The New York Times’ list of 100 Best Books of the 21st Century has propelled the existing conversation around the megalithic influence of American publishing on global readership to address some interesting questions: How much, and for how long, is America going to obsess over reading and dissecting itself? Why do reading lists emerging from the West claim authority on culture with such hyperbole? Is diversity in literature only worth mention if the story speaks of a Great War or unrest?
If a list so devoid of representation from small presses, working class writers, genre-fiction, and poetry is aggregated with contributions from “hundreds of novelists, nonfiction writers, academics, book editors, journalists, critics, publishers, poets, translators, booksellers, librarians and other literary luminaries”, what does that say about the backbone of American readership?
This past week, our team at The Bookshop Inc went through the records of our careers as booksellers, reached out to authors, literary critics, peers in publishing, and our community at-large in an effort to build an alternative list of books we think have most significantly influenced readers upon publication, in the last 24 years. Some of them were written in the 1900s and translated into English in the 21st century.
As booksellers, we do not believe in a ranking system based on hierarchy. To that effect, this list is organised alphabetically by the author’s first name. In no way is it authoritative, but we’ve tried our best to accommodate a diversity of books from around the world. We hope this list introduces the reading community to books which have silently, often without fan-fare or awards, managed to alter the way we think about the world.
The Hungry Tide, Amitav Ghosh
Between the sea and the plains of Bengal, on the easternmost coast of India, lies an immense archipelago of islands. Some are vast and some no larger than sandbars; some have lasted through recorded history while others have just washed into being. These are the Sundarbans. Here there are no borders to divide fresh water from salt, river from sea, and even land from water. The settlers of the Sundarbans believe that anyone without a pure heart who ventures into the watery labyrinth will never return. Survival is an everyday battle for these people who have managed to strike a delicate balance with nature. But the arrival of Piyali Roy, of Indian parentage but stubbornly American, and of Kanai Dutt, a sophisticated Delhi businessman, threatens to upset this balance. Kanai has returned to the islands at the request of his aunt, a local figure, for the first time since the death of his uncle, a political radical who died mysteriously in the aftermath of a local uprising. When Piyali, who is on the track of the rare river dolphins, hires Fokir, an illiterate but proud local man to guide her through the backwaters, Kanai becomes her translator. From this moment, the tide begins to turn.
A Gentleman in Moscow, Amor Towles
On June 21, 1922, Count Alexander Rostov – recipient of the Order of Saint Andrew, member of the Jockey Club, Master of the Hunt – is escorted out of the Kremlin, across Red Square and through the elegant revolving doors of the Hotel Metropol.
Deemed an unrepentant aristocrat by a Bolshevik tribunal, the Count has been sentenced to house arrest indefinitely. But instead of his usual suite, he must now live in an attic room while Russia undergoes decades of tumultuous upheaval.
Can a life without luxury be the richest of all?
Are Prisons Obsolete?, Angela Davis
Angela Davis has put the case for the latest abolition movement in American life: the abolition of the prison. As she quite correctly notes, American life is replete with abolition movements, and when they were engaged in these struggles, their chances of success seemed almost unthinkable. For generations of Americans, the abolition of slavery was a sheerest illusion. Similarly, the entrenched system of racial segregation seemed to last forever, and generations lived in the midst of the practice, with few predicting its passage from custom. The brutal, exploitative (dare one say lucrative?) convict-lease system that succeeded in formal slavery reaped millions to southern jurisdictions (and untold miseries for tens of thousands of men, and women). Few predicted its passing from the American penal landscape. Davis expertly argues how social movements transformed these social, political and cultural institutions, and made such practices untenable.
The Mushroom at the End of the World: On the Possibility of Life in Capitalist Ruins, Anna Lowenhaupt Tsing
Matsutake is the most valuable mushroom in the world – and a weed that grows in human-disturbed forests across the northern hemisphere. Through its ability to nurture trees, matsutake helps forests to grow in daunting places. It is also an edible delicacy in Japan, where it sometimes commands astronomical prices. In all its contradictions, matsutake offers insights into areas far beyond just mushrooms and addresses a crucial question: what manages to live in the ruins we have made?
By investigating one of the world’s most sought-after fungi, The Mushroom at the End of the World presents an original examination of the relationship between capitalist destruction and collaborative survival within multispecies landscapes, the prerequisite for continuing life on earth.
Kitchen Confidential: Adventures in the Culinary Underbelly, Anthony Bourdain
After twenty-five years of “sex, drugs, bad behaviour and haute cuisine”, chef Anthony Bourdain decided to tell all – and he meant all.
From his first oyster in the Gironde to his lowly position as a dishwasher in a honky-tonk fish restaurant in Provincetown; from the kitchen of the Rainbow Room atop the Rockefeller Center to drug dealers in the East Village, from Tokyo to Paris and back to New York again, Bourdain’s tales of the kitchen are as passionate as they are unpredictable, as shocking as they are funny.
My Seditious Heart, Arundhati Roy
My Seditious Heart collects the work of a two-decade period when Arundhati Roy devoted herself to the political essay as a way of opening up space for justice, rights and freedoms in an increasingly hostile environment. Taken together, these essays trace her twenty-year journey from the Booker Prize-winning The God of Small Things to the extraordinary The Ministry of Utmost Happiness – a journey marked by compassion, clarity and courage. Radical and readable, they speak always in defence of the collective, the individual and the land, in the face of the destructive logic of financial, social, religious, military and governmental elites.
The Night Bookmobile, Audrey Niffenegger
First serialised as a weekly column in the UK’s Guardian newspaper, The Night Bookmobile tells the story of a wistful woman who one night encounters a mysterious disappearing library on wheels that contains every book she has ever read. Seeing her history and most intimate self in this library, she embarks on a search for the bookmobile. But her search turns into an obsession, as she longs to be reunited with her own collection and memories.
Reading Lolita in Tehran: A Memoir in Books, Azar Nafisi
For two years before she left Iran in 1997, Nafisi gathered seven young women at her house every Thursday morning to read and discuss forbidden works of Western literature. They were all former students whom she had taught at university. Some came from conservative and religious families, others were progressive and secular; several had spent time in jail. They were shy and uncomfortable at first, unaccustomed to being asked to speak their minds, but soon they began to open up and to speak more freely, not only about the novels they were reading but also about themselves, their dreams and disappointments. Their stories intertwined with those they were reading – Pride and Prejudice, Washington Square, Daisy Miller and Lolita – their Lolita, as they imagined her in Tehran.
The Queue, Basma Abdel, Aziz, translated from the Arabic by Elisabeth Jaquette
In a surreal, but familiar, vision of modern-day Egypt, a centralised authority known as the “Gate” has risen to power in the aftermath of the “Disgraceful Events,” a failed popular uprising. Citizens are required to obtain permission from the Gate in order to take care of even the most basic of their daily affairs, yet the Gate never opens, and the queue in front of it grows longer.
Citizens from all walks of life mix and wait in the sun: a revolutionary journalist, a sheikh, a poor woman concerned for her daughter’s health, and even the brother of a security officer killed in clashes with protestors. Among them is Yehia, a man who was shot during the Events and is waiting for permission from the Gate to remove a bullet that remains lodged in his pelvis. Yehia’s health steadily declines, yet at every turn, officials refuse to assist him, actively denying the very existence of the bullet.
Ultimately it is Tarek, the principled doctor tending to Yehia’s case, who must decide whether to follow protocol as he has always done, or to disobey the law and risk his career to operate on Yehia and save his life.
