What to read to understand privilege

Three books dealing with class, entitlement and the struggle to climb the social ladder

Distinction by Pierre Bourdieu (1979)

A funny, lighthearted, laugh-a-line study of… just kidding! No, it’s actually an incredibly dense, chewy, heavy-going analysis of the relationship between taste, identity and class. But if you’ve ever wondered why people work so hard at making small distinctions and judgments about food, clothing, books, music, whatever, Pierre Bourdieu is the man who explains why. This study of social capital and class structure is a good place to begin with his work.

Property by Valerie Martin (2003)

Our culture places way too much importance on prizes, which are nothing more than marketing tools. Occasionally, though, you get a book that wins a big award but which people don’t talk about – because it’s telling them something they don’t want to hear. This is the case for Valerie Martin’s novel Property, which won the 2003 Women’s Prize for fiction. Property is a novel about slavery with a shocking and salutary twist: it’s told from the point of view of a female slave owner. A novel about racism, obviously, but also about privilege in one of its most insidious forms: that of obliviousness and entitlement.

The Eustace Diamonds by Anthony Trollope (1871)

I was a late convert to Trollope because I found his prose rather flat. But now I wonder what on earth I was thinking – he’s genuinely funny, much of the time, and has an especially sharp eye for vanity and phoniness. He is obsessively focused on class, and the principal struggle of his characters is on questions of status and social gradation. No English novelist is so specific about what his characters own and earn, and he never pretends that it doesn’t matter. The Eustace Diamonds is a novel about a young woman with zero scruples who tries to blag her way into the aristocracy, and nicks some family jewels in order to do it.

John Lanchester’s novel Look What You Made Me Do is published by Faber (£20). Order a copy from The Observer Shop for £17. Delivery charges may apply

Photography by Jim Heimann Collection/Getty Images