7 Books Like Empire's Son, Empire's Orphan

For more than thirty years, Michael Ondaatje has been among our most poetic, original and ground-breaking writers, charting a whole new geography of communion in a world of dissolving borders. But never has he written with such unguarded intimacy or such heartfelt directness as here. Just turned eighty, our master lyricist and love-poet, deep connoisseur of both craft and mystery, takes us to the end of life and beyond in a series of linked poems that measure memory against possibility, while wondering whether we will rise or fall as we climb that final staircase into the dark.

So many are writing these days about exile and migration, about shifting homes and the cost of moving to America, but few that I know do so with the gravitas, beautiful sonorousness and depth of Dinaw Mengestu. All his three novels are classics already, but in his latest, he goes farther, takes risks and claims an emotional power beyond anything he has achieved before.

I put this book down with a rush of exhilaration and gratitude, thrilled that fiction can still work such miracles.

This book is a literary biography that reads like a detective novel. I found it to be gripping, shocking, hilarious, and tragic. I also consider it a great work of literature in its own right, effectively reinventing the genre of biography and turning it into an artwork forged in the era of Raymond Chandler. It was first published in 1934, but has been through many reissues, including with the alternative subtitle, Genius or Charlatan? 

That question captures perfectly the state of mind in which I was left after finishing Symons’s account of the life of Frederick Rolfe, who called himself Baron Corvo, as he swanned around southern Europe in the 1900s. While Corvo was a writer—he wrote a series of over-ripe novels, most famously Hadrian the Seventh—his life is more the stuff of the unbelievable potboiler than the usual tedious life of authors tied to their typewriters.

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Right from the start I cared about these characters. It is amazing what people can go through and survive. This book impelled me to research what is happening in other parts of the world.

My mother is a member of the exact same generation as Rushdie, kids born at the moment when India gained independence, so I grew up in the shadow of that legacy—the optimism, the violence, the huge historical question mark. But when I picked up Rushdie’s magical-realist novel, it was the prose that spoke to me first: vivid, exaggerated, a cacophony, evoking India itself.

Our narrator, Saleem Sinai, was switched at birth with another child, and throughout the novel, images and phrases recur in different contexts. Often, these are puns that, by the second or third time they appear, have accumulated the weight of metaphor. I’ve read this book half a dozen times, and find more to enjoy with each reading.

I am fascinated by extraordinary lives, especially lives that cross borders and cultures. I also enjoy biographies set against major historical events, all the more so when an individual life is used to show an apparently familiar era of history in a new light. Tom Reiss’s book manages all this superbly. 

This book reconstructs the life of Lev Nussimbaum, who was born in Kiev in what is now Ukraine but was then imperial Russia. But he spent a good part of his life in Baku when that cosmopolitan Russian imperial port was the center of the world’s first great oil boom. Having traveled myself in the Caucasus region, as well as other former parts of the Russian Empire (and Soviet Union), I found Reiss’s account of that collapsing imperial culture quite fascinating. But it is the story of Lev—or, as he twice reinvented himself, Essad Bey and Kurban… show more.

This is a book about the collision of worlds and ideologies, told through the life of a single woman. This is a biography of Margaret Marcus, a small-town Jewish girl in midcentury America who converted to Islam, emigrated to Pakistan, and became a student of the Islamist political theorist Abul Ala Mawdudi. Under the name Maryam Jameelah, Margaret wrote many books condemning the corruption of Western capitalist society. And then came September 11… 

I found this book absolutely gripping and no less absorbing—and unsettling—in its moral power. Deborah Baker is a truly extraordinary biographer, and I admire her artistry, research, and instinct for an important life history in equal measure. Even though I have traveled extensively across Pakistan myself and written about many of the themes Baker explores, I still learned a great deal from this deeply serious but no less spellbinding biography.