Here are 100 books that Borderlines fans have personally recommended if you like
Borderlines.
Book DNA is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.
Ever since I followed a girlfriend on the hippie trail through Asia (see: Around the World In A Bad Mood) at 25, I had my life changed from fledgling novelist to travel writer—when, despite my professed difficulties, major magazines started calling me to see the world on their dime. I also was able to center three more book accounts of my wanderings on major life passions (Latin baseball, Brazilian music and Chinese food), so that I had enriching experiences even when the royalties weren't. I have taught courses on "travel lit" everywhere from Berkeley to Kuala Lumpur and honed a philosophy of travel writing as the ultimate in wide-eyed amateurism.
In the hands of Jose Saramago, a baroque stylist yet radical thinker, this tale of a reclusive proofreader and the definitive account of a 12th-century battle moves between the most stubborn boundary of all—separating the present from a still vivid past and a place where many of his Portuguese countrymen still live.
An editor at a Portuguese publishing house, Raimundo Silva, undertakes to rewrite a crucial episode in Portuguese history as a romantic saga, with the amorous encouragement of his supervisor.
It is April 1st, 2038. Day 60 of China's blockade of the rebel island of Taiwan.
The US government has agreed to provide Taiwan with a weapons system so advanced that it can disrupt the balance of power in the region. But what pilot would be crazy enough to run…
Ever since I followed a girlfriend on the hippie trail through Asia (see: Around the World In A Bad Mood) at 25, I had my life changed from fledgling novelist to travel writer—when, despite my professed difficulties, major magazines started calling me to see the world on their dime. I also was able to center three more book accounts of my wanderings on major life passions (Latin baseball, Brazilian music and Chinese food), so that I had enriching experiences even when the royalties weren't. I have taught courses on "travel lit" everywhere from Berkeley to Kuala Lumpur and honed a philosophy of travel writing as the ultimate in wide-eyed amateurism.
This novel is about an exiled Turkish journalist returning home to investigate the suicides of girls over being denied headscarves is Orhan Pamuk's masterwork.
It is the most profound and poetic statement I've ever read on the collision between the conflicting consciousness of the modern and the traditional mind.
Returning to Turkey from exile in the West, the secular poet Ka is driven by curiosity to investigate a surprising wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden by the government to wear their head scarves in school. But the epicentre of the suicides, the bleak, impoverished border city of Kars, is also home to the beautiful Ipek, a friend of Ka's youth whom he has never forgotten and whose spirited younger sister is a leader of the rebellious schoolgirls. As a fierce snowstorm descends, cutting them off from the world, violence between the military and local Islamic radicals begins to…
Ever since I followed a girlfriend on the hippie trail through Asia (see: Around the World In A Bad Mood) at 25, I had my life changed from fledgling novelist to travel writer—when, despite my professed difficulties, major magazines started calling me to see the world on their dime. I also was able to center three more book accounts of my wanderings on major life passions (Latin baseball, Brazilian music and Chinese food), so that I had enriching experiences even when the royalties weren't. I have taught courses on "travel lit" everywhere from Berkeley to Kuala Lumpur and honed a philosophy of travel writing as the ultimate in wide-eyed amateurism.
This is ostensibly a travel book, a journey of discovery for VS Naipaul, a product of the Indian diaspora deeply imbued with Western Anglo values. It's also reportage, essay, and passionate horror-filled screed. It's not a fair or objective portrait of his homeland, but it is brilliantly observed and profoundly argued.
In this book, V.S.Naipaul returns to the country which continues to intrigue and inspire him and about which he wrote "An Area of Darkness" in 1964, a semi-autobiographical account of a year spent in India. Now, twenty-five years later, he goes back to that country, returning to the places he visited years ago and talking to people of all types and at all levels of society. Naipaul started writing in 1954 he has won the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Hawthornden Prize, the W.H.Smith Award and the Booker Prize, the latter with the novel "In…
A Duke with rigid opinions, a Lady whose beliefs conflict with his, a long disputed parcel of land, a conniving neighbour, a desperate collaboration, a failure of trust, a love found despite it all.
Alexander Cavendish, Duke of Ravensworth, returned from war to find that his father and brother had…
As an English professor, I teach all kinds of literature, but I’m especially drawn to creative and experimental works that cross over different languages, cultures, and geographical regions. I’m drawn to writers who test the limits of language. Joseph Conrad chose to write in English, his third language (after Polish and French), which he learned from the polyglot world of sailing. Conrad’s English is populated by multiple other languages. When I discovered the Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, I was compelled to learn both Dutch and Indonesian in order to read the prison notes, then available only in Dutch, and the many stories and novels not yet translated into English.
This is a book that keeps on changing my life. I was bowled over the first time I read it because it completely transformed my understanding of global history. The multi-ethnic, multi-lingual, multi-national history I’d been piecing together studying Conrad’s work suddenly all made sense in a different way.
