Here are 100 books that Letters of Transit fans have personally recommended if you like
Letters of Transit.
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I am a historian of modern Poland. I teach, write, and think a lot about Poland and its place in Europe and the world. Regardless of where I live, Poland will always be my first home, where strawberries taste the best, the forest offers the most calming shade in the summer, and the language sounds the sweetest. But Poland is also a conundrum—perhaps similar to anywhere else and unique simultaneously. Its successes and failures, the traumas it caused and experienced, are part of me, and they keep pushing me to search for people and their stories that help us see the complexity of human life and individual choices.
Intuitively, I have always felt suspicious of the pressure to be happy and trust the transformative power of positive thinking. What is happiness? Why do we yield to the pressures to be happy? Why do we consider happiness to be of the highest value?
This little book argues for the importance of sadness and melancholia as emotions that are essential for any culture. It's sadness and its constant power to search for the meaning of life that makes us human and helps us grow. It's a powerful book that makes its case for the value of embracing sadness and melancholy as essential components of a meaningful life.
We are addicted to happiness. More than any other generation, Americans today believe in the power of positive thinking. But who says we're supposed to be happy? In Against Happiness, the scholar Eric G. Wilson argues that melancholia is necessary to any thriving culture, that it is the muse of great literature, painting, music, and innovation―and that it is the force underlying original insights.
So enough Prozac-ing of our brains. Let's embrace our depressive side as the wellspring of creativity. It's time to throw off the shackles of positivity and relish the blues thatmake us human.
The Victorian mansion, Evenmere, is the mechanism that runs the universe.
The lamps must be lit, or the stars die. The clocks must be wound, or Time ceases. The Balance between Order and Chaos must be preserved, or Existence crumbles.
Appointed the Steward of Evenmere, Carter Anderson must learn the…
I am a historian of modern Poland. I teach, write, and think a lot about Poland and its place in Europe and the world. Regardless of where I live, Poland will always be my first home, where strawberries taste the best, the forest offers the most calming shade in the summer, and the language sounds the sweetest. But Poland is also a conundrum—perhaps similar to anywhere else and unique simultaneously. Its successes and failures, the traumas it caused and experienced, are part of me, and they keep pushing me to search for people and their stories that help us see the complexity of human life and individual choices.
It is a personal account of a historian examining life in Donetsk, Ukraine, during Russia's 2014 takeover. The author chronicles her experiences and observations living in a city torn apart by war, offering insights into the daily struggles, fears, and hopes of the people caught amid the conflict.
It's powerful, poignant, and full of anecdotes book that will break your heart while showing a never-ending devotion to life that Ukrainians have built. It may not be perfect, but it's theirs. "Ukraine, to me, is like my dad. It's my light. My home," says the author.
In Ukraine, War, Love, Olena Stiazhkina depicts day-to-day developments in and around her beloved hometown Donetsk during Russia's 2014 invasion and occupation of the Ukrainian city. An award-winning fiction writer, Stiazhkina chronicles an increasingly harrowing series of events with sarcasm, anger, humor, and love.
The diary opens on March 2, 2014, as the first wave of pro-Russian protest washes over eastern Ukraine in the wake of Euromaidan, the Revolution of Dignity, and it closes on August 18, 2014, the day a convoy of civilian Ukrainian refugees is deliberately slaughtered by Russian forces. Early on, Stiazhkina is captured by pro-Russian forces…
I am a historian of modern Poland. I teach, write, and think a lot about Poland and its place in Europe and the world. Regardless of where I live, Poland will always be my first home, where strawberries taste the best, the forest offers the most calming shade in the summer, and the language sounds the sweetest. But Poland is also a conundrum—perhaps similar to anywhere else and unique simultaneously. Its successes and failures, the traumas it caused and experienced, are part of me, and they keep pushing me to search for people and their stories that help us see the complexity of human life and individual choices.
A beautiful and captivating novel about love written by a Palestinian writer, it is about a woman who falls for a man she accidentally exchanges letters with. After this introductory story, the book takes the readers through the webs of other characters' lives, heartbroken, forlorn, and desiring love.
It’s a book about alienation but written in such raw and beautiful language that it’s impossible to put it down.
Magical realism meets the magic of Christmas in this mix of Jewish, New Testament, and Santa stories–all reenacted in an urban psychiatric hospital!
