The best books on fascinating lives in far-off places: biographies and novels that bring history to life

Afghanistan has been part of my life for a very long time. I have written a lot about Afghan history and have traveled to the country, too. And I have probably read several hundred books about Afghanistan in half a dozen languages. But Khaled Hosseini’s book managed something quite extraordinary that no one has achieved before or since: he turned the travails of modern Afghan history into a massive international bestseller. 

In doing so, I admired how Khaled Hosseini adopted the tools of the novelist—characterization, empathy, a plot driven by the inner conflicts of personality and the outer conflicts of context—to not only make Afghanistan interesting to Western readers. He also turned his country from a place of abstract political and terrorist violence into a place where fellow human beings face dilemmas with which readers on the far side of the planet could identify and sympathize.

I am fascinated by extraordinary lives, especially lives that cross borders and cultures. I also enjoy biographies set against major historical events, all the more so when an individual life is used to show an apparently familiar era of history in a new light. Tom Reiss’s book manages all this superbly. 

This book reconstructs the life of Lev Nussimbaum, who was born in Kiev in what is now Ukraine but was then imperial Russia. But he spent a good part of his life in Baku when that cosmopolitan Russian imperial port was the center of the world’s first great oil boom. Having traveled myself in the Caucasus region, as well as other former parts of the Russian Empire (and Soviet Union), I found Reiss’s account of that collapsing imperial culture quite fascinating. But it is the story of Lev—or, as he twice reinvented himself, Essad Bey and Kurban Said—that makes this book far more than a dry historical survey of the first half of the twentieth century. 

After reading Reiss’s book, when I was in Tbilisi, I bought my own copy of Ali and Nino, Lev’s most famous novel (albeit written as Kurban Said). The best books always introduce us to other books in turn.

I am a historian by day. But I have always believed that artists—whether writers, painters, or musicians—capture the human experience of history and, moreover, convey it in an enduring form for future generations far more effectively than historians. 

Historians have to present a single line of analysis or argument, which inevitably and properly makes events of a particular historical period meaningful to the particular moment in time when they are writing. A true artist can transcend both of those times. In my view, Rushdie’s book achieves that for the period, or generation, after Indian independence in 1947.

I have lived in India and written a lot about Indian history myself, including a book about Bombay, where Rushdie was partly raised. So, I have enjoyed and admired many of his earlier books, but this one remains his great achievement as a work of historical art.

This book is a literary biography that reads like a detective novel. I found it to be gripping, shocking, hilarious, and tragic. I also consider it a great work of literature in its own right, effectively reinventing the genre of biography and turning it into an artwork forged in the era of Raymond Chandler. It was first published in 1934, but has been through many reissues, including with the alternative subtitle, Genius or Charlatan? 

That question captures perfectly the state of mind in which I was left after finishing Symons’s account of the life of Frederick Rolfe, who called himself Baron Corvo, as he swanned around southern Europe in the 1900s. While Corvo was a writer—he wrote a series of over-ripe novels, most famously Hadrian the Seventh—his life is more the stuff of the unbelievable potboiler than the usual tedious life of authors tied to their typewriters.

And from his quest to reconstruct that life from amid the myths that ‘Baron Corvo’ told about himself, in my opinion Symons created one of the most original books of the century.

This is a book about the collision of worlds and ideologies, told through the life of a single woman. This is a biography of Margaret Marcus, a small-town Jewish girl in midcentury America who converted to Islam, emigrated to Pakistan, and became a student of the Islamist political theorist Abul Ala Mawdudi. Under the name Maryam Jameelah, Margaret wrote many books condemning the corruption of Western capitalist society. And then came September 11… 

I found this book absolutely gripping and no less absorbing—and unsettling—in its moral power. Deborah Baker is a truly extraordinary biographer, and I admire her artistry, research, and instinct for an important life history in equal measure. Even though I have traveled extensively across Pakistan myself and written about many of the themes Baker explores, I still learned a great deal from this deeply serious but no less spellbinding biography.