How To Write About Africa, Binyavanga Wainaina
Binyavanga Wainaina was a seminal author and activist, remembered as one of the greatest chroniclers of contemporary African life. After his death in 2019, this ground-breaking collection brings together his pioneering writing on the African continent for the first time. A rule-breaker full of wry satire and piercing wisdom, this collection includes many of Binyavanga’s most critically acclaimed pieces, including the viral satirical sensation How to Write About Africa. Writing fearlessly across a range of topics – from politics to international aid, cultural heritage and redefining sexuality, this is a remarkable illustration of a writer at the height of his power.
Cursed Bunny, Bora Chung, translated from the Korean by Anton Hur
Cursed Bunny is a genre-defying collection of short stories by Korean author Bora Chung. Blurring the lines between magical realism, horror, and science fiction, Chung uses elements of the fantastic and surreal to address the very real horrors and cruelties of patriarchy and capitalism in modern society.
The Last Lover, Can Xue, translated from the Mandarin by Annelise Finegan
In Can Xue’s extraordinary book, we encounter a full assemblage of husbands, wives, and lovers. Entwined in complicated, often tortuous relationships, these characters step into each other’s fantasies, carrying on conversations that are “forever guessing games.” Their journeys reveal the deepest realms of human desire, figured in Can Xue’s vision of snakes and wasps, crows, cats, mice, earthquakes, and landslides. In dive bars and twisted city streets, on deserts and snowcapped mountains, the author creates an extreme world where every character “is driving death away with a singular performance.”
Who is the last lover? The novel is bursting with vividly drawn characters. Among them are Joe, sales manager of a clothing company in an unnamed Western country, and his wife, Maria, who conducts mystical experiments with the household’s cats and rosebushes. Joe’s customer Reagan is having an affair with Ida, a worker at his rubber plantation, while clothing store owner Vincent runs away from his wife in pursuit of a woman in black who disappears over and over again. By the novel’s end, we have accompanied these characters on a long march, a naive, helpless, and forsaken search for love, because there are just some things that can’t be stopped – or helped.
The Order of Time, Carlo Rovelli, translated from the Italian by Simon Carnell and Erica Segre
Time is a mystery that does not cease to puzzle us. Philosophers, artists and poets have long explored its meaning while scientists have found that its structure is different from the simple intuition we have of it. From Boltzmann to quantum theory, from Einstein to loop quantum gravity, our understanding of time has been undergoing radical transformations. Time flows at a different speed in different places, the past and the future differ far less than we might think, and the very notion of the present evaporates in the vast universe.
Enlightening and consoling, The Order of Time shows that to understand ourselves we need to reflect on time – and to understand time we need to reflect on ourselves.
In the Dream House, Carmen Maria Machado
In the Dream House is Carmen Maria Machado’s engrossing and wildly innovative account of a relationship gone bad. Tracing the full arc of a harrowing experience with a charismatic but volatile woman, this is a bold dissection of the mechanisms and cultural representations of psychological abuse.
Each chapter views the relationship through a different lens, as Machado holds events up to the light and examines them from distinct angles. She casts a critical eye over legal proceedings, fairy tales, Star Trek and Disney villains, as well as iconic works of film and fiction, infusing all with her characteristic wit, playfulness and openness to enquiry. The result is a powerful book that explodes our ideas about what a memoir can do and be.
The Literary Conference, César Aira
César is a translator who’s fallen on very hard times due to the global economic downturn; he is also an author, and a mad scientist hell-bent on world domination. On a visit to the beach, he intuitively solves an ancient riddle, finds a pirate’s treasure, and becomes a very wealthy man. Even so, César’s bid for world domination comes first and so he attends a literary conference to be near the man whose clone he hopes will lead an army to victory: the world-renowned Mexican author, Carlos Fuentes. A comic science fiction fantasy of the first order, The Literary Conference is the perfect vehicle for César Aira’s takeover of literature in the 21st century.
The Emperor’s Children, Claire Messud
In Manhattan, just after the century’s turn, three thirty-year-old friends, Danielle, Marina and Julius, are seeking their fortunes. But the arrival of Marina’s young cousin Bootie – fresh from the provinces and keen, too, to make his mark – forces them to confront their own desires and expectations. The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud is an American classic: a sweeping portrait of one of the most fascinating cities in the world, and a haunting illustration of how the events of a single day can change everything, forever.
Blankets, Craig Thompson
Blankets is the story of a young man coming of age and finding the confidence to express his creative voice. Craig Thompson’s poignant graphic memoir plays out against the backdrop of a Midwestern winterscape: finely-hewn linework draws together a portrait of small-town life, a rigorous fundamentalist Christian childhood, and a lonely, emotionally mixed-up adolescence.
Under an engulfing blanket of snow, Craig and Raina fall in love at winter church camp, revealing to one another their struggles with faith and their dreams of escape. Over time though, their personal demons resurface and their relationship falls apart. It’s a universal story, and Thompson’s vibrant brushstrokes and unique page designs make the familiar heartbreaking all over again.
In a Strange Room, Damon Galgut
A young man takes three journeys, through Greece, India and Africa. He travels with little purpose, letting the chance encounters on the road dictate his path. But although he knows that he is drifting, he is unable to settle. It is as if, without these encounters, the person he is cannot exist. And yet each journey ends in disaster.
A novel of longing and thwarted desire, rage and compassion, In a Strange Room is an extraordinary evocation of one man’s search for love, and a place to call home.
The Dawn of Everything: A New History of Humanity, David Graeber and David Wengrow
For generations, our remote ancestors have been cast as primitive and childlike either free and equal, or thuggish and warlike. Civilisation, we are told, could be achieved only by sacrificing those original freedoms or, alternatively, by taming our baser instincts. David Graeber and David Wengrow show how such theories first emerged in the eighteenth century as a reaction to indigenous critiques of European society, and why they are wrong. In doing so, they overturn our view of human history, including the origins of farming, property, cities, democracy, slavery and civilisation itself.
Bhimayana: Experiences of Untouchability, Srividya Natarajan and S Anand, art by Durgabai Vyom and Subhash Vyom
Bhimrao Ramji Ambedkar (1891-1956), one of India’s foremost revolutionaries, grew up untouchable. Battling against the odds, he gained multiple doctorates, campaigned against social discrimination and the caste system and went on to draft the Constitution of India. Throughout his life Ambedkar faced routine discrimination: in school at the age of 10; in Baroda after his return from Columbia University; and while travelling in later life. The discrimination experienced by Ambedkar continues to haunt a majority of India’s 170 million Dalits as many are still denied water, shelter and the basic dignities of life. In this ground-breaking work, Pardhan-Gond artists Durgabai Vyam and Subhash Vyam interweave historical events with contemporary incidents, infusing fresh energy into the graphic idiom through their magical art.
Mirrors, Eduardo Galeano, translated from the Spanish by Mark Fried
In Mirrors, Galeano smashes aside the narrative of conventional history and arranges the shards into a new pattern, to reveal the past in a radically altered form. From the Garden of Eden to 21st-century cityscapes, we glimpse fragments in the lives of those who have been overlooked by traditional histories: the artists, the servants, the gods and the visionaries, the black slaves who built the White House, and the women who were bartered for dynastic ends.
The End of Eddy, Édouard Louis, translated from the French by Michael Lucey
Édouard Louis grew up in a village in northern France where many live below the poverty line. His bestselling debut novel about life there, The End of Eddy, has sparked debate on social inequality, sexuality and violence. It is an extraordinary portrait of escaping from an unbearable childhood, inspired by the author’s own. Written with an openness and compassionate intelligence, ultimately, it asks, how can we create our own freedom?