Pramoedya’s novel shows how Conrad’s novels are really all about the anti-colonial revolution. I love the book for the way it introduces all the most important historical, political, social, sexual, and philosophical questions bound up with decolonization.
It's a deceptively simple read, but cocooned within the sentimental coming-of-age story of its first-person narrator, the European-educated Minke, is an increasingly historical account of colonial oppression, anti-colonial resistance, and worldwide revolution that completely overturns European assumptions about what constitutes “this earth of mankind.”
Minke is a young Javanese student of great intelligence and ambition. Living equally among the colonists and colonized of 19th-century Java, he battles against the confines of colonial strictures. It is his love for Annelies that enables him to find the strength to embrace his world.
I've lived in Asia for more than 22 years and have extensively traveled around the region, both for work and pleasure, from the Middle East and central Asia to Japan, and Australia, New Zealand, and every country in between. Asia is the perfect setting for a thriller, as a region that’s deeply rooted in traditions, but where modernity and growth are also breathless. There can be political instability at times, and even corruption, unsurpassed wealth and shocking poverty, bankers, and prostitutes. I worked for many years as an investment banker and my experiences inspired me to write my debut thriller, Hard Underwriting, in Hong Kong, and uncover the dark side of Asia’s financial capital.
This is the latest book in Boczar’s Eric Ketch series, which follows the adventures of an American international man of mystery across Hong Kong, Macao, Thailand, Cambodia, Vietnam, and Burma, in the pursuit of rubies, exotic women, and ruthless assassins.
Boczar himself knows the region very well, having lived in Hong Kong for over three decades, and worked as a war correspondent, on the porous borders of the golden triangle and in Lebanon during the civil war.
The descriptions, whether of cities, weapons, smugglers, or guerilla fighters, all feel true, and Boczar knows only too well how to tell a convincing and edge-of-your-seat story that is difficult to put down.
Southeast Asia. Eric Ketch returns to take down bad guys while still making time to take out bad girls. Some things have stayed the same while some things have changed. Communist countries have become capitalist markets. But powerful, entitled elites continue to control politics and business. The communist cadres have simply become the capitalist kingpins. Ketch gets hired as a freelance agent to do what he does best. Delivering justice. His way. However, the game board continues to elude him and he still gets torn between completing the mission and doing the right thing. Meanwhile, he remains vulnerable to exotically…
I love knowing about things. Science is both a knowledge base and a way to discover new knowledge. I’ve been looking through microscopes and telescopes (that my dad built) from my earliest toddling. Though I have never been to university I have picked the brains of my scientific siblings (one of whom is a biology professor) and I read widely. Gathering crumbs from many sources gives a wider knowledge base than one university child afford. Scientists begin with speculation. I love inventing systems and worlds where we break one or a few of our known laws of nature or physics. Marrying science with fantasy births marvelous offspring!
Lost, confused, and feeling the victim, Ethan visits Thailand. He falls down a sinkhole into an alternate reality. Even more lost among really weird people, feeling even more confused and victimized, he learns the true meaning of life. But can he get back to live his real life?
Who hasn’t tumbled into Ethan’s emotions? We go along thinking we’re doing good and suddenly the worst happens. We didn’t deserve any of it yet we’re stuck alone and destitute in it.
Ethan meets an archaeologist who introduces him to indigenous people and their ghost stories. I love cultural studies, sociology, archaeology, anthropology, and linguistics, all sciences represented in this story. Reality gets smudged and blurred, but love, loyalty, and forgiveness remain true and unshaken in this beautiful story of redemption.
In this debut novel from Connie Mae Inglis, readers travel with Ethan Adam on his quest to find answers to questions he has barely articulated.
All his life, Ethan's felt betrayed by the ones he's loved.
Feeling homeless, and without hope, Ethan travels from the Canadian prairies to Southeast Asia, searching for he knows not what.
When his path crosses with an archaeologist heading to an unexplored area of northern Myanmar, Ethan goes on a journey into an Edenesque world of welcoming telepathic humans, strange voices, and a cunning enemy. For what purpose? He doesn't know.
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
During 30 years living in Chiang Mai, Thailand, I have developed a deep appreciation of Northern Thai culture and a fascination with its 700-year history. Though the region escaped being colonised as were nearby Laos (by the French) and Burma (by the Brits), a teak boom in the late 19th century came close to pulling it under the colonial yoke as Western trading companies muscled in. Teak Lord explores the frequently fragile relationships between circumspect Asians and adventurous Westerners, against a background of shifting borders and impenetrable jungle.
A lifelong hero of mine, George Orwell is best known for his political allegoriesAnimal Farm and 1984, but his first published novel, written after a five-year stint as a policeman in Burma, gave an indication of his direction as a writer, with a vicious swipe at colonial attitudes and manners. The main character, John Flory, is a jaded teak merchant who detests the colonial “lie that we’re here to uplift our Black brothers instead of to rob them”. He has no friends at the local colonial club, is unlucky in love and meets a tragic end—all part of Orwell’s drive to “tell it like it is.”
