The novel that changed my mind – ten experts share a perspective‑shifting read
Our beliefs aren’t fixed. They’re shaped, stretched and sometimes overturned by the ideas we encounter as we move through life. For many of us, novels are the moments where that shift happens.
For World Book Day, we asked ten academic experts to share a work of fiction that has challenged their assumptions and changed their thinking in a lasting way.
1. A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines (1968)
A Kestrel for a Knave by Barry Hines showed me that my potential could not be defined by anyone but myself. The novel made me realise how easily labels from teachers and colleagues can become self-fulfilling. If you’re consistently told that you’re bad at something, you often end up believing it; like the main character Billy, and like myself, when my A-Level biology teacher told me I wouldn’t amount to anything in science and that I should quit.
Hines shows that potential isn’t determined by the people who underestimate you. Learning thrives when it is fuelled by passion and determination, and Billy’s dedication to training his kestrel Kes mirrored my own dedication to become a scientist.
The novel reminded me that the most meaningful growth happens when you trust your abilities more than the limitations other people put on you.
Anneliese Hodge is a PhD researcher in biological sciences
2. Beautiful World Where Are You? by Sally Rooney (2021)
Beautiful World Where Are You? follows the lives and loves of two friends for a period in their late 20s. It is the novel that changed my mind in relation to writing about sexual consent, at least, writing explicitly and positively about it.
I thought that consent was a subject rarely tackled by writers, unless to violate it or teach teenagers. In the latter case, it was usually done in a responsible style – not something stylish or sexy. Choosing a formative diet of 19th-century novels from the western canon undoubtedly biased my perceptions. Beautiful World shattered them. Its graphic sex scenes are peppered with the language of consent. Alright? OK? Can I? Do you want? Yes.
Rooney normalises seeking and giving clear, continuous consent, regardless of gender. Consent is integral to these scenes and part of the pleasure for characters and – if her bestseller status is any indication – readers.
Sarah Olive is a senior lecturer in English literature
3. Purple Hibiscus by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2004)
I grew up Roman Catholic in an all-boys school, and I first read Purple Hibiscus as a teenager, when faith was not a question but a climate of incense, rosaries and the quiet mathematics of guilt.
The novel follows Kambili, a Nigerian teenager navigating family, politics and belief under a father whose strict Catholicism masks violence and silence. One scene, in which he pours boiling water over her feet while praying for her soul, captures that terrible fusion of devotion and control.
Across the novel, Adichie unsettled me. I had assumed to question the church was to wound God. She showed me that devotion and questioning can live in the same breath, and that faith is deepened by honest attention rather than unexamined obedience.
This insight continues to shape my thinking about identity, scholarship and everyday moral life, including on African diaspora faith and international development.
Edward Ademolu is a lecturer in cultural competency
4. The Years by Annie Ernaux (2008)
The Years by Annie Ernaux changed my mind on how a life can be narrated.
Childhood by Nathalie Sarraute had already pushed the boundaries of autobiography in 1983 by splitting the narrating self and exposing the inconsistencies of memory. Ernaux masterfully continued along that path, showing how the images and memories that shape us are at once both personal and collective.
The book’s protagonist is approached through descriptions of photographs taken over the years by family members and others. These passages are interwoven with images, events and stories cutting across generations.
What emerges is a fragmented, patchwork portrait that is able to provoke the strongest emotions – immensely more than in a narration where the illusion of the singularity of a life is maintained. And this is probably because of its strange realism, allowing proximity through impersonality. Reading it, I encountered a life as an open space, a theatre of memory where I could wander, moving in and out, getting closer or just passing by.
Cecilia Benaglia is associate professor of French and comparative literature
5. Ministry for the Future by Kim Stanley Robinson (2020)
Kim Stanley Robinson’s Ministry for the Future opened my eyes. Not only to the future reality of climate change, but it also made it clear to me that my naive belief that we could engineer our way out of the problem was very far from the truth.
I’d never read a more visceral description of what living and dying in a world ravaged by climate change would feel like. When the temperature climbs and we hit 100% humidity it’s simply impossible for the human body to cool itself, leaving the power grid straining to keep up with demand as those who can afford it attempt to stay alive with air conditioning.
Nothing short of a fundamental shift in what we value and how we act as a collective can get us close to avoiding the worst consequences of the climate crisis, and whichever way we choose the world will change beyond recognition. We just have to pick which path to follow.
Richard Sulley is a senior research fellow in sustainability policy
Read more: Top climate books to look out for in 2026 – recommended by experts
6. Never Let Me Go by Kazuo Ishiguro (2005)
In Never Let Me Go, humans are farmed so their organs can be harvested by benefactors whenever needed. The book raises numerous moral questions but the core question for me is – how far will we go to meet a human need?