Beauty is a Wound, Eka Kurniawan, translated from the Indonesian by Annie Tucker
The epic novel Beauty is a Wound combines history, satire, family tragedy, legend, humour, and romance in a sweeping polyphony. The beautiful Indo prostitute Dewi Ayu and her four daughters are beset by incest, murder, bestiality, rape, insanity, monstrosity, and the often vengeful undead. Kurniawan’s gleefully grotesque hyperbole functions as a scathing critique of his young nation’s troubled past: the rapacious offhand greed of colonialism; the chaotic struggle for independence; the 1965 mass murders of perhaps a million Communists, followed by three decades of Suharto’s despotic rule.
Yoga for People Who Can’t Be Bothered To Do It, Geoff Dyer
From Amsterdam to Cambodia, from Rome to Indonesia, from New Orleans to Libya, and from Detroit to Ko Pha-Ngan, Geoff Dyer finds himself both floundering about in a sea of grievances and finding moments of transcendental calm. This aberrant quest for peak experiences leads, ultimately, to the Black Rock Desert in Nevada, where, to quote Tarkovsky’s Stalker, “your most cherished desire will come true”.
Cry, Heart, But Never Break, Glenn Ringtved, translated from the Danish by Robert Moulthrop, illustrated by Charlotte Pardi
Aware their grandmother is gravely ill, four siblings make a pact to keep death from taking her away. But Death does arrive all the same, as it must. He comes gently, naturally. And he comes with enough time to share a story with the children that helps them to realise the value of loss to life and the importance of being able to say goodbye.
Norwegian Wood, Haruki Murakami, translated from the Japanese by Jay Rubin
When he hears her favourite Beatles song, Toru Watanabe recalls his first love Naoko, the girlfriend of his best friend Kizuki. Immediately he is transported back almost twenty years to his student days in Tokyo, adrift in a world of uneasy friendships, casual sex, passion, loss and desire – to a time when an impetuous young woman called Midori marches into his life and he has to choose between the future and the past.
The Dinner, Herman Koch, translated from the Dutch by Sam Garrett
It’s summer’s evening in Amsterdam and two couples meet at a fashionable restaurant. Between mouthfuls of food and over the delicate scraping of cutlery, the conversation remains a gentle hum of politeness – the banality of work, the triviality of holidays. But the empty words hide a terrible conflict and, with every forced smile and every new course, the knives are being sharpened.
Each couple has a fifteen-year-old son. Together, the boys have committed a horrifying act, caught on camera, and their grainy images have been beamed into living rooms across the nation; despite a police manhunt, the boys remain unidentified – by everyone except their parents. As the dinner reaches its culinary climax, the conversation finally touches on their children and, as civility and friendship disintegrate, each couple shows just how far they are prepared to go to protect those they love.
Enter Ghost, Isabella Hammad
After years away from her family’s homeland, and reeling from a disastrous love affair, actress Sonia Nasir returns to Haifa to visit her older sister Haneen. On her arrival, she finds her relationship with Palestine is fragile, both bone-deep and new.
When Sonia meets the charismatic Mariam, a local director, she joins a production of Hamlet in the West Bank. Soon, Sonia is rehearsing with a dedicated, if competitive, group of men – yet as opening night draws closer, it becomes clear just how many obstacles stand before the troupe. Amidst it all, the life she once knew starts to give way to the exhilarating possibility of finding a new self in her ancestral home.
A Dictator Calls, Ismail Kadare, translated from the Albanian by John Hodgson
In June 1934, Joseph Stalin allegedly telephoned the famous novelist and poet Boris Pasternak to discuss the arrest of fellow Soviet poet Osip Mandelstam.
In a fascinating combination of dreams and dossier facts, Ismail Kadare reconstructs the three minutes they spoke and the aftershocks of this tense, mysterious moment in modern history.
Weaving together the accounts of witnesses, reporters and writers such as Isaiah Berlin and Anna Akhmatova, Kadare tells a gripping story of power and political structures, of the relationship between writers and tyranny. The telling brings to light uncanny parallels with Kadare’s experience writing under dictatorship, when he received an unexpected phone call of his own.
The Wandering Falcon, Jamil Ahmed
The boy known as Tor Baz – the black falcon – wanders between tribes. He meets men who fight under different flags, and women who risk everything if they break their society’s code of honour. Where has he come from, and where will destiny take him?
Set in the decades before the rise of the Taliban, Jamil Ahmad’s stunning debut takes us to the essence of human life in the forbidden areas where the borders of Pakistan, Iran and Afghanistan meet. Today the “tribal areas” are often spoken about as a remote region, a hotbed of conspiracies, drone attacks and conflict.
With rare tenderness and perception, Jamil Ahmad describes a world of custom and cruelty, of love and gentleness, of hardship and survival; a fragile, unforgiving world that is changing as modern forces make themselves known.
Why Be Happy When You Could Be Normal?, Jeanette Winterson
In 1985 Jeanette Winterson’s first novel, Oranges Are Not the Only Fruit, was published. It was Jeanette’s version of the story of a terraced house in Accrington, an adopted child, and the thwarted giantess Mrs Winterson. It was a cover story, a painful past written over and repainted. It was a story of survival.
This book is that story’s the silent twin. It is full of heart and humour and a fierce love of life. It is about the pursuit of happiness, lessons in love, the search for a mother and a journey into madness and out again. It is generous, honest and true.
Narcopolis, Jeet Thayil
Shuklaji Street, in Old Bombay. In Rashid’s opium room, the air is thick with voices and ghosts: Hindu, Muslim, Christian. A young woman holds a long-stemmed pipe over a flame, her hair falling across her eyes. Men sprawl and mutter in the gloom. Here, they say you introduce only your worst enemy to opium. There is an underworld whisper of a new terror: the Pathar Maar, the stone killer, whose victims are the nameless, invisible poor. In the broken city, there are too many to count.
Stretching across three decades, with an interlude in Mao’s China, it portrays a city in collision with itself. With a cast of pimps, pushers, poets, gangsters and eunuchs, it is a journey into a sprawling underworld written in electric and utterly original prose.
Go Went Gone, Jenny Erpenbeck, translated from the German by Susan Bernofsky
One of the great contemporary European writers takes on Europe’s biggest issue Richard has spent his life as a university professor, immersed in the world of books and ideas, but now he is retired, his books remain in their packing boxes and he steps into the streets of his city, Berlin. Here, on Oranienplatz, he discovers a new community – a tent city, established by African asylum seekers. Hesitantly, getting to know the new arrivals, Richard finds his life changing, as he begins to question his own sense of belonging in a city that once divided its citizens into them and us.
How to Do Nothing: Resisting the Attention Economy, Jenny Odell
In a world where addictive technology is designed to buy and sell our attention, and our value is determined by our 24/7 data productivity, it can seem impossible to escape. But in this inspiring field guide to dropping out of the attention economy, artist and critic Jenny Odell shows us how we can still win back our lives.
Odell sees our attention as the most precious – and overdrawn – resource we have. And we must actively and continuously choose how we use it. We might not spend it on things that capitalism has deemed important but once we can start paying a new kind of attention, she writes, we can undertake bolder forms of political action, reimagine humankind’s role in the environment, and arrive at more meaningful understandings of happiness and progress.
Em and the Big Hoom, Jerry Pinto
Set in Bombay during the last decades of the 20th century, Em and The Big Hoom tells the compelling story of the Mendeses mother, father, daughter and son. Between Em, the beedi smoking, hyperactive mother, driven frequently to hospital by her mania and failed suicide attempts and the Big Hoom, the rock-solid, dependable father, trying to hold things together as best he can, they are an extraordinary family.
