King Kong Theory, By Virginie Despentes

A bestseller in her native France, this memoir-come-treatise explains how Virginie Despentes came to write the controversial 1994 novel and 2000 film, Baise Moi.

Beginning with, and continually returning to, her rape, aged 17, by three men, Despentes argues compellingly about women's guilt, men's power and the way that both are still abused three decades after the supposed triumph of feminism.

Her personal memories are more appealing than her theorising, which is enlivened but also confused by palpable anger. And so it should be.