California. Isabel Allende weaves war, music, and migration into a story about the endurance of love across generations.