The Namesake, Jhumpa Lahiri
The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name.
Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves.
No Good Men Among the Living: America, the Taliban, and the War through Afghan Eyes, Anand Gopal
In a breathtaking chronicle, acclaimed journalist Anand Gopal traces the lives of three Afghans caught in America’s war on terror. He follows a Taliban commander, who rises from a scrawny teenager to a leading insurgent; a US-backed warlord, who uses the American military to gain wealth and power; and a village housewife trapped between the two sides, who discovers the devastating cost of neutrality. Through their dramatic stories emerges a stunning tale of how the United States had triumph in sight in Afghanistan – and then brought the Taliban back from the dead.
A General Theory of Oblivion, José Eduardo Agualusa, translated from the Spanish by Daniel Hahn
On the eve of Angolan independence, Ludo bricks herself into her apartment, where she will remain for the next thirty years. She lives off vegetables and pigeons, burns her furniture and books to stay alive and keeps herself busy by writing her story on the walls of her home.
The outside world slowly seeps into Ludo’s life through snippets on the radio, voices from next door, glimpses of a man fleeing his pursuers and a note attached to a bird’s foot. Until one day she meets Sabalu, a young boy from the street who climbs up to her terrace.
Home Fires, Kamila Shamsie
Isma is free. After years spent raising her twin siblings in the wake of their mother’s death, she is finally studying in America, resuming a dream long deferred. But she can’t stop worrying about Aneeka, her beautiful, headstrong sister back in London – or their brother, Parvaiz, who’s disappeared in pursuit of his own dream: to prove himself to the dark legacy of the jihadist father he never knew.
Then Eamonn enters the sisters’ lives. Handsome and privileged, he inhabits a London world away from theirs. As the son of a powerful British Muslim politician, Eamonn has his own birthright to live up to – or defy. Is he to be a chance at love? The means of Parvaiz’s salvation? Two families’ fates are inextricably, devastatingly entwined in this searing novel that asks: what sacrifices will we make in the name of love?
Border: A Journey to the Edge of Europe, Kapka Kassabova
When Kapka Kassabova was a child, the border zone between Bulgaria, Turkey and Greece was rumoured to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall so it swarmed with soldiers, spies and fugitives. On holidays close to the border on the Black Sea coast, she remembers playing on the beach, only miles from where an electrified fence bristled, its barbs pointing inwards toward the enemy: the holiday-makers, the potential escapees.
Today, this densely forested landscape is no longer heavily militarised, but it is scarred by its past. In Border, Kapka Kassabova sets out on a journey to meet the people of this triple border – Bulgarians, Turks, Greeks, and the latest wave of refugees fleeing conflict further afield. She discovers a region that has been shaped by the successive forces of history: by its own past migration crises, by communism, by two World wars, by the Ottoman Empire, and – older still – by the ancient legacy of myths and legends. As Kapka Kassabova explores this enigmatic region in the company of border guards and treasure hunters, entrepreneurs and botanists, psychic healers and ritual fire-walkers, refugees and smugglers, she traces the physical and psychological borders that criss-cross its villages and mountains, and goes in search of the stories that will unlock its secrets.
We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, Karen Joy Fowler
Rosemary doesn’t talk much, and about certain things she’s silent. She had a sister, Fern, her whirlwind other half, who vanished from her life in circumstances she wishes she could forget. And it’s been ten years since she last saw her beloved older brother Lowell.
Now in college, Rosemary starts to see she can’t go forward without going back to the time when aged five, she was sent away from home to her grandparents and returned to find Fern gone.
It was Rosemary’s parents who began all of the trouble – don’t they always? But, dear reader, exactly how they did it is a twist you’ll have to discover for yourself.
Until the Lions, Karthika Nair
In Until the Lions, Karthika Nair retells the Mahabharata through multiple voices. Her poems capture the epic through the lenses of nameless soldiers, outcast warriors and handmaidens but also abducted princesses, tribal queens and a gender-shifting god. As peripheral figures and silent catalysts take centre stage, we get a glimpse of lives and stories buried beneath the edifices of god and nation, heroes and victory; a glimpse of the price paid for myth and history – all too often interchangeable.
Behind the Beautiful Forevers: Life, Death and Hope in a Mumbai Undercity, Katherine Boo
This brilliant work of reportage on the Mumbai slum called Annawadi, and the true-life stories of some of its inhabitants, is a powerful and unforgettable account of the impact of corruption, inequality, globalisation and religion in an Indian megacity.
The Devotion of Suspect X, Keigo Higashino, translated from the Japanese by Alexander O Smith
Yasuko lives a quiet life, working in a Tokyo bento shop, a good mother to her only child. But when her ex-husband appears at her door without warning one day, her comfortable world is shattered.
When Detective Kusanagi of the Tokyo Police tries to piece together the events of that day, he finds himself confronted by the most puzzling, mysterious circumstances he has ever investigated. Nothing quite makes sense, and it will take a genius to understand the genius behind this particular crime.
The Paper Menagerie and Other Stories, Ken Liu
This mesmerising collection features many of Ken’s award-winning and award-finalist stories, including: “The Man Who Ended History: A Documentary” (Finalist for the Hugo, Nebula, and Theodore Sturgeon Awards), “Mono No Aware” (Hugo Award winner), “The Waves” (Nebula Award finalist), “The Bookmaking Habits of Select Species” (Nebula and Sturgeon Award finalists), “All the Flavors” (Nebula Award finalist), “The Litigation Master and the Monkey King” (Nebula Award finalist), and the most awarded story in the genre’s history, “The Paper Menagerie” (The only story to win the Hugo, Nebula, and World Fantasy awards).
Insightful and stunning stories that plumb the struggle against history and betrayal of relationships in pivotal moments, this collection showcases one of our greatest and original voices.
The Hundred Years’ War on Palestine: A History of Settler Colonial Conquest and Resistance, Rashid Khalidi
The 20th century for Palestine and the Palestinians has been a century of denial: denial of statehood, denial of nationhood and denial of history. The Hundred Years War on Palestine is Rashid Khalidi’s powerful response. Drawing on his family archives, he reclaims the fundamental right of any people: to narrate their history on their own terms.
Beginning in the final days of the Ottoman Empire, Khalidi reveals nascent Palestinian nationalism and the broad recognition by the early Zionists of the colonial nature of their project. These ideas and their echoes defend Nakba – the Palestinian term for the establishment of the state of Israel – the cession of the West Bank and Gaza to Jordan and Egypt, the Six-Day War and the occupation. Moving through these critical moments, Khalidi interweaves the voices of journalists, poets and resistance leaders with his own accounts as a child of a UN official and a resident of Beirut during the 1982 siege. The result is a profoundly moving account of a hundred-year-long war of occupation, dispossession and colonisation.
The Inheritance of Loss, Kiran Desai
In a crumbling, isolated house at the foot of Mount Kanchenjunga in the Himalayas lives an embittered judge who wants only to retire in peace, when his orphaned granddaughter, Sai, arrives on his doorstep. The judge’s cook watches over her distractedly, for his thoughts are often on his son, Biju, who is hopscotching from one gritty New York restaurant to another. Kiran Desai’s brilliant novel, published to huge acclaim, is a story of joy and despair. Her characters face numerous choices that majestically illuminate the consequences of colonialism as it collides with the modern world.
The Vanishing Man: In Pursuit of Velázquez, Laura Cumming
In 1845, a Reading bookseller named John Snare came across the dirt-blackened portrait of a prince at a country house auction. Suspecting that it might be a long-lost Velázquez, he bought the picture and set out to discover its strange history – a quest that led from fame to ruin and exile.
