Carmen Maria Machado, In the DreamHouse (2019). This memoir from queer American feminist writer Carmen Maria Machado delves into the abusive relationship that Machado experienced with a fellow graduate student. Machado’s work takes an experimental form to account for the lack of representation of violence in queer women’s sexual relationships with each other.

Buchi Emecheta, Second-Class Citizen (1974). Emecheta is a Nigerian feminist novelist, whose representation of a Nigerian immigrant in England still feels groundbreaking. Adah moves to England after her husband and, in this new country where racism and class severely constrain their lives, their relationship becomes increasingly violent. The novel traces the patriarchal experience across the two countries and Adah’s increasing desperation as she becomes the sole provider for her children.

Rachel Louise Snyder, No Visible Bruises: What We Don’t Know About Domestic Violence Can Kill Us (2019). Snyder’s nonfiction book about the ways domestic violence is turned into a “private” issue but is really a public crisis is a challenging read. The book is told through the prism of one story of a domestic violence murder-suicide that illustrates the dangers of trying to leave an abusive environment, in this case a young, working-class woman with two small children. Powerfully indicts communities, police, and families in their inability to understand support victims of domestic violence.

Lexie Bean, ed. Written on the Body: Letters from Trans and Non-Binary Survivors of Sexual Assault and Domestic Violence (2019). Bean edits a ground-breaking anthology that collects writing from trans and non-binary survivors of domestic violence and sexual assault. It includes personal narratives as well as poetry and other artistic works that explore the impact of DV on the body and on perceptions of oneself.