There’s been a lot going on recently, a lot of heartbreak, protests, new movements, anger, frustration, and the realisation of learning, that we have a lot to start learning.

A lot of us have a lot to learn, a lot of us have a lot to grasp and a lot of us have a lot of changing to do in order to make this world a better place for everyone. We cannot let this go on, it’s something we find hard to get our heads round. Shocked and in disbelief that this is still happening, and how it is still allowed. We are sorry, and we want to help.

Below you will find a collection of books we will be getting our hands on to start educating ourselves on the history, the politics, the stories and the ways we can change the future. Remember, we do not just read to escape, we read to educate. #blacklivesmatter

They Can’t Kill Us All by Wesley Lowery

A deeply reported book that brings alive the quest for justice in the deaths of Michael Brown, Tamir Rice, and Freddie Gray, offering both unparalleled insight into the reality of police violence in America and an intimate, moving portrait of those working to end it.

Conducting hundreds of interviews during the course of over one year reporting on the ground, Washington Post writer Wesley Lowery traveled from Ferguson, Missouri, to Cleveland, Ohio; Charleston, South Carolina; and Baltimore, Maryland; and then back to Ferguson to uncover life inside the most heavily policed, if otherwise neglected, corners of America today. 

They Can't Kill Us All grapples with a persistent if also largely unexamined aspect of the otherwise transformative presidency of Barack Obama: the failure to deliver tangible security and opportunity to those Americans most in need of both.

*Amazon

Between The World & Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates

For Ta-Nehisi Coates, history has always been personal. At every stage of his life, he's sought in his explorations of history answers to the mysteries that surrounded him -- most urgently, the mystery of race, an abstract concept that put the safety of him and the people he loved the most, including his son, in constant jeopardy.

Here, Coates takes readers along on his journey through America's history of race and its contemporary resonances through a series of awakenings - moments when he discovered some new truth about our long, tangled history of race, whether through his myth-busting professors at Howard University, a trip to a Civil War battlefield, a journey to Chicago's South Side to visit aging survivors of 20th century America's "long war on black people," or a visit with the mother of a beloved friend who was shot down by the police.

* Waterstones

They Hate U Give by Angie Thomas

Inspired by the Black Lives Matter movement, this is a powerful, gripping and piercingly relevant YA novel about inequality, police violence, 21st century prejudice and one girl’s struggle for justice.

Sixteen-year-old Starr lives in two worlds: the poor neighbourhood where she was born and raised and her posh high school in the suburbs. The uneasy balance between them is shattered when Starr is the only witness to the fatal shooting of her unarmed best friend, Khalil, by a police officer.

Now what Starr says could destroy her community. It could also get her killed.

‘The Hate U Give is an outstanding debut novel and says more about the contemporary black experience in America than any book I have read for years, whether fiction or non-fiction.’ – The Guardian

* Waterstones

Beloved by Toni Morrison

The winner of the 1988 Pulitzer Prize and a finalist for the 1987 National Book Award, Beloved remains American novelist Toni Morrison’s crowning achievement. Dedicated to the ‘Sixty Million and more’ Africans and their descendants who died as a result of the slave trade, the novel remains both a mesmerising family story and a landmark depiction of the legacy of slavery, both on individuals and America’s national psyche.

Set in the mid-1800’s in the aftermath of the American Civil War, Belovedchronicles the experiences of Sethe, abandoned by her sons and living with her youngest daughter in Cincinnati. Sethe’s is a house haunted by secrets; of the violent, traumatic memories of her former enslaved life at Sweet Home, Kentucky and by shameful secrets that refuse to stay buried.

* Waterstones

The Fire Next Time by James Baldwin

The landmark work on race in America from James Baldwin, whose life and words are immortalized in the Oscar-nominated film I Am Not Your Negro.

'We, the black and the white, deeply need each other here if we are really to become a nation'

James Baldwin's impassioned plea to 'end the racial nightmare' in America was a bestseller when it appeared in 1963, galvanising a nation and giving voice to the emerging civil rights movement.

Told in the form of two intensely personal 'letters', The Fire Next Time is at once a powerful evocation of Baldwin's early life in Harlem and an excoriating condemnation of the terrible legacy of racial injustice. 

* Waterstones

Your Silence Will not Protect You by Audre Lorde

Audre Lorde (1934-92) described herself as ‘Black, lesbian, mother, warrior, poet’. Born in New York, she had her first poem published while still at school and her last the year she died of cancer.

Her extraordinary belief in the power of language – of speaking – to articulate selfhood, confront injustice and bring about change in the world remains as transformative today as it was then, and no less urgent.

If books really aren’t your thing, how about spending a day curled up on the couch watched numerous documentaries or films. Here are the ones on our list:

Just Mercy, Destin Daniel Cretton

Strong Island, Yance Ford

21 Days a Slave, Steve McQueen

13th, Ava DuVernay

The Long Song, Mahalia Belo

When They See Us, Ava DuVernay

BlackKklansmen, Spike Lee

If Beale Street Could Talk, Barry Jenkins

The Colour Purple, Stephen Spielberg

The Help, Tate Taylor