Fusing detection and biography, this book shows how and why great works of art can affect us, even to the point of mania. And on the trail of John Snare, Cumming makes a surprising discovery of her own. But most movingly, The Vanishing Man is an eloquent and passionate homage to the Spanish master Velázquez, bringing us closer to the creation and appreciation of his works than ever before.
Hellfire, Leesa Gazi, translated from the Bengali by Shabnam Nadiya
For the sisters Lovely and Beauty, home is a cage. Their mother Farida Khanam never lets them out of her hawk-eyed gaze.
Leesa Gazi’s Hellfire opens with Lovely’s first-ever solo expedition to Gausia Market on her fortieth birthday. There will be many firsts for her today, but she mustn’t forget the curfew Farida Khanam has ordained. As Lovely roams the streets of Dhaka, her mother’s carefully constructed world begins to unravel. The twisted but working arrangements of a fragile household begin to assume a macabre quality as the day progresses.
The Shadow King, Maaza Mengiste
Ethiopia, 1935. With the threat of Mussolini’s army looming, recently orphaned Hirut struggles to adapt to her new life as a maid. Her new employer, Kidane, an officer in Emperor Haile Selassie’s army, rushes to mobilise his strongest men before the Italians invade.
Hirut and the other women long to do more than care for the wounded and bury the dead. When Emperor Haile Selassie goes into exile and Ethiopia quickly loses hope, it is Hirut who offers a plan to maintain morale. She helps disguise a gentle peasant as the emperor and soon becomes his guard, inspiring other women to take up arms. But how could she have predicted her own personal war, still to come, as a prisoner of one of Italy’s most vicious officers?
Circe, Madeline Miller
In the house of Helios, god of the sun and mightiest of the Titans, a daughter is born. But Circe has neither the look nor the voice of divinity and is scorned and rejected by her kin. Increasingly isolated, she turns to mortals for companionship, leading her to discover a power forbidden to the gods: witchcraft.
When love drives Circe to cast a dark spell, wrathful Zeus banishes her to the remote island of Aiaia. There she learns to harness her occult craft, drawing strength from nature. But she will not always be alone; many are destined to pass through Circe’s place of exile, entwining their fates with hers. The messenger god, Hermes. The craftsman, Daedalus. A ship bearing a golden fleece. And wily Odysseus, on his epic voyage home.
There is danger for a solitary woman in this world, and Circe’s independence draws the wrath of men and gods alike. To protect what she holds dear, Circe must decide whether she belongs with the deities she is born from or the mortals she has come to love.
The Butterfly’s Burden, Mahmoud Darwish, translated from the Arabic by Fady Joudah
Mahmoud Darwish was the most acclaimed poet in the Arab world. The Butterfly’s Burden presents three recent books in a single volume, each translated into English for the first time and presented side by side with the Arabic: The Stranger’s Bed (1998), Darwish’s first collection of love poems; State of Siege (2002), a terse, politically charged sequence written in Ramallah; and Don’t Apologize for What You’ve Done (2003), a song “green like the phoenix” after the daily horrors in Ramallah. These poems provide continual contrasts, balancing old literary traditions with new, highlighting lyrical, loving reflections alongside a bitter longing for the Palestine that was lost when Israel was created.
Munnu: A Boy From Kashmir, Malik Sajad
Seven-year-old Munnu is growing up in Indian-administered Kashmir. Life revolves around his family: Mama, Papa, sister Shahnaz, brothers Adil and Akhtar and, his favourite, older brother Bilal. It also revolves around Munnu’s two favourite things – sugar and drawing.
But Munnu’s is a childhood experienced against the backdrop of conflict. Bilal’s classmates are crossing over into the Pakistan-administered portion of Kashmir to be trained to resist the “occupation”; Papa and Bilal are regularly taken by the military to identification parades where informers will point out “terrorists”; Munnu’s school is closed; close neighbours are killed and the homes of Kashmiri Hindu families lie abandoned, as once close, mixed communities have ruptured under the pressure of Kashmir’s divisions.
In Memory of a Memory, Maria Stepanova translated from the Russian by Sasha Dugdale
With the death of her aunt, Maria Stepanova is left to sift through an apartment full of faded photographs, old postcards, letters, diaries, and heaps of souvenirs: a withered repository of a century of life in Russia. Carefully reassembled with calm, steady hands, these shards tell the story of how a seemingly ordinary Jewish family somehow managed to survive the myriad persecutions and repressions of the last century.
In dialogue with writers like Roland Barthes, WG Sebald, Susan Sontag and Osip Mandelstam, In Memory of Memory is imbued with rare intellectual curiosity and a wonderfully soft-spoken, poetic voice. Dipping into various forms – essay, fiction, memoir, travelogue and historical documents – Stepanova assembles a vast panorama of ideas and personalities and offers an entirely new and bold exploration of cultural and personal memory.
Persepolis, Marjane Satrapi, translated from the French by Anjali Singh
In powerful black-and-white comic strip images, Satrapi tells the coming-of-age story of her life in Tehran from ages six to fourteen, years that saw the overthrow of the Shah’s regime, the triumph of the Islamic Revolution, and the devastating effects of war with Iraq. The intelligent and outspoken only child of committed Marxists and the great-granddaughter of one of Iran’s last emperors, Marjane bears witness to a childhood uniquely entwined with the history of her country.
Entangled Life: How Fungi Make Our Worlds, Change Our Minds and Shape Our Futures, Merlin Sheldrake
The more we learn about fungi, the less makes sense without them. They can change our minds, heal our bodies and even help us avoid environmental disasters; they are metabolic masters, earth-makers and key players in most of nature’s processes. In Entangled Life, Merlin Sheldrake takes us on a mind-altering journey into their spectacular world and reveals how these extraordinary organisms transform our understanding of our planet and life itself.
Ants Among Elephants: An Untouchable Family and the Making of Modern India, Sujatha Gidla
Sujatha Gidla was born an untouchable. Her family, belonging to the Mala caste, was educated in Warangal and Madras by Canadian missionaries in the 1930s, making it possible for Gidla to attend elite schools and move to America at the age of 26. It was only then that she saw how extraordinary – and yet how typical – her family history truly was. Determined to uncover that history, and understand the social and political forces that made it possible, she travelled back to India to record the testimonies of her mother, her uncles, and their friends. In Ants Among Elephants, she tells their story. A moving portrait of love, hardship, and struggle, Ants Among Elephants is also that rare thing: a personal history of modern India told from the bottom up.
Cooked: A Natural History of Transformation, Michael Pollan
Michael Pollan’s Cooked takes us back to basics and first principles: cooking with fire, with water, with air and with earth.
Meeting cooks from all over the world, who share their wisdom and stories, Pollan shows how cooking is at the heart of our culture and that when it gets down to it, it also fundamentally shapes our lives.
Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami, translated from the Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd
On a hot summer’s day in a poor suburb of Tokyo, we meet three women: thirty-year-old Natsuko, her older sister Makiko, and Makiko’s teenage daughter Midoriko. Makiko, an ageing hostess despairing the loss of her looks, has travelled to Tokyo in search of breast enhancement surgery. She’s accompanied by Midoriko, who has recently stopped speaking, finding herself unable to deal with her own changing body and her mother’s self-obsession. Her silence dominates Natsuko’s rundown apartment, providing a catalyst for each woman to grapple with their own anxieties and their relationships with one another.
Eight years later, we meet Natsuko again. She is now a writer and finds herself on a journey back to her native city, returning to memories of that summer and her family’s past as she faces her own uncertain future. In Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami paints a radical and intimate portrait of contemporary working-class womanhood in Japan, recounting the heartbreaking journeys of three women in a society where the odds are stacked against them.
