'10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World' is one of my favorite books of 2020 and an all-time favorite too! Elif Shafak's writing is stunning, the characters are multi-faceted, and the readers are driven to feel deep empathy and connection with each and every one of them! '10 Minutes 38 Seconds' also felt like a love letter to Istambul- by highlighting how diverse, colorful, complex, and utterly beautiful the city is, despite all its flaws. I highly recommend this book, and I will surely be rereading it in the future.

This is a short and easy-to-read satire of a young Belgian woman who starts her first job at a Japanese multinational in Tokyo. I found the protagonist's highly hierarchical and toxic work environment experiences hilarious, especially due to how surrealist and extreme it all becomes. This is not a book that will teach you anything about Japanese society, especially as it was written from a European perspective, and some aspects of how Japanese characters are described can be prejudicial. However, as a light read about the experiences of a young European woman abroad, dealing with culture shocks and navigating her first job, this is a quite amusing book.

An eye-opening intersectional feminist analysis about the 1960-70s reproductive health policies in France: While abortion and contraception were forbidden and criminalized in metropolitan France, the same was encouraged and sometimes even forcefully imposed on women in the French overseas departments, such as the Reunion Island and Martinique. In this book, Françoise Vergès goes into the 'why' of this dichotomic policy implementation and argues for the importance of intersectional feminism and above-all decolonial feminism.

This short novella with gothic undertones is the story of two elderly sisters in the 19th century who lead a puritan life in a close-knit community in a little isolated village, accompanied only by their french housekeeper, Babette. One day, Babette decides to leave and throws the sisters a majestic feast. I found this book nice but nothing special. Disclaimer: I am not the biggest fan of 'classics' as a genre.

Purge is a thriller telling the story of a young Russian girl, Zara, who runs away from a sex trafficking ring and ends up taking refuge in the house of an old lady named Aliide. Set in the Estonian countryside, the story jumps from the present (1990s post-Soviet Estonia) and the past (1940-50s during the German and then Soviet occupation). The reader quickly learns that the stories of these strangers are deeply interlinked.

This is a haunting story about how our decisions and actions can dramatically change the course of our lives. If you are triggered by sexual assault, rape, or graphic descriptions of physical violence, I suggest you skip this one.

'Invisible Women' is an analysis of how the world we live in is designed based on a data gap - the experiences of men are seen as the norm, and that of women are not taken into account. Criado-Perez shows us how, from urban planning to new technologies, women's experiences are ignored. We can feel it in our day-to-day lives in both little things (like huge phones that don't fit our hands) and highly significant ones (like airbags not designed to save us in case of a crash).

Although this is an extremely important, eye-opening, and enraging analysis, the author's choice of 'women' as only cis-gendered women is disappointing.

'Butterfly' is the memoir of Syrian Olympic swimmer and refugee Yusra Mardini. It is an inspiring tale about resilience, adaptation, hope, and never giving up on one's dream. A feel-good book that is also very fitting for young people to read.

In 'Woman at Point Zero,' author Nawal El Saadawi brings us on a heartbreaking journey into a women's prison in 1970's Egypt and tells the tale of a sex worker sentenced to death for the murder of her pimp.

Inspired by true events, the author, who is also a medical doctor, met the protagonist Firdaus in prison during research she was conducting on neurosis in Egyptian women.

'Woman at Point Zero' is a must-read feminist classic, and I highly recommend it too!

I really disliked this book. I found it to be triggering, one-sided, to perpetuate and propagate harmful stereotypes. I do not recommend it.

This is the memoir of Nadia Murad, a Yazidi-Iraqi woman who was abducted, enslaved, and sexually exploited by the Islamic State in Iraq at the age of 21. Murad is one of the thousands of people from the Yazidi minority who were tortured or killed during the ISIS insurgency in Iraq between 2014 and 2017 - an event recognized as a genocide by the United Nations. Murad lost 18 members of her family, including her mother and 6 brothers.

In this incredibly powerful book, Murad details her story, her pain, and her resilience. As difficult as it might be to read or listen to it, it comes nowhere close to how hard it must be for her - and other victims of war atrocities - to tell and relive their stories. It is titled 'The Last Girl' as Murad hopes she is the last girl to have a story like her own.