History suggests that we will damage our natural environment and destroy human lives, societies and even civilisations, to meet some human needs. We face this question now regarding technology such as AI and genetic engineering. They meet human needs of quick data processing or improved health outcomes, but present untold negative risks. Our activities around fossil fuels and minerals raise similar concerns.
This core question, raised by my reading of the novel, has shaped my career. It led me to leave a career in business to retrain as a philosopher so that I could combine business theory with philosophy. I now explore ways of continuing to innovate, but do so more awake to the potential harms and perhaps to make trade-offs that favour human dignity rather than economic progress alone.
Athol Williams is a senior fellow in strategy, leadership & ethics
7. The Bluest Eye by Toni Morrison (1970)
Toni Morrison’s The Bluest Eye had a deep impact on me. It changed how I understand racism. The novel shows that racism is not just built into institutions and systems. It also shapes how people see themselves and the world around them. In the book, whiteness is treated as the standard for everything – beauty, goodness, success, and even what it means to be fully human.
The novel details how Pecola Breedlove, an African-American girl growing up in post-Great Depression Ohio, internalises anti-Black racism and develops a crippling inferiority complex through her desperate yearning to have blue eyes. The psychopathological effects of internalising anti-Black racism lead to Breedlove’s eventual insanity, which in a way constitutes her only protection from the misogynoir world.
What is further instructive about Morrison’s work is that it shows what literature, rather than highly technical theory, can do – connects us at a deeply emotional level, helping forge cultures of empathy and care.
Paul Giladi is a reader in philosophy
8. Middlemarch by George Eliot (1871)
Middlemarch calls itself a “study in provincial life”. It traces a picture of how – even in the 19th century – shifts in religion and science created complicated webs of human relationships.
I read the novel when I was 16, an age at which few people’s ideals are taken particularly seriously. Nevertheless, its central character, Dorothea, gave me a hugely formative model of an unapologetically clever, ardent woman shut out from formal education and struggling to find a meaningful channel for the intensity of her faith. Dorothea keeps searching for meaning, no matter how often she stumbles.
Middlemarch changed my mind by teaching me a kind of consolatory optimism: that whether we place our faith in religion or science, both can set us out “with a glorious equipment of hope and enthusiasm and get broken by the way”. To persist, we need “patience with each other and the world”.
Miranda Jane Mourby is a PhD candidate in law
9. Flowers for Algernon by Daniel Keyes (1966)
Back when I was 17, youthfully arrogant and thinking intelligence to be the only virtue worthy of measure, an unassuming sci-fi novel found me.
Flowers for Algernon is told through progress reports penned by the main character, Charlie. Charlie is born with a very low IQ, and is chosen to become the first human subject for an experimental treatment that enhances his IQ over time, eventually making him a genius. The treatment is not successful long term – and so what goes up must also come down.
Transhumanism is the philosophical movement in favour of transforming the human condition through technology, including enhancing cognitive abilities. Flowers for Algernon changed my naïve acceptance of the transhumanist core premises, as the novel forces you to ask instead: What makes intelligence good? Who is this enhancement for, and who does it benefit? How do we define what makes humans “better”?
In these days of tech billionaires investing in gene-editing and hailing the coming of artificial general intelligence, words from this novel still echo in my head: “Intelligence and education that hasn’t been tempered by human affection isn’t worth a damn.”
Sarah Moth-Lund Christensen is a fellow in AI and In/equality
10. Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata (2016)
Whenever I’m asked if I “live to work” or “work to live”, I think of the adage: “I do not dream of labour.” My position has been troubled once, namely by Sayaka Murata’s Convenience Store Woman.
Murata’s novel follows Keiko, a convenience store worker who is socially shamed to leave her job and find a husband. Despite establishing a fake relationship with her workshy former colleague Shiraha, she still earns scorn from their respective families. Keiko ultimately leaves, determined to work at a convenience store again.
Initially, I was tempted to read this as a sad ending. Considering the novel’s critique of how society forces people into specific “norms” against their better judgement, I suddenly paused; was I missing the point?
This is not to say that the novel presents Keiko’s return to low-wage work as a fully positive thing. There is a gothic quality to Keiko’s view that she is a mere appendage of the store’s ecosystem. However, the ending made me consider: as a reader, was I adding to socially prescribed assumptions of what a “happy” ending might look like?
Lillian Hingley is a researcher and tutor in English
Has a novel ever changed your mind? Let us know in the comments below.
Richard Sulley receives funding from The Grantham Foundation for the Protection of the Environment
Anneliese Hodge, Athol Williams, Cecilia Benaglia, Edward Ademolu, Lillian Hingley, Miranda Jane Mourby, Paul Giladi, Sarah Moth-Lund Christensen, and Sarah Olive do not work for, consult, own shares in or receive funding from any company or organisation that would benefit from this article, and have disclosed no relevant affiliations beyond their academic appointment.