A Case of Exploding Mangoes, Mohammed Hanif
In August 1988, Zia gets into the presidential plane, Pak One, which explodes midway. Who killed him? The army generals growing old waiting for their promotions, the CIA, the ISI, RAW, or Ali Shigri, a junior officer at the military academy whose father, a whisky-swilling jihadi colonel, was murdered by the army?
Doppelganger: A Trip Into the Mirror World, Naomi Klein
When Naomi Klein discovered that a woman who shared her first name, but had radically different, harmful views, was getting chronically mistaken for her, it seemed too ridiculous to take seriously. Then suddenly it wasn’t. She started to find herself grappling with a distorted sense of reality, becoming obsessed with reading the threats on social media, and the endlessly scrolling insults from the followers of her doppelganger. Why had her shadowy other gone down such an extreme path? Why was identity – all we have to meet the world – so unstable?
To find out, Klein decided to follow her double into a bizarre, uncanny mirror world: one of conspiracy theories, anti-vaxxers and demagogue hucksters, where soft-focus wellness influencers make common cause with fire-breathing far-right propagandists (all in the name of protecting “the children”). In doing so, she lifts the lid on our own culture during this surreal moment in history, as we turn ourselves into polished virtual brands, publicly shame our enemies, watch as deep fakes proliferate and whole nations flip from democracy to something far more sinister.
Family Lexicon, Natalia Ginzburg, translated from the Italian by Jenny McPhee
An Italian family, sizable, with its routines and rituals, crazes, pet phrases, and stories, doubtful, comical, indispensable, comes to life in the pages of Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon. Giuseppe Levi, the father, is a scientist, consumed by his work and a mania for hiking – when he isn’t provoked into angry remonstration by someone misspeaking or misbehaving or wearing the wrong thing. Giuseppe is Jewish, married to Lidia, a Catholic, though neither is religious; they live in the industrial city of Turin where, as the years pass, their children find ways of their own to medicine, marriage, literature, politics. It is all very ordinary, except that the background to the story is Mussolini’s Italy in its steady downward descent to race law and world war. The Levis are, among other things, unshakeable anti-fascists. That will complicate their lives.
Wizard of the Crow, Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o
To honour the Ruler’s birthday, the Free Republic of Aburiria set out to build a tower; a modern wonder of the world that will reach the gates of Heaven. But behind this pillar of unity, a battle for control of the Aburirian people rages. Among the contenders: the eponymous Wizard, an avatar of folklore and wisdom; the corrupt Christian Ministry; and the nefarious Global Bank.
The Shallows: How the Internet is Changing the Way We Think, Read and Remember, Nicolas Carr
The Shallows draws on the latest research to show that the Net is literally re-wiring our brains inducing only superficial understanding. As a consequence, there are profound changes in the way we live and communicate, remember and socialise – even in our very conception of ourselves. By moving from the depths of thought to the shallows of distraction, the web, it seems, is actually fostering ignorance.
Seeing Like a Feminist, Nivedita Menon
For Nivedita Menon, feminism is not about a moment of final triumph over patriarchy but about the gradual transformation of the social field so decisively that old markers shift forever. From sexual harassment charges against international figures to the challenge that caste politics poses to feminism, from feminist dilemmas regarding commercial surrogacy to the Shah Bano case, from queer politics to domestic servant’s unions to the Pink Chaddi campaign, from the ban on the veil in France to the attempt to impose skirts on international women badminton players, Menon insists that feminism complicates the field irrevocably.
On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous, Ocean Vuong
This is a letter from a son to a mother who cannot read. Written when the speaker, Little Dog, is in his late twenties, the letter unearths a family’s history that began before he was born. It tells of Vietnam, of the lasting impact of war, and of his family’s struggle to forge a new future.
And it serves as a doorway into parts of Little Dog’s life his mother has never known – episodes of bewilderment, fear and passion – all the while moving closer to an unforgettable revelation.
The Dream Life of Sukhanov, Olga Grushin
Stepping out into the dusk of a warm evening, esteemed art critic Sukhanov feels on top of the world. But the year is 1985 and the air is heavy with change. His future is haunted by doubt. Beset by visions of a past he gave up, he questions his choices: in swapping a life as a brilliant underground artist for comfort did he betray his dreams?
Drive Your Plow over the Bones of the Dead, Olga Tokarczuk, translated from the Polish by Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Annie Proulx in a remote Polish village, Janina devotes the dark winter days to studying astrology, translating the poetry of William Blake, and taking care of the summer homes of wealthy Warsaw residents. Her reputation as a crank and a recluse is amplified by her not-so-secret preference for the company of animals over humans. Then a neighbour, Big Foot, turns up dead. Soon other bodies are discovered, in increasingly strange circumstances. As suspicions mount, Janina inserts herself into the investigation, certain that she knows whodunit. If only anyone would pay her mind.
On the Move, Oliver Sacks
From its opening pages on his youthful obsession with motorcycles and speed, On the Move is infused with his restless energy. As Sacks recounts his experiences as a young neurologist in the early 1960s, first in California and then in New York, where he discovered a long-forgotten illness in the back wards of a chronic hospital, as well as with a group of patients who would define his life, it becomes clear that Sacks’s earnest desire for engagement has occasioned unexpected encounters and travels – sending him through bars and alleys, over oceans, and across continents.
The Lonely City: Adventures in the Art of Being Alone, Olivia Laing
When Olivia Laing moved to New York City in her mid-thirties, she found herself inhabiting loneliness on a daily basis. Increasingly fascinated by this most shameful of experiences, she began to explore the lonely city by way of art. Moving fluidly between the works and lives of some of the city’s most compelling artists, Laing conducts an electric, dazzling investigation into what it means to be alone, illuminating not only the causes of loneliness but also how it might be resisted and redeemed.
Natasha’s Dance: A Cultural History of Russia, Orlando Figes
Beginning in the 18th century with the building of St. Petersburg’s “a window on the West” – and culminating with the challenges posed to Russian identity by the Soviet regime, Figes examines how writers, artists, and musicians grappled with the idea of Russia itself – its character, spiritual essence, and destiny. He skillfully interweaves the great works – by Dostoevsky, Stravinsky, and Chagall – with folk embroidery, peasant songs, religious icons, and all the customs of daily life, from food and drink to bathing habits to beliefs about the spirit world. Figes’s characters range high and low: the revered Tolstoy, who left his deathbed to search for the Kingdom of God, as well as the serf girl Praskovya, who became Russian opera’s first superstar and shocked society by becoming her owner’s wife.
Like the European-schooled countess Natasha performing an impromptu folk dance in Tolstoy’s War and Peace, the spirit of “Russianness” is revealed by Figes as rich and uplifting, complex and contradictory-a powerful force that unified a vast country and proved more lasting than any Russian ruler or state.
Poonachi or the Story of a Black Goat, Perumal Murugan, translated from the Tamil by N Kalyan Raman
Through a seeming act of providence, an old couple receives a day-old female goat kid as a gift from the cosmos. Thus begins the story of Poonachi, the little orphan goat.
As you follow her story from forest to habitation, independence to motherhood, you recognise in its significant moments the depth and magnitude of your own fears and longings, fuelled by the instinct for survival that animates all life. Masterly and nuanced, Perumal Murugan’s tale forces us to reflect on our own responses to hierarchy and ownership, selflessness and appetite, love and desire, living and dying. Poonachi is the story of a goat who carries the burden of being different all her life, of a she-goat who survives against the odds. It is equally an expression of solidarity with the animal world and the female condition. The tale is also a commentary on our times, on the choices we make as a society and a nation, and the increasing vulnerability of individuals, particularly writers and artists, who resist when they are pressed to submit.
