All Out War by Tim Shipman (2016)

An essential primer for anyone seeking to understand the politics of the Brexit referendum. Shipman, the political editor of the Sunday Times, gives a vivid and compelling account of the Westminster gambles, compromises and miscalculations that unleashed social forces that prime minister David Cameron utterly failed to anticipate or understand. From Boris Johnson’s ambition-fuelled decision to join the Leave campaign to Jeremy Corbyn’s fatefully low-key endorsement of Remain, Shipman chronicles with élan the how and the why of the country’s fateful decision to “take back control”.

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Revolt on the Right by Robert Ford & Matthew Goodwin (2014)

The book that David Cameron should have read before he called that referendum. Written in 2014, Ford and Goodwin’s groundbreaking analysis was the first to see the real significance of the rise of Ukip in British politics. Long-dismissed as a home for Little England golf-club bores, Nigel Farage’s party had also become a home for a sizeable part of the post-industrial working class. White, blue-collar and older, these alienated voters rejected the social and economic liberalism that both the Conservatives and Labour espoused. Revolt on the Right helps explain why, when their chance came to give the establishment the bloodiest of noses, they grabbed it.

Le Crépuscule de la France d’en Haut (The Twilight of the French Elite) by Christophe Guilly (2016)

A Paris-based geographer, Guilluy has made his name tracing a similar story of popular disillusionment with politics in France. He contrasts the prosperity and dynamism to be found in major cities such as Paris and Bordeaux with the grim realities of “peripheral” France, where a majority of the population spend their lives. While globalisation has benefited the educated urban middle classes, it has also created generations of losers in the small towns and villages of La France profonde. Although the former backed Emmanuel Macron in the recent general election, many of the latter headed for the far right and the far left.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest A culture in crisis. Photograph: Dan Bannister/Getty Images

Hillbilly Elegy: A Memoir of a Family and Culture in Crisis by JD Vance (2016)

In the same ballpark as Ford, Goodwin and Guilluy, but a very different take. Vance is a white conservative who grew up in Middletown, Ohio. This is a place where, he writes, “there was something almost spiritual about the cynicism of the community at large”. His father drinks excessively; his mother is unstable and addicted to narcotics. The town’s population, by and large, distrusts the media and blames the corrupt politicians of Washington DC for its sorry fate. Many will surely have voted for Trump. But though Vance’s portrayal of these angry representatives of the “left-behind” is warm, he unflinchingly draws the connections between their multiple vices and their unhappy lives.

The Road to Somewhere by David Goodhart (2017)

The founder and former editor of Prospect, Goodhart sets out to identify a faultline in British society which, in important ways, has superseded the traditional political division between left and right. “Somewheres” generally live in smaller towns and communities, have an attachment to place and traditions, and dislike the upheavals associated with globalisation, including increased migration. “Anywheres” live in cities, are more socially liberal, internationally minded and have more educational qualifications. The thesis of The Road to Somewhere has been criticised for the simplicity of its ideal-types. But the relevance of its analysis to the Remain/Leave split makes it a must-read.

Corbyn: The Strange Rebirth of Radical Politics by Richard Seymour (2016)

The remarkable story of Jeremy Corbyn’s rise, from rebel backbencher to Labour party leader and possible future prime minister, still has a long way to go. But this attempt to work out how and why it happened is the best early stab at an explanation. Good on the use of social media and “movement” politics, Seymour also highlights just how badly Labour had begun to misjudge its own supporters. A useful counterpoint to the idea that the post-crash challenges to the liberal economic consensus were essentially conservative in nature.

Between the World and Me by Ta-Nehisi Coates (2015)

“Here is what I would like for you to know,” writes Coates in this book-length letter addressed to his 15-year-old son. “In America, it is traditional to destroy the black body – it is heritage.” The emergence of the Black Lives Matter movement, in the wake of multiple shootings of black men by American police officers, is just one indication that the United States is living through the most delicate moment in its racial politics since the civil rights era. Donald Trump, a figurehead for white recidivism when it comes to race, isn’t helping. Adopting the epistolary style of James Baldwin, Coates delivers a passionate call for black reflection on a country in which the “plunder of black life” continues to be, he argues, endemic.

Facebook Twitter Pinterest Yanis Varoufakis on Aegina island in Greece in August 2015. Photograph: Nikos Pilos/The Observer

Adults in the Room: My Battle With Europe’s Deep Establishment by Yanis Varoufakis (2017)

During the long agony of the Greek debt crisis, Yanis Varoufakis became the leather-clad, motorbike-riding poster-boy for Europe’s socialists. When he became the country’s finance minister in 2015, Varoufakis was an idealist with faith in the power of argument. As a former economics lecturer, he believed that he would be able to demonstrate to the likes of Wolfgang Schäuble, his opposite number in Germany, that the harsh medicine of austerity, prescribed by Brussels and Berlin, was killing the Greek economy, rather than curing it. This vivid account of how that went (badly), is a chronicle of one intellectual’s political disillusionment.

Capital in the Twenty-First Century by Thomas Piketty (2013)

Seven-hundred pages long, highly technical and packed with graphs and statistics, this book was the unlikeliest of bestsellers. But the impact of Piketty’s book testifies to the rising profile of the issue it addresses: inequality. Foregrounding the role of inherited wealth in driving unequal outcomes in western societies, Piketty claims to lay bare the mechanism that ensures the rich get richer and pull away from the rest of society. How much work they or anyone else actually does is a side-issue, compared to the rate of return on their capital. A “confiscatory” global tax on inherited wealth is Piketty’s solution to the growing gulf in living standards between the asset-rich and the asset-poor.

How Will Capitalism End? by Wolfgang Streek (2016)

Streeck is one of Germany’s most eminent sociologists and this collection of essays is, at one level, an ethnography of everyday life in post-crash, western capitalism. Burdened by debt, unlikely ever to get a decent pay rise, and resigned to the erosion of the public sphere through cuts and neglect, we get by, says Streeck, through “coping, hoping, doping and shopping”. The crash brought the era of debt-fuelled economic growth to a calamitous end, so there is little prospect of an upturn anytime soon. And, in the post-industrial, globalised era, there is little or no scope for a socialism-in-one-country-type solution. Instead, according to Streeck, capitalism “will for the foreseeable future hang in limbo, dead or about to die from an overdose of itself but still very much around”. Pour yourself a consolatory glass of whisky before reading.

This is part of the Observer’s 100 political classics that shaped the modern era. Please leave suggestions below of books that inspired and shaped your political consciousness and we’ll round up the best in next week’s Observer