Books are the thing I return to before anything else.
When I am trying to understand something about myself, there is a book that has already been there. When I am preparing for a trip, there is a book that has walked those streets before me. When I need to feel less alone in something, there is always, always a book for that.
I have been a reader for as long as I can remember and a writer for almost as long. The two things are not separate. You cannot write well without reading widely and you cannot read without eventually having things you need to say.
This is the shelf. It changes as I do. Come and browse.
What I Am Reading Right Now
One book at a time. This is the one on my bedside table right now — the one I am reading slowly because I do not want it to end, or quickly because I cannot put it down.
I update this monthly. Sometimes I finish something and take a few days to find the next right thing. That pause is part of the practice.
Books I Keep Recommending
These are the books I have pressed into people’s hands, sent as gifts, or mentioned in conversation more times than I can count. Not a complete reading list. A curated shortlist of the ones that have done something real.
Organised by what they are for rather than by genre. Because the question I usually get is not what kind of book is this but what do I read when I need this specific thing.
WHEN YOU ARE TRYING TO UNDERSTAND YOURSELF
The Body Keeps the Score
Author: Bessel van der Kolk
The most important book I have read about what trauma does to the body and how healing actually works. Required reading for anyone who has ever wondered why they feel what they feel in their body when nothing is visibly wrong.
Man’s Search for Meaning
Author: Viktor Frankl
Written in a Nazi concentration camp. About finding meaning in suffering. I return to this when the difficulty of my own life needs perspective and depth.
The Gifts of Imperfection
Author: Brene Brown
About letting go of who you think you should be and embracing who you are. The research is real. The writing is accessible. The impact is lasting.
WHEN YOU NEED TO UNDERSTAND THE WORKPLACE
Invisible Women
Author: Caroline Criado Perez
About the data gap that affects women in every sector of public and professional life. Infuriating, necessary, and meticulously researched. I reference this book constantly in my professional life writing.
Dare to Lead
Author: Brene Brown
On courageous leadership and what it actually requires. More honest and more demanding than most leadership books. Worth reading whether you lead people or not.
Lean In
Author: Sheryl Sandberg
Contested, imperfect, and still worth reading. The conversation it started is more important than its limitations.
WHEN YOU ARE PREPARING TO TRAVEL
Eat Pray Love
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert
I know. I know. But the Italy section alone is worth the whole book and the honesty about what searching looks like from the inside is still one of the most accurate portraits I have read.
The Alchemist
Author: Paulo Coelho
Read before any significant journey. The kind of book that means different things at different points in your life.
Notes from a Small Island
Author: Bill Bryson
On Britain specifically but the quality of attention Bryson brings to the ordinary is what makes it useful for any travel. He taught me to look more carefully at the places I visit.
WHEN YOU ARE BUILDING SOMETHING
Big Magic
Author: Elizabeth Gilbert
On creative living beyond fear. The chapter on ideas as living entities that choose their collaborators changed how I think about my own writing entirely.
Atomic Habits
Author: James Clear
The most practically useful book on behaviour change I have read. Not because the ideas are new but because the application is so specific and so honest about how change actually works.
The War of Art
Author: Steven Pressfield
On resistance. The thing that sits between you and the work you know you are supposed to be doing. Short. Devastating. Keep it close.
FICTION THAT STAYS WITH YOU
Homegoing
Author: Yaa Gyasi
A novel that follows a Ghanaian family across generations and continents. The most recent book I have read that made me stop mid-chapter and sit with what I had just read before I could continue.
Purple Hibiscus
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
The first Adichie book I read and still the one I return to. About family, faith, silence, and what it costs to speak.
The God of Small Things
Author: Arundhati Roy
About a family in Kerala, India, but also about everything. The prose is unlike anything else I have read. I underlined every other sentence.
Books I Wrote
I have been writing and publishing for most of my adult life.
The books below are the ones I am most proud of. Each one came from a place that was real. The experience of writing them changed me. I hope some of them change you too.
All titles are available on Amazon. If a book finds the right reader at the right moment, that is everything I hoped for when I wrote it.
THE ARCHITECTURE OF RESILIENCE TRILOGY
Three books. One woman’s honest examination of what it costs to survive the workplace, survive heartbreak, and rebuild from the ash of both.
The Biggest Contributors to a Toxic Workplace
This is the book I wrote because I needed it to exist.
The toxic workplace is one of the most consistently damaging experiences in a professional woman’s life and one of the least specifically examined. We know the symptoms: the dread on Sunday evenings, the physical weight of Monday mornings, the erosion of confidence that happens so gradually you do not notice it until the day you do not recognise yourself in the mirror.
This book names the specific dynamics. The passive management that is not passive at all. The colleague whose behaviour is never quite provable but always felt. The culture that rewards the wrong things and punishes the right ones. And the deeper question underneath all of it: how did we get here and how do we find our way out.
If you have ever worked somewhere that made you smaller, this book is for you.
The Year of Being Single
A year spent alone, examined honestly.
Not a book about being sad about being single. A book about what happens when you stop reaching for the next relationship and actually sit with yourself long enough to find out who is there.
The Year of Being Single is about the identity that forms when you are not performing for anyone. The things you discover about your own desires when you are not filtering them through what another person wants. The friendships that deepen. The habits that change. The quiet that becomes, eventually, company.
I wrote this during a year that changed me more than any relationship had. I suspect it will find the reader who needs it exactly when they need it.
Ashes and Architecture
The third book in the Architecture of Resilience Trilogy.
About what it means to rebuild after everything. Not the dramatic collapse, though there was that too. The slower, quieter rebuilding that happens when you have survived something and are now standing in the ruins of a version of your life asking what comes next.
Ashes and Architecture is about the architecture of starting over. The decisions that look small from the outside and feel enormous from the inside. The moments that turn out to be foundations. The person you discover you are when everything that was covering you has burned away.
MEMOIR
Shameless Perverts From My Village
Published under the pen name Electra
This one is different.
Written under my pen name Electra, set in the fictionalised village of Kululi, this memoir goes to places that the other books do not. The experiences that shaped me in ways I spent years not talking about. The village, the people in it, the things that happened there that I have been carrying in my body since long before I had the language to describe them.
Shameless Perverts From My Village is for the women who grew up knowing things they were not supposed to know and feeling things they were not supposed to feel and who have been trying to make sense of that original landscape ever since.
It is the most personal thing I have written. It is also, in some ways, the most free.
ALSO BY ELECTRA
I have a catalogue of over 18 published titles spanning personal development, workplace nonfiction, journals, and memoir. Browse the full collection on my Amazon author page.