2016 in books: what to read on your summer break

In a year that saw race and gender issues make headlines, largely in response to the hyperbole of the American election campaign, memoir and fiction dealing with identity politics featured heavily on many bestseller lists this year. Both The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead and Paul Beatty’s The Sellout deal with issues of racism and slavery in the US, but in starkly different ways. The Underground Railroad, published in August, deals with a young slave’s escape from the horrors from bondage and won the National Book Award for fiction, while Beatty’s The Sellout is a biting modern-day satire about a young man’s isolated upbringing and the race trial that sends him to the Supreme Court.