Indica: A Deep Natural History of the Indian Subcontinent, Pranay Lal
Researching across wide-ranging scientific disciplines and travelling with scientists all over the country, biochemist Pranay Lal has woven together the first compelling narrative of India’s deep natural history, filled with fierce reptiles, fantastic dinosaurs, gargantuan mammals and amazing plants. This story, which includes a rare collection of images, illustrations and maps, starts at the very beginning – from the time when a galactic swirl of dust coalesced to become our life-giving planet – and ends with the arrival of our ancestors on the banks of the Indus. Pranay Lal tells this story with verve, lucidity and an infectious enthusiasm that comes from his deep, abiding love of nature.
An Unnecessary Woman, Rabih Alameddine
Aaliya Saleh lives alone in her Beirut apartment, surrounded by stockpiles of books. Godless, fatherless, childless, and divorced, Aaliya is her family’s “unnecessary appendage”. Every year, she translates a new favourite book into Arabic, then stows it away. The thirty-seven books that Aaliya has translated over her lifetime have never been read – by anyone.
This breathtaking portrait of a reclusive woman follows Aaliya’s digressive mind as it ricochets across visions of past and present Beirut. Colourful musings on literature, philosophy, and art are invaded by memories of the Lebanese Civil War and Aaliya’s own volatile past. As she tries to overcome her ageing body and spontaneous emotional upwellings, Aaliya is faced with an unthinkable disaster that threatens to shatter the little life she has left.
Strangers to Ourselves: Unsettled Minds and the Stories that Make Us, Rachel Aviv
Strangers to Ourselves is a compassionate, courageous and deeply researched look at the ways we talk about and understand ourselves in periods of crisis and distress. Drawing on conversations as well as unpublished journals and memoirs, it follows people who have found that psychiatric language has limitations when it comes to explaining who they are, or that a diagnosis, while giving their experience a name, creates a sense of a future life they wish to question or resist.
Farthest Field: An Indian Story of the Second World War, Raghu Karnad
The years 1939-45 might be the most revered, deplored and replayed in modern history. Yet India’s extraordinary role has been concealed, from itself and from the world. In riveting prose, Karnad retrieves the story of one family – a story of love, rebellion, loyalty and uncertainty – and with it, the greater revelation that is India’s Second World War.
Farthest Field narrates the lost epic of India’s war, in which the largest volunteer army in history fought for the British Empire, even as its countrymen fought to be free of it. It carries us from Madras to Peshawar, Egypt to Burma – unfolding the saga of a young family amazed by their swiftly changing world and swept up in its violence.
India After Gandhi: The History of the World’s Largest Democracy, Ramachandra Guha
India After Gandhi is a magisterial account of the pains, struggles, humiliations and glories of the world’s largest and least likely democracy. A riveting chronicle of the often brutal conflicts that have rocked a giant nation, and of the extraordinary individuals and institutions who held it together, it established itself as a classic when it was first published in 2007. In the last decade, India has witnessed, among other things, two general elections; the fall of the Congress and the rise of Narendra Modi; a major anti-corruption movement; more violence against women, Dalits, and religious minorities; a wave of prosperity for some but the persistence of poverty for others; comparative peace in Nagaland but greater discontent in Kashmir than ever before.
The Faraway Nearby: A Field Guide to Getting Lost, Rebecca Solnit
Gifts come in many guises. One summer, Rebecca Solnit was bequeathed three boxes of ripening apricots, which lay, mountainous, on her bedroom floor – a windfall, a riddle, an emergency to be dealt with. The fruit came from a neglected tree that her mother, gradually succumbing to memory loss, could no longer tend to. From this unexpected inheritance came stories spun like those of Scheherazade, who used her gifts as a storyteller to change her fate and her listener’s heart.
As she looks back on the year of apricots and emergencies, Solnit weaves her own story into fairytales and the lives of others – Marquis de Sade, Mary Shelley and Ernesto “Che” Guevara. She tells of unexpected invitations and adventures, from a library of water in Iceland to the depths of the Grand Canyon. She tells of doctors and explorers, monsters and moths. She tells of warmth and coldness, of making art and re-making the self.
Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants, Robin Wall Kimmerer
Drawing on her life as an indigenous scientist, a mother, and a woman, Kimmerer shows how other living beings – asters and goldenrod, strawberries and squash, salamanders, algae, and sweetgrass – offer us gifts and lessons, even if we’ve forgotten how to hear their voices. In a rich braid of reflections that range from the creation of Turtle Island to the forces that threaten its flourishing today, she circles toward a central argument: that the awakening of a wider ecological consciousness requires the acknowledgement and celebration of our reciprocal relationship with the rest of the living world. For only when we can hear the languages of other beings will we be capable of understanding the generosity of the earth, and learn to give our own gifts in return.
Family Matters, Rohinton Mistry
Nariman Vakeel is a 79-year-old Parsi widower beset by Parkinson’s disease and haunted by memories of the past. He lives with his two middle-aged step-children. When Nariman’s illness is compounded by a broken ankle, he’s forced to take up residence with his daughter Roxana, her husband Yezad and their two young sons. This new responsibility for Yezad, who is already besieged by financial worries, proves too much and pushes him into a scheme of deception – with devastating consequences.
At The Existentialist Café: Freedom, Being, and Apricot Cocktails, Sarah Bakewell
Paris, near the turn of 1933. Three young friends meet over apricot cocktails at the Bec-de-Gaz bar on the rue Montparnasse. They are Jean-Paul Sartre, Simone de Beauvoir and their friend Raymond Aron, who opens their eyes to a radical new way of thinking. Pointing to his drink, he says, “You can make philosophy out of this cocktail!”
From this moment of inspiration, Sartre will create his own extraordinary philosophy of real, experienced life – of love and desire, of freedom and being, of cafés and waiters, of friendships and revolutionary fervour. It is a philosophy that will enthral Paris and sweep through the world, leaving its mark on post-war liberation movements, from the student uprisings of 1968 to civil rights pioneers.
At the Existentialist Café tells the story of modern existentialism as one of passionate encounters between people, minds and ideas. From the “king and queen of existentialism” – Sartre and de Beauvoir – to their wider circle of friends and adversaries including Albert Camus, Martin Heidegger, Maurice Merleau-Ponty and Iris Murdoch, this audiobook is an enjoyable and original journey through a captivating intellectual movement.
Cockroaches, Scholastique Mukasonga, translated from the French by Jordan Stump
Scholastique Mukasonga’s Cockroaches is the story of growing up a Tutsi in Hutu-dominated Rwanda – the story of a happy child and a loving family, all wiped out in the genocide of 1994. A vivid, bittersweet depiction of family life and bond in a time of immense hardship, it is also a story of incredible endurance, and the duty to remember that loss and those lost while somehow carrying on.
The Great Fire, Shirley Hazzard
In war-torn Asia and stricken Europe, men and women, still young but veterans of harsh experience, must reinvent their lives and expectations, and learn, from their past, to dream again. Some will fulfil their destinies, others will falter. At the centre of the story, a brave and brilliant soldier finds that survival and worldly achievement are not enough. His counterpart, a young girl living in Occupied Japan and tending to her dying brother, falls in love, and in the process discovers herself.
In the looming shadow of world enmities resumed, and of Asia’s coming centrality in world affairs, a man and a woman seek to recover self-reliance, balance, and tenderness, struggling to reclaim their humanity.
