100 Books Like A Disappearance In Fiji

After graduating, the narrator's family set him up with a job on Wall Street but it just isn't for him despite his upbringing preparing him for this kind of route. A few months later, he sets off on a round-the-world trip. The book features the first eighteen months of this journey spent in Australasia scraping a living in any way he can with occasionally outlandish casual jobs including beekeeping, running a youth hostel, and working on a production line in a cardboard box factory. He comes across a young woman, another traveller, sleeping beneath a table of honey pots and they begin a passionate yet fraught love affair.

Not only is this a great story, it is also punctuated with Bloom's vivid descriptions of landscapes and people he encounters along the way. There are meditations on the quirky details of life and reminiscing on an unusual childhood.

The South Pacific nation of Fiji is a magical place, as I found out many years ago on a scuba trip that evolved into a circuit of the main island of Viti Levu. For tourists, the island chain offers the gold standard of tropical paradise resorts, but the story for the Fijians is considerably more complicated. The islands are widely scattered, race relations led to government coups, economic opportunities are limited, and old ways are under pressure from modern expectations.

Using cultural elements like canoe racing, as well as a foreboding sense of the conflict inherent in Fijian life today, Fiji becomes a marvelous place for trouble. I could almost smell the hibiscus! And the sunscreen! This story nearly had me booking a flight before I was halfway through.

Fiji’s complexities are woven into the plot, which would be impossible to set anywhere else. Modern beach fun and age-old traditions… show more.

If the goods and services that we enjoy in America today all had to be provided by human muscle power, we would each, on average, need roughly 150 people working full-time for us. Instead, fossil fuels do the work. The good news: coal helped end the horrors of slavery. The bad news: we’re all now utterly dependent on an energy system that’s destroying the world and the survival prospects of future generations. In many ways, we have become slaves to the fossil fuel regime, and Nikiforuk explains how. This book deserved far more attention than it received when published in 2012.

I love historical fiction with mystery and long-held secrets centered around a piece of art, and where the story teaches me something I never learned in school. Harmel does it beautifully in this evocative novel with the POW internment camps in Florida during WWII.

Hooked on page one, I was captured by the protagonist’s hunger for roots and family, and kept turning pages to uncover the mystery of Emily’s family along with her. This page-turner is heartbreaking as well as heartwarming, and it set me off to reading all of Harmel’s novels.

Few know that thousands of villagers from India were shipped to various colonies as indentured laborers after slavery ended in Britain’s territories.

Lured by promises of rich earnings they could send home, they replaced slaves and worked in similar conditions of hardship. In South Africa’s Colony of Natal, Indian indentured laborers did backbreaking work on sugar plantations, and their stories have seldom been told. In particular, no one has revealed the hidden stories of women plantation workers. In this heartbreaking yet lyrical novel, Joanne Joseph (tracing her own grandmother’s history) breaks the mold with her story of Shanti, who runs away from an arranged marriage and finds herself apparently powerless in a foreign land. How she indeed exercises her will, forges friendships, and finds love and peace makes for a riveting story.

Even though it wasn’t commercially successful in its time, Cane was a critical success. I love the fact that it’s come to be considered a representative work of both literary modernism and the Harlem Renaissance. 

The book’s three-part structure was described by Toomer as a circle, moving from stories, poems, and songs featuring rural characters in Georgia in the first part, to stories set in theaters and sections of dramatic dialogue set in the cities of Washington, DC, and Chicago in the second part, and finally back to the rural South in the third part.

It is a beautiful and wildly experimental work, and flies in the face of many assumptions about African American characters, in both the South and the North.

Smith traces the historical arc of rum from local colonial consumption to becoming a major export by the nineteenth century.

I am amazed at how much history Smith captures by focusing his study on one type of alcohol. With his attention to how European and African drinking habits shaped rum consumption, he demonstrates how rum cut across gender, class, and race relations.

With their knowledge of distillation and introduction of resources new to the Americas, Europeans increased alcohol’s potency. Alcohol took on political as well as economic significance when colonial officials used alcohol revenue to govern. Without displacing fermented drinks, distilled liquor introduced new dynamics in the production and consumption of alcohol.

I love that he emphasizes how common consumption spurred taverns and other drinking establishments, which facilitated socialization that frequently contravened social norms, such as elite men who conversed with poor and working-class women and African and mulatto drinkers… show more.

Paula Fox, the late great novelist and revered children’s book author, wrote a wonderful memoir of effectively not having parents. Oh, Fox’s parents were around, but they were drunk, careless, and inattentive, often shuffling young Paula to and from locales as varied as Hollywood and pre-Revolutionary Cuba. Her parents are depicted in this memoir as both monstrous and sympathetic, providing aspiring memoirists with a model of artful ambivalence. The book is also filled with extraordinary walk-ons by Orson Welles, James Cagney, Stella Adler, and F. Scott Fitzgerald. It’s a beautiful book by one of the most effortlessly commanding writers this country has ever produced. (Full disclosure: As a twenty-eight-year-old greenhorn editor, I had the pleasure of line-editing this book, which wasn’t editing so much as polishing silver.)

A brutal but beautifully told fiction based on true events, it explores the aftermath of America’s withdrawal from Vietnam – folding into the narrative, such horrific events as the Koh Kra massacre. 

The protagonists are 16-year-old Anh, her 13-year-old brother Minh and their 10-year-old brother Thanh. During an ill-fated sea crossing to Hong Kong, they are separated from their parents and siblings. After passing through camps and detention centres, they find themselves in the Britain of the 80s.

What follows is a clear-eyed, often heart-rending look at the immigrant experience. Pin’s writing style is precise and understated – and perhaps the more powerful it. Among the many elements that make the book so beguiling is the addition of Dao, one of the siblings’ lost brothers narrating parts of the story from limbo.

In many ways this is the quintessential Hong Kong book because its very style and approach is, as the title says, somewhat impossible, mixing the intensely personal with the political, closely observed reflections and a large collection of unique Hong Kong voices.

Written during and after the 2019/20 protests, Cheung throws her net wide to give the reader an intimate picture of the real Hong Kong, an exasperating and wonderful place. She is the youngest of the authors I have recommended and, therefore, closer to the generation who gave rise to the protests. People often speak of the unique Hong Kong spirit in Hong Kong, and this book gives profound insight into what that means.