By Camilla Sarra. Cover image by Nguyen Thu Hoai via unsplash.
If you’re looking for book recommendations on Instagram, Librantropia is an account worth discovering. Behind it is Sonia, 38, an economics graduate whose day job has little to do with publishing. She spends much of her working day in front of Excel spreadsheets, which might explain why reading has become such an important escape. Moving from numbers to words, she says, feels like “a breath of fresh air.” Librantropia began in September 2021, after Sonia rediscovered novels during the pandemic and started sharing short reviews and impressions on her personal Instagram account. Friends began buying the books she recommended and encouraged her to create a dedicated page. She eventually did, despite admitting to a serious case of impostor syndrome, and gradually the project found its audience. There is no strict editorial formula behind her recommendations. Sonia follows her curiosity, with a particular interest in new releases and international literature, especially English-language and Middle Eastern writers. Classics appear less often — compulsory reading at school left its mark. The result is what she describes as a kind of good literary chaos, where personal taste matters more than following trends. We asked Sonia to narrow down her reading list to five books worth discovering.
The Corrections — Jonathan Franzen
Meet the Lamberts, a Midwestern American family struggling to stay together as their lives begin to unravel. Enid wants her three grown-up children to come home for one last Christmas, but each is dealing with a crisis of their own. Through their complicated relationships, Franzen explores marriage, money, work and the contradictions of American middle-class life. Published in 2001, The Corrections won the National Book Award for Fiction and became one of the defining novels of Franzen’s career. Sharp, uncomfortable and often darkly funny, it’s a story about the distance between the family we imagine and the one we actually have.
James — Percival Everett
You probably know Mark Twain’s Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. In James, Percival Everett revisits the story from the perspective of Jim, the enslaved man who travels down the Mississippi with Huck. When Jim discovers that he is about to be sold and separated from his wife and daughter, he runs away. Everett retains elements of Twain’s original adventure while giving Jim a voice, agency and inner life of his own. The result is a powerful reimagining of a familiar American classic, raising questions about freedom, identity and who gets to tell history. James won the 2024 National Book Award for Fiction and the 2025 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. A remarkable example of how changing the perspective can transform an entire story.
Educated — Tara Westover
Tara Westover grew up in a survivalist family in rural Idaho and was seventeen when she first entered a classroom. Education opened up a world she had never known, eventually taking her to the University of Cambridge, where she earned a PhD. Yet Educated is about much more than academic achievement. Westover explores what happens when learning changes the way we understand our families and ourselves, and the difficult choices involved in building a life beyond the one we were raised to accept. A number-one New York Times bestseller, the memoir has been translated into more than 45 languages. It’s an extraordinary story about independence, belonging and the courage to question everything you’ve been taught.
The Silent Patient — Alex Michaelides
Alicia Berenson is a successful painter living in London with her husband, a fashion photographer. Then one evening, she shoots him five times and stops speaking. Completely. Her silence turns the crime into a public obsession. Alicia is admitted to a secure psychiatric facility, where psychotherapist Theo Faber becomes determined to make her talk and uncover what really happened. But the deeper he investigates, the more unsettling the story becomes. Published in 2019, The Silent Patient was Alex Michaelides’s debut novel and reached number one on the New York Times hardcover fiction bestseller list. If you love psychological thrillers that keep you guessing, this one deserves a place on your reading list.
Shantaram — Gregory David Roberts
At more than 900 pages, Shantaram is a serious reading commitment, but its extraordinary scope is part of the appeal. Lin, an escaped Australian convict travelling on a false passport, arrives in Bombay hoping to disappear. Instead, he becomes increasingly involved in the city’s many different worlds, from running a medical clinic in one of its poorest neighbourhoods to entering its criminal underworld. His journey eventually takes him into violence and war, while his search for belonging becomes the emotional heart of the novel. Drawing on elements of Gregory David Roberts’s own life, Shantaram turns Bombay into a vivid presence, full of contradictions and unexpected encounters. It’s an ambitious, immersive story about friendship, survival and the possibility of starting over.
