Books like A Hall of Mirrors — picked by fans

No list of mine would be complete without a Graham Greene novel on it.

My favourite author, the one I return to time and again. I reread this novel while I was writing my book, and it had lost none of its power or, indeed, glory since the last time I read it.

The story of a whisky priest on the run in the anti-Catholic purges in South America, it’s about faith, hope, self-worth, and fear. And redemption? Maybe. Maybe not. No one writes tortured souls like Greene. No one makes you care for them more.

The once-promising writer Jacob Finch Bonner is out of ideas and down on his luck. When his student Evan Parker proclaims that his work-in-progress is sure to be a runaway hit, Bonner waits to see if this bold proclamation comes to fruition. 

After Bonner learns Parker has died, he decides he’ll usher that story into the world—as his own. But someone knows Bonner isn’t the original author. Shame and suspense intertwine and heighten as this book speeds along. I enjoyed Korelitz’s exploration of how far an author will go for praise or even relevancy. 

This novel also explores an idea that fascinates me: Who “owns” a story? Just because something happened to you or your family, does that mean no one else can tell it or embellish it? Author Anne Lamott says you own everything that happened to you, but how much should you tell, and how will others react… show more.

This is a book which lodges between the chase type of plot, and the "who dunnit."

The chase aspect revolves around a retired MI5 agent who is brought in to investigate a realised data leakage, and the painstaking process of eliminating suspects until the perpetrator is found. Not so much a "who dunnit," as a "who’s doing it." 

The story has authenticity inasmuch as the author was a member of the security services during the war.

Sheldon Horowitz, an aging widower suffering from dementia, has been removed from New York to Oslo, so he can live with his granddaughter, his only relative, and her new husband.

Confused but wily, Horowitz is soon on the run in a country he does not know, hiding the neighbor boy being pursued by the thug who murdered the boy’s mother. This book was a total surprise to me, and seemed an unlikely amalgam of elements that could never work together—but did.

I bought Kalyvas’s book back in 2009 as a doctoral student looking to understand the social science literature on civil war violence and finished reading it only in 2023 as an associate professor interested in studying target choice for a class I was teaching.

Though singularly focused on civil wars, the book goes deep in constructing theoretical arguments to support the premise of the book and travels broad in applying the models across various civil wars. It teaches readers to look beneath the surface to understand what we observe on the outside.

It is a great resource for those looking for good examples of how to develop a theoretical model. Finally, I also highly recommend this book to graduate students looking for research ideas.

Prior to this book, most works on the long history of terrorism applied contemporary definitions of the term to various incidents throughout world history. Wilson turned the page on this framework. Killing Strangers analyzes the gamut of political violence in Western Europe and North America since the late eighteenth century to explain how we’ve arrived at a contemporary reality characterized, in part, by recurring fear of impersonal atrocities carried out in public gathering spaces. Wilson shows how, on one hand, the rise of the modern bureaucratic state’s “monopoly” on legitimate force pushed most violent challengers to the fringes of society. On the other hand, various technological innovations—from dynamite and automobiles to commercial airlines and satellite television—offered new possibilities for those intent on violent havoc. 

The word “visceral” comes to mind when I attempt to distill what this book is about. A not-so-fictional auto-biography opens in the slum called Paradise, where Chipo, Bastard, Sbho, Stina, and “I” are headed to the–relatively–more affluent area of Budapest to steal fruit. These dirt-poor kids don’t know it, but they are victims of the far-off, murderous regime of President Robert Mugabe–but that always remains hidden in the background. They are brutalized and never know it or know why.

Courtesy of an invite from an Aunt in the United States, the protagonist eventually escapes Zimbabwe. But once there, while things get materially much better, in reality, it is no less bewildering and bereft of meaning: she and her friends spend their afternoons watching hard-core porn while eating popcorn and discussing inane stuff, like “what the hell are they doing?!” It’s funny in parts, but it also hurts in parts. The… show more.

The Shining Path war was the bloodiest episode in modern-Peruvian history, claiming the lives of nearly 70,000 people. While there are a number of excellent books on the Shining Path, I have never read an account of the war as captivating as this—and I doubt I ever will. Gavilán, an Indigenous peasant from the Andean region at the heart of the conflict, recounts his harrowing journey from child soldier in the guerrilla ranks to teenaged soldier in the Peruvian military. Along the way, the author invites readers to share the innermost struggles of a young man driven to survive against incredible odds. The writing is notable for its quick pace and brutal honesty. A must-read for anyone wishing to understand Peru’s political backdrop and contemporary history.

U.S. Rep. Jamie Raskin was not only inside the Capitol on January 6 when it was stormed, he had just tragically buried his 25-year-old son the previous day. His book, a cathartic exercise for himself and a shocked nation, drills down to the heart of what happened, showing in graphic detail how violent and terrifying that day was from an insider’s perspective. 

As a former constitutional law professor at American University who later became a Trump impeachment manager and member of the U.S. House Select Committee investigating the attack, Raskin eloquently explains the underlying events and issues that led to the violent breach. He argues forcefully why the former president himself must be held accountable before the country can begin a crucial, difficult healing process.

The editors of this volume are two of the most important and influential medical anthropologists in the world and major scholars of violence. In addition to collecting a set of useful texts on violence, the introduction to the volume is a piece of writing that I have returned to many times.