Bernardine Evaristo’s 2019 Booker-Prize-winning novel, Girl, Woman, Other, is a perfect illustration of the novel’s power to make you empathize with characters unlike yourself. It’s about black womanhood, but it’s also about being unconfined to your identity. 

Correction: The character married to Giles, who reads Betty Friedan's The Feminine Mystique, is not Shirley but Penelope.