Latitudes of Longing, Shubhangi Swarup
An astounding exploration of intense longings, Shubhangi Swarup’s novel begins in the depths of the Andaman Sea, and follows geological and emotional faultlines through the Irrawaddy delta and the tourist trap of Thamel, to end amidst the highest glaciers and passes of the Karakorams. The story sweeps through worlds and times that are inhabited by: a scientist who studies trees and a clairvoyant who talks to them; Lord Goodenough who travels around the furthest reaches of the Raj, giving names to nameless places; a geologist working towards ending futile wars over a glacier; octogenarian lovers; a superstitious dictator and a mother struggling to get her revolutionary son released; a yeti who seeks human companionship; a turtle who turns first into a boat and then a woman; and the ghost of an evaporated ocean as restless as the continents.
The Lost Pianos of Siberia, Sophy Roberts
Dotted throughout this remote and beautiful landscape are pianos created during the boom years of the 19th century. They tell the story of how, ever since entering Russian culture under the influence of Catherine the Great, piano music has run through the country like blood. How these pianos made the journey into this snow-bound wilderness in the first place is remarkable. That they might be capable of making music in such a hostile landscape feels like a miracle.
Terra Nullius: A Journey Through No One’s Land, Sven Lindqvist, translated from the Swedish by Sarah Death
Terra Nullius is a journey across Australia’s desert and into its shocking past. This lyrical book describes its landscape, flora and fauna and geology, tells the history of the country and reveals the shocking treatment of its Aboriginal peoples.
I Have Not Seen Mandu: A Fractured Soul-Memoir, Swadesh Deepak, translated from the Hindi by Jerry Pinto
When Swadesh Deepak – celebrated Hindi playwright and short-story writer – arrives at PGI, Chandigarh, after having tried to set himself on fire, the doctors don’t know if he belongs in the burns unit or in the psychiatric ward. He’s living a “curse”. A dangerous seductress – his Mayavini – is taking revenge for his insulting rebuff at her wish to visit with him the famous lovers’ palace in Mandu. She comes to him at night, sometimes with three white leopards, and she leaves the smell of her body in his nostrils. When he tries to kill himself, she tells him he will not die. He is firmly in her clutches, but he will tolerate anything for her, from humiliation at the hands of acquaintances to carnivorous worms under his skin. This fractured, shattering narrative records Deepak’s descent into madness and his brief, uncertain recovery. Shortly after it was published, he left home for a walk one morning and never returned.
The House of Doors, Tan Twang Eng
Willie Somerset Maugham is one of the greatest writers of the early 20th century. But in 1921 he is beleaguered by an unhappy marriage, ill-health and business interests that have gone badly awry. He is also struggling to write.
His friend Robert Hamlyn offers an escape in the Straits Settlements of Penang, where Robert’s steely wife Lesley learns to see Willie as he is – a man who has no choice but to mask his true self.
As Willie prepares to leave, Lesley confides in him secrets of her own, including how she came to know the charismatic revolutionary Dr Sun Yat Sen. And more scandalous still, her connection to an Englishwoman charged with murder in the Kuala Lumpur courts – a tragedy drawn from fact, and worthy of fiction.
Educated, Tara Westover
Tara Westover grew up preparing for the end of the world. She was never put in school, never taken to the doctor. She did not even have a birth certificate until she was nine years old.
At sixteen, to escape her father’s radicalism and a violent older brother, Tara left home. What followed was a struggle for self-invention, a journey that gets to the heart of what an education is and what it offers: the perspective to see one’s life through new eyes, and the will to change it.
Open City, Teju Cole
Along the streets of Manhattan, a young Nigerian doctor doing his residency wanders aimlessly. The walks meet a need for Julius: they are a release from the tightly regulated mental environment of work, and they give him the opportunity to process his relationships, his recent breakup with his girlfriend, his present, his past. Though he is navigating the busy parts of town, the impression of countless faces does nothing to assuage his feelings of isolation. But it is not only a physical landscape he covers; Julius crisscrosses social territory as well, encountering people from different cultures and classes who will provide insight on his journey – which takes him to Brussels, to the Nigeria of his youth, and into the most unrecognisable facets of his own soul.
Songs of Kabir, translated by Arvind Krishna Mehrotra
A lovely book of translations of the poetry of Kabir, a truly visionary egalitarian thinker of the 15th century, whose songs remain alive in the folk tradition of north India. In bringing Kabir to an English-speaking audience Arvind Krishna Mehrotra has made a major contribution to the global reach of that inspiring vision.
Sidewalks, Valeria Luiselli, translated from the Spanish by Christina MacSweeney
Evocative, erudite and consistently surprising, these narrative essays explore the places – real and imagined – that shape our lives. Whether wandering the familiar streets of her neighbourhood, revisiting the landmarks of her past, or getting lost in a foreign city, Valeria Luiselli plots a unique and exhilarating course that traces unexpected pathways between diverse ideas and reveals the world from a fresh perspective. Here, we follow Luiselli as she cycles around Mexico City, shares a cigarette with the night porter in her Harlem apartment, and hunts down a poet’s tomb in Venice. Each location sparks Luiselli’s nimble curiosity and prompts imaginative reflections and inventions on topics as varied as the fluidity of identity, the elusiveness of words that can’t be translated, the competing methods of arranging a bookcase, and the way that city-dwellers evade eye contact with their neighbours while spying on their lives.
Ghachar Ghochar, Vivek Shanbhag, translated from the Kannada by Srinath Perur
It’s true what they say – it’s not we who control money, it’s the money that controls us. When there’s only a little, it behaves meekly; when it grows, it becomes brash and has its way with us. From a cramped, ant-infested house to a spacious bungalow, a family finds itself making a transition in many ways. The narrator, a sensitive young man, is numbed by the swirl around him. All he can do is flee every day to an old-world cafe, where he seeks solace from an oracular waiter. As members of the family realign their equations and desires, new strands are knotted, others come apart, and conflict brews dangerously in the background.
Two Cures for Love, Wendy Cope
The idea for this book grew out of Wendy Cope’s experience of meeting her audience when reading her poems in schools. This is an edition of the poems which identifies the references, verse-forms, contexts and occasions of her work, and which offers readers a new arrangement of the poetry as a whole. The notes also identify dates of composition, so that it is possible to observe the development of her work. As well as drawing on Wendy Cope’s three published books, the selection also includes a significant number of poems collected or published for the first time.
The Housekeeper and the Professor, Yoko Ogawa, translated from the Japanese by Stephen Snyder
Each morning, the Professor and the Housekeeper are introduced to one another. The Professor may not remember what he had for breakfast, but his mind is still alive with elegant mathematical equations from the past. He devises clever maths riddles – based on her shoe size or her birthday – and the numbers reveal a poetic world to both the Housekeeper and her son.
With each new equation, the three lost souls forge an affection more mysterious than imaginary numbers, and a bond that runs deeper than memory.
Barracoon: The Story of the Last Slave, Zora Neale Hurston
Abducted from Africa, sold in America. The compelling true story of one of the last survivors of the Atlantic Slave Trade, Barracoon recounts one man’s fight for freedom. After being illegally smuggled as “Black Cargo” fifty years after the abolition of slavery, Cudjo Lewis spent nearly six years in captivity before being finally emancipated. Cudjo casts light on the circumstances of his capture and his detention in a barracoon, before embarking on his journey through the Middle Passage, to his arrival in the United States on the Alabama River. This never-before-published work brilliantly illuminates the tragedy of slavery and one life forever defined by it.
Disclosure: Arunava Sinha is the editor of Books and Ideas section of Scroll.
