The 100 Complete Boxed Set: The 100 / Day 21 / Homecoming / Rebellion

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Wells eventually realizes that there is something familiar about Bellamy and Octavia; ultimately, he discovers that their mother was Melinda Blake, the woman his father had loved before marrying Wells' mother for the sake of his career. Pratchett’s mighty Discworld series is a high point in modern fiction: a parody of fantasy literature that deepened and darkened over the decades to create incisive satires of our own world. The 29th book, focusing on unlikely heroes, displays all his fierce intelligence, anger and wild humour, in a story that’s moral, humane – and hilarious. After a nuclear apocalypse, survivors live on a dying space habitat. To test if Earth is survivable, one hundred juvenile delinquents, known as the 100, are sent to the ground. People who survived on Earth are known as Earthborns. They survived within Mount Weather and moved to the ground 50 years before the start of the series. Approximately a year ago, the Earthborns split into two groups. Read the review 3 Secondhand Time by Svetlana Alexievich (2013), translated by Bela Shayevich (2016)

The Belarusian Nobel laureate recorded thousands of hours of testimony from ordinary people to create this oral history of the Soviet Union and its end. Writers, waiters, doctors, soldiers, former Kremlin apparatchiks, gulag survivors: all are given space to tell their stories, share their anger and betrayal, and voice their worries about the transition to capitalism. An unforgettable book, which is both an act of catharsis and a profound demonstration of empathy. 2 Gilead by Marilynne Robinson (2004)Mary Beard, whose slim manifesto Women & Power became an instant feminist classic. Photograph: Sarah Lee/The Guardian 54 Women & Power by Mary Beard (2017)

Crace is fascinated by the moment when one era gives way to another. Here, it is the enclosure of the commons, a fulcrum of English history, that drives his story of dispossession and displacement. Set in a village without a name, the narrative dramatises what it’s like to see the world you know come to an end, in a severance of the connection between people and land that has deep relevance for our time of climate crisis and forced migration. Atkinson examines family, history and the power of fiction as she tells the story of a woman born in 1910 – and then tells it again, and again, and again. Ursula Todd’s multiple lives see her strangled at birth, drowned on a Cornish beach, trapped in an awful marriage and visiting Adolf Hitler at Berchtesgaden. But this dizzying fictional construction is grounded by such emotional intelligence that her heroine’s struggles always feel painfully, joyously real.Chart-topping history of humanity … Yuval Noah Harari. Photograph: Olivier Middendorp 21 Sapiens by Yuval Noah Harari (2011), translated by Harari with John Purcell and Haim Watzman (2014)

Read the review 83 Tell Me How It Ends by Valeria Luiselli (2016), translated by Luiselli with Lizzie Davis (2017)A telling description of modern power … Yanis Varoufakis. Photograph: Alkis Konstantinidis/Reuters 86 Adults in the Room by Yanis Varoufakis (2017) What if aviator Charles Lindbergh, who once called Hitler “a great man”, had won the US presidency in a landslide victory and signed a treaty with Nazi Germany? Paranoid yet plausible, Roth’s alternative-world novel is only more relevant in the age of Trump. An electrifying memoir that captured a moment in thinking about gender, and also changed the world of books. The story, told in fragments, is of Nelson’s pregnancy, which unfolds at the same time as her partner, the artist Harry Dodge, is beginning testosterone injections: “the summer of our changing bodies”. Strikingly honest, originally written, with a galaxy of intellectual reference points, it is essentially a love story; one that seems to make a new way of living possible. Normal cells are identically normal; malignant cells become unhappily malignant in unique ways.” In adapting the opening lines of Anna Karenina, Mukherjee sets out the breathtaking ambition of his study of cancer: not only to share the knowledge of a practising oncologist but to take his readers on a literary and historical journey. The title is the question Winterson’s adoptive mother asked as she threw her daughter out, aged 16, for having a girlfriend. The autobiographical story behind Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, and the trials of Winterson’s later life, is urgent, wise and moving.

Read the review 26 Capital in the Twenty First Century by Thomas Piketty (2013), translated by Arthur Goldhammer (2014)

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In the old days, I would go to movie theaters. Not so much anymore. Now, I mostly watch movies through some form of streaming or premium or on-demand access. So, I’m a little “late” on my movie comments. Dylan’s reticence about his personal life is a central part of the singer-songwriter’s brand, so the gaps and omissions in this memoir come as no surprise. The result is both sharp and dreamy, sliding in and out of different phases of Dylan’s career but rooted in his earliest days as a Woody Guthrie wannabe in New York City. Fans are still waiting for volume two.