Reading Group Roundup: July 2026

This month we report on groups that have tackled books with big themes: race and racism, women’s oppression and how geography influences politics and history.

Percival Everett’s novel The Trees (2021) is a hard-hitting exploration of racism in America. When the town of Money, Mississippi is beset by a series of brutal murders, a pair of black detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive. They’re prepared for the hostility of the local white sheriff, his deputy and the racist white townsfolk. What they haven’t reckoned with is the second corpse that appears at each crime scene: a body that strangely resembles the real-life Emmett Till, a black boy who was brutally murdered in the town in the 1950s. The book is a mix of horror and knockabout comedy that unsettles the reader at every turn. Everett is a black writer who puts shocking derogatory language into the mouths of his racist white characters and makes us read it. The result is a book that sometimes feels like a slap in the face.

For the group at Huntercombe it opened up wide-ranging discussion of the history of lynching, the horrifying story of Emmett Till and the book as a kind of revenge that creates white characters who are not just vicious but also ignorant and absurd.

Margaret Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale (1985) is a dystopian novel that has been adapted and extended for 6 TV series. Offred is a Handmaid in The Republic of Gilead, a religious totalitarian regime in what was once the United States. The regime is totally controlled by men; women have only one function: to breed and re-populate a world devastated by a catastrophe that remains mysterious. Offred belongs to the household of The Commander, Fred Waterford, who also names her – ‘Of-Fred’. If Offred refuses to enter into sexual servitude, she will be exiled and will likely die. The novel is about her attempts to fight back.

One of the members at Standford Hill had read it 30 years ago and was keen to see if it was still as powerful. The group’s answer was a resounding yes and their discussion raised crucial questions about women’s position in contemporary society as well as in the fictional Gilead. The novel explores the idea of freedom in terms of protection v choice, ‘freedom from’ v ‘freedom to’, and the group debated it with thoughtful energy. They also commented on how relevant the issues still are: ‘There were passages that actually made you stop reading to think about what was happening, because there was a resonance with things happening now.’

Have you ever wondered:

How did the USA become a superpower?

Why do countries go to war?

Why are some countries rich while others are so poor?

Prisoners of Geography (2015, 2025) by Tim Marshall is a non-fiction book about how geography has shaped world history. It’s organised around 10 regions, from Africa and the Arctic to Europe, the Middle East and the Americas, India and Pakistan, Japan, Korea, Russia and China, and it explores how mountains, rivers and seas have affected historical events in each one.

It’s a big book but in recent months groups at both Pentonville and Wandsworth have read it with gusto. The sections can be read in any order and there was lots of discussion about which regions were most interesting and why. Members also commented on how relevant the book is to current events, from Trump’s invasion of Venezuela to the US/Iran war and the Straits of Hormuz. Along with the big picture overview, the book is also chock-full of fascinating facts, from the cost of an Arctic ice-breaker ($1 billion) to the crucial importance of deep-water harbours. Both groups agreed it was a great read, either all at once or to dip in and out of.

And for quite a few it was a great way to get a better handle on things happening today: ‘It helped me understand the news better and I’m now much more interested in it’.

Prison Reading Groups (PRG) was created in 1999 to set up, support and fund informal reading groups in prisons. We currently support more than 75 groups in over 50 prisons nationwide. If you’re interested, check with your library to see if there’s a group in your prison. PRG is part of registered charity Give a Book.