Alice Walker's The Colour Purple ($14) is as iconic as a novel can be. It has won the Pulitzer Prize for fiction and the National Book Award for fiction, and it's also been made into both a movie and a Broadway musical. The novel is centreed on sisterhood and the trials of racism and poverty in 1930s Georgia, but it is often banned for being too sexually and socially explicit. Banned books often feature what is explicit because it's what's real, and that's why this one is worth a read.