Join author and Pulitzer Prize winner Isabel Wilkerson, in conversation with Sofia Akel to celebrate the paperback publication of her bestselling book Caste.

CASTE: The Origins of Our Discontents spent fifty-eight consecutive weeks on the NYT bestseller list and landed with such phenomenal force in August 2020 that it is only being published in paperback nearly three years later. 

Beyond race and class lies a caste system that shapes people’s lives, behaviour, and a nation’s fate. In a book that changed the conversation in America, Isabel spotlights the insidious undertow of caste and the effects of its human hierarchy on our culture, politics, and everyday lives. She explores the pillars that support caste systems across civilisations, illuminating their effects through deeply researched human narratives, before proposing how we can move beyond these artificial and destructive human divisions and toward hope in our common humanity.

With a devastating new Afterword, Isabel shows how that system is playing out right now in America, from the Capitol riots to the restriction of voting rights; from the reversal of abortion rights for women in many US states, where this book is often banned or barred from their school systems and public libraries; to the conspiratorial rise of ‘Replacement Theory’, and how the struggle to hold their place in a caste system drives some people to trample democracy itself.

This incredibly special event will see Isabel and Sofia discuss the pertinence of this powerful book from it’s publication three years ago to today. Do not miss this incredibly striking and necessary event.

"When you engage with the beauty of her storytelling, it is Wilkerson’s lightness of spirit that helps explain the book’s stunning success" Afua Hirsch

"The most important book I've ever selected for my book club. Should be required reading for humanity" Oprah Winfrey