Honest and evocative, George Orwell's first novel is an examination of the debasing effect of empire on occupied and occupier.
Burmese Days focuses on a handful of Englishmen who meet at the European Club to drink whisky and to alleviate the acute and unspoken loneliness of life in 1920s Burma-where Orwell himself served as an imperial policeman-during the waning days of British imperialism.
One of the men, James Flory, a timber merchant, has grown soft, clearly comprehending the futility of England's rule. However, he lacks the fortitude to stand up for his Indian friend, Dr. Veraswami, for admittance into the…
I've spent the last 30-years studying, reading about, writing, and teaching the story of the war between the Allies and the Japanese in the Far East during WWII. It includes of course the story of the fighting between the main protagonists, but there’s much more that has been neglected by writers and historians, certainly in the West. It includes the story of Burma and its various people; the role of India and its people as it moved rapidly towards independence and the role of China throughout. Every time I look at an aspect of the war, or read another memoir or open a dusty file in the archives, I come across more exciting material.
This is a ground-breaking book because in telling the extraordinary story of the Indian Army during the Second World War, Professor Raghavan rightly places it firmly at the center of the great victories the Allies achieved over the Japanese in 1945. This book traces the transformation of the Indian Army from a largely domestically focused constabulary of 200,000 in 1939 to a victorious all-arms combat force of well over 2 million men and women in 1945. This army for the first time reflected India as a whole, rather than the pre-war Indian Army which recruited selectively from across India.
SPECTATOR BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2016, GUARDIAN BOOKS OF THE YEAR 2016
'Authoritative, expansive and incisive...helps restore India to the global twentieth century' Sunil Khilnani
Between 1939 and 1945 India changed to an extraordinary extent. Millions of Indians suddenly found themselves as soldiers, fighting in Europe and North Africa but also - something simply never imagined - against a Japanese army threatening to invade eastern India. Many more were pulled into the vortex of wartime mobilization.
Srinath Raghavan's compelling and original book gives both a surprising new account of the fighting and of life on the home front. For Indian…
As an author, humanitarian, and diplomat, I’ve seen firsthand how the everyday brutality of civil wars and ethnic conflicts is often overlooked in favor of statistics: 100,000 displaced; 500 arrested; 7 villages torched. In places like Myanmar, Ethiopia, Congo, Nigeria, and Bangladesh, I have tried to use human-centered reporting to bring a magnifying glass to the effect of these tragedies on everyday people. By focusing on the stories that most of the world would rather turn away from, I think we have a better chance to understand, and ultimately prevent, these violent political and social upheavals.
Bertil Lintner’s many books on Myanmar were essential background material for me when I lived there doing my own research on the country’s never-ending civil war. Land of Jade is a vivid and insightful study of Myanmar’s conflicts, and my favorite of his works. In 1985, he struck out to walk on foot from India, across northern Myanmar (then Burma), and eventually into southwestern China. The journey was the first (and likely only) time a journalist would undertake such an arduous, dangerous, and unforgettable trek.
His hosts along the way were a bewildering array of rebel groups at war against Myanmar’s despotic authoritarian regime. Accompanying Lintner on the journey was his pregnant wife Hseng Noung, whose photographs of Myanmar’s rugged northern terrain further enhance this incredible travelogue.
This book follows the journey of a writer in search of wisdom as he narrates encounters with 12 distinguished American men over 80, including Paul Volcker, the former head of the Federal Reserve, and Denton Cooley, the world’s most famous heart surgeon.
In these and other intimate conversations, the book…
Rory MacLean is one of Britain's most innovative travel writers. His books – which have been translated into a dozen languages — include UK top tens Stalin's Nose and Under the Dragon as well as Pravda Ha Ha and Berlin: Imagine a City, "the most extraordinary work of history I've ever read" according to the Washington Post which named it a "Book of the Year". Over the years he has travelled throughout Burma – apart from when banned by the military government for his writings – coming to know it as a deeply-wounded and fractured golden land of temple bells, be-medalled generals who enrich themselves through drug deals and ever-optimistic men and women who fight on to restore its ‘democratic transition’.
"Nearly every night I dream of the Shan State, of Mandalay, of the jungle. The landscapes of my dreams resemble real ones, yet they shift like images on silver screens…" Pascal Khoo Thwe’s mesmerizing biography stretches from his grandmother’s creation stories to civil war and a chance conversation about James Joyce which leads to a new life in Britain. A minor masterpiece.
The astonishing story of a young man's upbringing in a remote tribal village in Burma and his journey from his strife-torn country to the tranquil quads of Cambridge.
In lyrical prose, Pascal Khoo Thwe describes his childhood as a member of the Padaung hill tribe, where ancestor worship and communion with spirits blended with the tribe's recent conversion to Christianity. In the 1930s, Pascal's grandfather captured an Italian Jesuit, mistaking him for a giant or a wild beast; the Jesuit in turn converted the tribe. (The Padaung are famous for their 'giraffe women' - so-called because their necks are ritually…
