One November day, Gisèle Pelicot was called to a local police station and life as she knew it ended. Her husband of fifty years had been caught by a supermarket guard filming up women’s skirts. But on his computer was shattering evidence: for nearly a decade, he had been secretly drugging and raping her and inviting dozens of strangers into their home to abuse her.

Four years later, he and fifty other men were put on trial and Gisèle’s courage in waiving her right to anonymity made global headlines. ‘Shame must change sides,’ she declared, giving voice and hope to millions. Her words became a rallying cry and her decision marked a turning point in public feeling about sexual violence.

In A Hymn to Life, Gisèle Pelicot tells her story for the very first time, offering a testament and promise: that victims have no reason to feel ashamed; that even after unimaginable betrayal we can go on; and that colour will always return to life.

Gina Martin describes A Hymn to Life as ‘a page-turning memoir that will move you to live more’. To mark publication, we’ve returned to five agenda-setting feminist memoirs that moved us just as profoundly.

Maya Angelou describes her work as being about how as humans, ‘we fall and how we somehow, amazingly, stand up again’. An irrepressible hopeful current rises through this modern classic, which opens with Maya’s childhood in the segregated American South, tells of the traumatic sexual abuse she suffered at the hands of her mother’s lover, and ends with her becoming the first black streetcar conductor in San Francisco. In this coming-of-age story, words offer a lifeline, and become a life-force.

Candid, moving and warm, Michelle Obama brings together personal and political, revealing an extraordinary strength of character; busting all patriarchal connotations that might come with the job description of First Lady and reshaping the role to be utterly her own. She is generous with the wisdom she shares along the way and the value she gives to progress in and of itself – rather than a means to an end – can be applied on any level.

The memoir from the youngest-ever Nobel Peace Prize nominee is an extraordinary story of courage, determination and the power of peaceful protest in the name of girl’s education under Taliban rule. In the telling, Malala evokes life in the Swat Valley in Pakistan, as well as the family bonds that sustained her. Inspiring and rebellious, here is the story of a cause brought to global headlines.

Raised by Mormon fundamentalist parents, Tara Westover didn’t have a birth certificate until she was seven years old – and was never sent to school. Educated follows the author’s escape from her extreme and often violent childhood surroundings, and her subsequent quest for self-invention, through study that finally led her to a PhD at Cambridge.

Through the narrative of three generations of women in her family, Jung Chang tells the story of twentieth-century China: from her grandmother refusing to accept her role as a subjugated concubine to her mother’s active role in a changing society, as she rose in the Communist Party. The strength and resilience of women in the face of brutal political, social and physical oppression is extremely powerful.