Books like Children of Sugarcane — picked by fans

One of the best examples of “history from below” I’ve read.

It tells the well-known story of David Livingstone’s last journey–how after he died in tropical Africa, his servants marched his body across the continent to the port of Dar es Salaam, so that it could be shipped back to England and buried there with appropriate pomp and reverence. This forms the framework for an utterly original novel that presents this epic trek from the perspective of two of Livingstone’s slave servants: his feisty Muslim cook, Halima, who brings her gossipy sardonic perspective to the enterprise, and his devout and pompous body servant Joseph, a Christian determined to do right by his master.

This work sparkles with energy and humor, as well as presenting a fresh perspective on a well-trodden path.

I’m in awe of this author’s trilogy of award-winning novels about Zimbabwe’s colonial history. Haunting and hypnotic, they blend magical realism, epic history, and social satire. Although they form a series with some recurring characters, all are standalone reads.

Her first, The Theory of Flight, won South Africa’s biggest literary award. The second, recommended here, is a sustained act of grace in which the author climbs into the skin of an alpha white male Rhodesian, Emil Coetzee, whose ambitions lead to his running the doomed colony’s sinister secret police. It humanizes him without excusing him in an imaginative tour de force that asks a burning question: why do we sometimes choose evil?

If you love this book (you will), Ndlovu’s third novel, The Quality of Mercy, brings the series to a redemptive close.

For every dreaming rebel. This novel weaves together two tumultuous periods in history–the last decades of slavery and the start of grand apartheid–and the stories of two women bursting the seams of their existence.

In 1794, Katrijn van der Caab, a freed slave, finds herself on a farm where the master’s obsession with experimentation reflects a growing fixation with racial classification. In 1961, Sister Vergilius, a nun in rural South Africa, wants to escape the confines of her order even as the political and social strictures of the time hem her in still further.

This complex book demands commitment from the reader, but it is so beautifully written that phrases still linger in my mind. And the main characters were so compelling that I tracked down the author to ask her their fates!

This is the novel that brought South Africa’s Lauren Beukes international plaudits, and which was serialised for Apple TV. 

But she writes speculative fiction, and this has an especially zany hook–a time-travelling serial killer–so why is this a historical novel? Beukes did deep research into several key periods in US history, bringing the “shining girls” of those eras alive in ways that are breathtakingly imaginative and entertaining.

In particular, her accounts of the black women who worked in shipyards during World War 2–and the middle-class women who operated “underground railways” for abortion in the 1960s–are heartbreakingly relevant in current times. Beukes explicitly states that she wanted women–so often the passive corpses or suffering victims in crime fiction–and their histories to be front and center of this novel.

We started in the snow-capped peaks of Davos and end in the sun-baked forested hills of Niyamgiri in Odisha, where Adivasis (India’s “tribals” or indigenous groups) are fighting land seizures by multinational mining companies like Vedanta. This remarkable book, co-authored by anthropologist and regional expert Felix Padel (who happens to be Charles Darwin’s grandson) and activist and filmmaker Samarendra Das, shows how such distant spaces are connected. It brings attention to the commodity chain of aluminum, from the bauxite in the ground to the finished industrial and consumer products all around us, and faithfully captures both corporate strategies and indigenous perspectives (a rare feat). Now in its second edition, Out of this Earth continues to inspire a deeper understanding of capitalism as a total system and provides hope to those challenging it. 

I am always looking out for talented young writers and this debut really struck me for its narrator’s very distinctive voice, both stylish and sad. An Indian Catcher in the Rye but with a protagonist more hampered by family and circumstances, capable of greater angst, and looking for authenticity in the strangest and loneliest of places. 

Although I contributed to this volume, I am recommending it not because of that but because it has a couple of excellent chapters on Gandhi. Best known is Shahid Amin’s, "Gandhi as Mahatma: Gorakhpur District, Eastern UP, 1921-2". In this, he examines Gandhi’s fleeting visit in February 1921 to Gorakhpur District, a largely rural area close to the border with Nepal – showing how this visit was understood by the local peasantry. Many tales circulated, many of which involved the idea that Gandhi had the power of rewarding those who accepted his message and punishing those who did not in supernatural ways. The chapter provides a superb analysis of the ways in which his message was filtered and changed in ways that Gandhi himself not only had no part in, but which he – when brought to his notice – repudiated. The chapter by Partha Chatterjee, "Gandhi and the Critique… show more.

The book offers a low-risk, long-term investment approach by investing in high-quality stocks. There are lots of examples from the Indian stock market backed by data and charts supporting the method. Not for traders, the book will help serious long-term investors seeking wealth creation over the long run.

There is no better book for understanding India’s family businesses in a broader social and political context than this sprawling, powerful novel. Preti Taneja retells and reworks Shakespeare’s King Lear as three sisters (and an illegitimate son) fight over the inheritance of a massive company that makes everything from textiles to cars (echoes of the Tatas, Birlas, and Ambanis, but also of the East India Company as the subcontinent’s original corporate sovereign). Taneja touches on all the big issues, including gender, caste, climate, and Kashmir, without ever being preachy. It is a long and sometimes challenging read, but always rewarding. I may be biased given the subject matter, but this is the century’s Great Indian Novel—a worthy successor to the likes of Midnight’s Children, A Suitable Boy, and Sacred Games. 

Published 80 years ago and based on the author’s experiences hunting man-eating tigers and leopards in northern India, I read this book repeatedly. Well and sensitively written, it is not a book of boasting, hunting, and bravado but a nuanced account of efforts to protect local people from the ravages of seriously dangerous wildlife.

Corbett, part of the British occupation machinery in India, projects a love of the people of northern India and the wildlife. He is deeply committed to both and laments the need to kill tigers but accepts that protecting ordinary people is the priority.

He provides a wealth of wildlife information and always explains how and why a tiger became a man-eater–often the result of a bad encounter with a porcupine, the breaking of canines in older tigers, or injuries received hunting or being hunted.