100 Books Like Hunger

Well-known American author Jack London experienced a genuine decline into vagrancy in the US during the late nineteenth century.

In his 1907 memoir, he depicts the realities of the vagrant’s life without flinching. The detailed descriptions of begging for sustenance from strangers’ homes, risking death to evade detection on fright trains, and the life of inmates in the state penitentiary are as gripping as they are appalling.

The only US book in this collection of recommendations, The Road confirms very similar experiences and challenges facing the homeless on both sides of the Atlantic.

I, Ruchin, like Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance for multiple reasons.

It is a father-son story, yet it includes how their family and friends shape their experiences. I like it because the motorcycle itself transforms into a human-like character, adding depth to the dialogue.

I also like the storytelling style; it is vivid. You can see each scene unfolding before you. And lastly, I appreciate how it draws on the Hindu and Buddhist values I grew up with, making the book even more relatable.

At the same time, I find the book a little dated in its voice and perhaps too long for readers today.

I loved this book because it combines the gothic tradition with politics. Written during the Soviet era, it deals with the Devil and his entourage who visit Soviet-era Moscow and reveal Soviet society.

While not truly a gothic novel, it is an imaginative work and kept me mesmerized as an undergraduate student so much that I have gone back to read it again as an adult.

The go-to book about voluntary homelessness, I always appreciate George Orwell’s amazing writing. It’s hard to put down.

The first half is about his time as a lowly kitchen assistant in the basement of a Parisian restaurant in the 1930s. The brutal divide between the rich and the destitute is better depicted here than in anything else I’ve ever read. The second half describes his time back in England and provides a heart-rending understanding of why homeless people are referred to as tramps and the ultimate emptiness of church-organized aid.

Although Orwell always had the option to opt out, his study of the lived experience of homelessness and the skill with which he captured it afterwards stand out as a colossus of the genre.

The great Chinese British powerhouse writes about her childhood in a poor coastal village in post-Mao’s China where she’s made to live with her grandparents and life is rough and hard, especially for a girl. It’s a very atmospheric tale, that paints a vivid picture of this incredible society. It’s also a Cinderella story, about a suffering child that, thanks to incredible stubbornness and stamina, rises up to become one of the twelve (out of a million or so) applicants that are accepted into the Chinese Film School in Beijing each year. She later moves to England and her descriptions of the west are super fresh and priceless.

I read this years ago and then devoured all of Nawal el Sadawi’s books, fiction and non-fiction.

I have Iranian heritage on my birth father’s side and have always been fascinated in the life I could have lived as an Iranian girl, if I had been raised there instead of the UK.

So reading Nawal ed Sadawi’s books, set in Egypt where she was born, educated, and worked as a doctor and writer, gave me an insight I really wanted into Islamic societies and how women can live in them.

Woman at Point Zero is harrowing, brilliant, immersive, and painful, taking as its theme the story of Firdaus, who tells the story of why she has killed a man before she is executed. She explains why and her courage and eloquence have stayed with me ever since.

We need these stories of women on the edge who still, somehow, resist… show more.

Germans have been in love with Italy since always, a love that found its culmination with Goethe’s famous Italienische Reise in 1816. It’s a love that lasts forever, for it’s a love that never finds fulfillment. Germans are like the stuffed up straight guy who’s in love with a lively beauty above their level, that is Italy; they’re forever stuck in the moment of enchantment, they can never grasp or really fathom their love, let alone turn it into a real affair or just begin to understand this incredible woman. Promising young German writer Strauss takes up residence in the famous Via Corso in Rome (close to Casa di Goethe), and tries to make his moment come alive under the heavy burden of history. Maybe not as urgent or dramatic as the other four books, but still here we have a one man-boy against all of Rome, all of our… show more.

In early 2016 I stayed in Kochi, Kerala, in the south of India, working on a novel. There I came across the local bestseller Goat Days by the Bharein-based Indian author, Benyamin, and was totally blown away. It's a powerful tale of a young Indian worker named Najeeb Muhammad, who, like many of his countrymen, goes to work in Saudi Arabia, dreaming of earning some money for his family back home. His dream turns into a nightmare when he is taken as a slave to a remote desert farm where he has to take care of the goats and dwell among them. He is forced to live alone in the desert with all its hardships, sandstorms, heat, and general dryness, treated like an animal by his Saudi master. Still, hope prevails. This is one of the ultimate "me-against-the-world" books. Its strength is underlined by the fact that it's banned in… show more.

Many of us writers are subject to the terrible cliché of substance abuse, none so much as Charles Bukowski. Having dabbled in the debauched myself, Ham on Rye sadly reflects what life could be like if the idiocy of adolescence continues into adulthood. This book is hilarious, vulgar, shocking, and oddly insightful. Not only is this my favourite Bukowski book, but it’s the book that introduced me to his work and changed my writing forever.

Embracing the absurdist nature of this work (which is, of course, a play vs. a novel) is key to both understanding and enjoying it. I personally love how the story holds a mirror up to one of the central themes in Hamlet. The moral question of “should he act?” is replaced by the more existential question: are they (R & G) even capable of acting? Is control of one’s life even an option? 

The destiny vs. free will debate rings strong throughout, resonating with anyone like me who often wonders if outside forces are in charge. With wit and charm, this story can have you contemplating those aspects of your life in which you are more pawn than you’d like to be.