Contemporary fictions that tackle important social issues

The Man Booker Prize winner of 2016 is an African-American novel of satire on race relations in the United States. The book revolves around the unnamed, black narrator who is coming before the Supreme Court on charges of slave holding and re-instituting segregation. The narrator recounts to the Supreme Court the events that brought him to the present time.
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In a prose nothing short of poetic magic, Kingsolver illuminates the Western arrogance, and the dangers of importing Western ideas to Africa without any respect for the context and local culture.
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Ambitious teenager Craig Gilner is determined to succeed. He does everything it takes to ace his way into Manhattan's Executive Pre-Professional High School, but the pressure becomes unbearable and one fine night, he nearly kills himself. The book explores Craig's suicidal episode till he is finally able to confront the sources of his anxiety.
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A popular African-American professor is denied tenure at the liberal-minded Webster College. Students protest, call the action ‘racism’, and their demonstration gains national attention even though the tenure was denied due to plagiarism issues. Even the principal’s daughter, who joins the protest, suddenly finds herself in the position of power that the loud crowd is fighting against. The novel reveals how complicated situations are often oversimplified and how the truth can lie somewhere between two extreme perceptions.
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This is the story of a young couple living in a violent, war-torn country. They decide to flee and become refugees, running from Greece to London and eventually to the West Coast, as they try to hold onto their past in new, foreign places that aren't always kind to them. This novel talks of a world that is changing fast, with refugee populations flooding into countries that are most of the time ill-prepared to receive them.
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Cleave brings a haunting novel about the tenuous friendship between two disparate strangers — one an illegal Nigerian refugee, the other a recent widow from suburban London. Though the eyes of a young Nigerian girl, Cleave gives human dimension to the stories of refugees from around the world who escape to the West but struggle to comprehend the new culture.
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This best-selling YA novel takes on racism and police brutality. 16-year-old Starr’s friend gets killed by a cop. Starr, enraged by her friend’s unnecessary death, which sparks protests and hashtags, gets to see how his death generates different reactions among her Black and White friends.
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5-year-old Claude wants to be a girl when he grows up, and he likes to wear dresses and carry a purse. His parents, though loving and supportive, are but tackling something foreign to them. The author herself has a transgender daughter. This hard-hitting story puts a fresh perspective to the LGBT debates — and offers a peek inside parenting a child who doesn't fit into society's categories.
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Born almost a generation apart, with very different ideas about love and family, Mariam and Laila are two women brought jarringly together by war, loss, and fate. Hosseini, with his brilliant prosaic skills, brings the challenge of women’s rights in Afghanistan alive in an unforgettable way, and gives the readers a glimpse of the plight that the jihadi reign imposed on liberals, and mostly on women.
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In an ambitious yet empathetic story, Patterson brings to life one of the most apparent geopolitical problems in modern times: the Israeli/Palestinian conflict.
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