The best books on how war & displacement affects families

This book is a sweeping, multigenerational, cinematic memoir spanning from the Chinese silk trade to WWII Japanese-occupied Hong Kong and, finally, suburban Australia. I love true stories where we learn about history and cultures through fascinating characters. In House of Kwa, Mimi’s eccentric father, Francis, may have put the war behind him, but Mimi certainly bears his scars. 

Imagine what it’s like to receive a legal letter notifying you that your father is suing you. That’s what turned Mimi’s hair gray overnight. Francis sued his daughter over the distribution of his sister’s estate, Mimi’s doting, nurturing, globe-trotting Aunt Theresa. 

It’s remarkable how Mimi overcame her abusive childhood in 1970s Western Australia and later became a renowned journalist and TV presenter. Mimi is the hero of this story for learning how to stand up for herself and her mother, and when she is older, for helping her mother obtain a diagnosis for a debilitating mental-health condition and treatment, she should have received decades earlier. 

In this unputdownable book that reads like Educated-meets-Wild Swans, Mimi shows us how to deal with parents we don’t get to choose by committing to love her father, always, with empathy, patience, and grace.

Given the heroic women I portray in Irena’s Gift, I am naturally drawn to stories of resilient women who challenge conventions to reinvent themselves and thrive in new countries. In Kantika, through exquisite prose, Elizabeth Graver transports readers from the vibrant streets of Constantinople to the bustling avenues of Barcelona–where characters based on her own Sephardic family are exiled after losing everything–to Havana and then New York. 

Its glorious cover is an apt description of the kaleidoscope of cultures and places this story allows us to inhabit. Graver's lyrical writing breathes life into each city as if it were a character. Each location bursts with movement and color, such as this description of 1907 Constantinople: “In wordless tunes, nonsense sounds and ballads, in Ladino, French and bits of Turkish, Hebrew, Greek, she sings, as on the street the lemon man sings lemons, the Bulgarian sings pudding, the vegetable man sings eggplant, squash, and artichokes–“fresh, cheap, ladies, how I wait for you with my aubergine!”

I recommend you Google this book's excellent review in the New York Times.

Anne Berest embarks on a detective journey after an anonymous postcard arrives at her family home listing the names of her maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques—all killed at Auschwitz. Anne and her mother are determined to find out who sent the postcard and why. For sixteen years, Anne pursues her quest to uncover the sender’s identity and her family’s hidden past while grappling with her own identity—what it means to be Jewish and how she embodies the legacy of her murdered family members. 

Although Berest wrote her family’s Holocaust history as a novel, she describes it as a ‘true novel.’ She changed the name of the village where family members were arrested in order to protect the people living there now. She also changed the names of perpetrators to protect descendants who did not get to choose their parents but had to live with their bad choices.

Like Irena’s Gift, this book is part piecing together a hidden family history, part mystery investigation, and part search for Jewish identity. Both our books explore transgenerational trauma. As in my family, Anne’s grandmother, Myriam, the sole survivor in her family, resisted any talk about the war and her experiences. Berest grew up with what she later came to understand as her ancestors living in her cells. She refers to this dominant theme of her book as ‘invisible transmission.’

I clung to Anne’s explorations of how the Holocaust shaped her in ways she discovered only while pursuing the mystery of this story and how her quest helped her understand what she calls her ‘Holocaust neuroses,’ such as her fear of gas leaks. Secrets and silenced trauma steeped her childhood and mine, leaving effects she describes as “breathing in secondhand smoke”—seemingly innocuous at the time, but the damage and scarring became obvious decades later.

Provocative, tragic, but staggeringly beautiful, of all the ‘best books’ on my list, this affected me the most profoundly. I found Berest’s poignant articulation of the effects of a war that she did not endure uncannily familiar: “I struggle endlessly to make a connection between the thought of my family and the mythologized occurrence that is genocide. And that struggle is what constitutes me. It is the thing that defines me. For almost forty years, I have tried to draw a shape that resembles me, but without success. Today, though, I can connect those disparate dots. I can see, in the constellation of fragments scattered over the page, a silhouette in which I recognize myself at last: I am the daughter, and the granddaughter, of survivors.” 

Winner of the Baillie Gifford Prize for nonfiction, this magnificent book begins as a memoir with Flannagan visiting the site of the POW camp in Japan where his father was subjected to slave labor during WWII, was starved, and faced certain death, saved only by the atomic bomb dropping on nearby Hiroshima. Throughout this book, Flanagan grapples with the fact he exists only because of this tragedy (as I grapple in Irena’s Gift with the fact I exist only because a Nazi SS officer who tortured and killed women saved my mother.)  

Often, in families of war survivors, one son or daughter becomes curious—obsessed even—with how their parent survived, perhaps not realizing they are also seeking to understand their own identity given they inherited their parent’s trauma. Frustrated by a Japanese museum’s omission of his father’s slave labor experience, Flanagan poses his dilemma: “Sometimes I wonder why we keep returning to beginnings—why we seek the single thread we might pull to unravel the tapestry we call our life in the hope that behind it we will find the truth of why.

But there is no truth. There is only why. And when we look closer, we see that behind that why is just another tapestry. And behind it, another and another, until we arrive at oblivion.”

And so, Flannagan borrows ‘Question 7’ from Chekhov, who believed literature’s role is not to provide answers but only to ask the relevant questions. He attempts to unravel the why of his father’s experiences, his own, and the complexities of human motivations and behaviors in genre-defying threads that veer between nonfiction and novelistic, from interrogating the role of H.G. Wells and his lovers in creating the atom bomb to almost torturing us reliving the prolonged terror of his nearly drowning as a river guide at 21. 

This is a vivid, intentionally disjointed, but haunting narrative about life’s unanswerable questions that will captivate your soul.

As a journalist, teacher and Education Director for Israel’s Kids4Peace (now part of Seeds of Peace), Ittay Flescher has spent years bringing together youth across conflict lines. In this vital book for our times, he shows how recognizing our shared humanity can cultivate dialogue and trust, dismantle stereotypes, counter dehumanization, and foster empathy—demonstrating that in both groups, there are partners for peace. Flescher highlights young voices challenging the one-sided narratives they have inherited, and shows how, “two rooted and indigenous national identities” can engage in difficult conversations about historical events, identity, and coexistence.

Given how war has affected my own family, what resonated most is Flescher’s ability to humanize conflict. He reminds us that behind every headline are innocent mothers, fathers, daughters, and sons who deserve our compassion. He has learned that people with extreme opinions often carry deep traumas that shaped their beliefs: “I can understand someone’s pain and show empathy for that without agreeing with their political view.”

The Holy and the Broken outlines an actionable roadmap to dialogue, incorporating lessons from conflicts and reconciliation in Northern Ireland, Bosnia, South Africa, and beyond. It is a powerful testament to the power of listening.