On locked ward 5C4, Josh, a patient with many similarities to Jesus, is hospitalized concurrently with Nick, a patient with many similarities to Santa. The two argue…
I am a historian of modern Poland. I teach, write, and think a lot about Poland and its place in Europe and the world. Regardless of where I live, Poland will always be my first home, where strawberries taste the best, the forest offers the most calming shade in the summer, and the language sounds the sweetest. But Poland is also a conundrum—perhaps similar to anywhere else and unique simultaneously. Its successes and failures, the traumas it caused and experienced, are part of me, and they keep pushing me to search for people and their stories that help us see the complexity of human life and individual choices.
It is a memoir about a father and a father-daughter relationship written by a daughter. But it is also a story about how history written with capital H can affect family relationships, about surprising ways children interpret their parents while searching for space for themselves in their parent’s lives. Jane Lazarre seems to live in the shadow of her extraordinary father, who left Eastern Europe in 1902 for the USA and dedicated his life to fighting for economic equality and racial justice.
He believed in a more just world, but he also struggled with depression and cracking cohesion of the communist movement that he was a member of. The book is as much about him as about his daughter’s attempts to live up to some of his dreams: it’s about love, search for answers, and reconciliation.
In a letter to his baby grandson, Bill Lazarre wrote that "unfortunately, despite the attempts by your grandpa and many others to present you with a better world, we were not very successful." Born in 1902 amid the pogroms in Eastern Europe, Lazarre dedicated his life to working for economic equality, racial justice, workers' rights, and a more just world. He was also dedicated to his family, especially his daughters, whom he raised as a single father following his wife's death. In The Communist and the Communist's Daughter Jane Lazarre weaves memories of her father with documentary materials-such as his…
Growing up outside London in the 1980s and 1990s, I learned almost nothing about the American Revolution. After all, who wants to teach schoolchildren that their nation once fought a war against farmers with muskets—and lost? I didn’t discover the subject until senior year of college, but when I did, it turned my life upside down. Long story short, I now teach the Revolution every semester to college students in the United States. So I’ve been reading hungrily about the topic for decades now—trying to catch up on lost time—and these books are the five that have convinced me that America’s founding fight was actually a world war in all but name.
This is probably the first book I ever read that made me think of the American Revolution as an event in global history.
I was mesmerized by how Maya Jasanoff gives voice to the Loyalists—the people American history usually forgets—as they faced uncertain futures as exiles in the remnants of the British empire after 1783.
And Maya writes like I want to write, absorbing readers in the human messiness of loss, loyalty, and belonging. I love how she connects intimate, personal stories to the vast sweep of empire, turning difficult work in dozens of dusty archives into living, breathing drama.
As a refugee myself, I was attracted to read about the lives and experiences of other refugees, not merely those from my own community or background, but especially those from other backgrounds–which is probably reflected in the books that I’ve chosen for my list.
Even though this love story is set in very tragic times–The Spanish Civil War and the troubles in Chile–we follow the journey of two refugees, Victor and Rose, whose forced marriage gradually deepens into true love.
The author, herself an immigrant in the USA, meaningfully draws out questions facing so many migrants and refugees: Where do I belong? Where are my roots? Is my heart divided, or has it grown bigger?
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THE SUNDAY TIMES BESTSELLER
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
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'A powerful love story spanning generations... Full of ambition and humanity' - Sunday Times
'One of the strongest and most affecting works in Allende's long career' - New York Times Book Review
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On September 3, 1939, the day of the Spanish exiles' splendid arrival in Chile, the Second World War broke out in Europe.
Victor Dalmau is a young doctor when he is caught up in the Spanish Civil War, a tragedy that leaves his life - and the fate of his country - forever changed. Together with…
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…
I am a historian at University College London, where I examine Palestinian refugee history in both my writing and my teaching. I first visited a Palestinian refugee camp 15 years ago, and I’ve spent much of my life since then researching the subject’s history and politics. As I see it, this topic is really the key to understanding the political dynamics of Israel-Palestine today. While a huge amount has been written on Israel-Palestine, I have always found that the most striking and informative works focus on refugees’ own experiences – and that’s the common thread running through the books I’ve chosen here.
Being Palestinian is a collection of essays by Palestinians reflecting on their identity and experiences living outside of their homeland.
I’ve chosen it here because few works are so effective in conveying both the commonalities and the diversity of the Palestinian refugee experience. The contributors range from Ivy League professors to activists campaigning for justice in the Middle East today; they include figures who grew up in refugee camps and those raised in some of the wealthiest cities in the world.
In many ways Being Palestinian is the perfect introduction to learning more about the subject, because it is accessible and highly personal without being simplistic.
What does it means to be Palestinian in the diaspora? This collection of 100 personal reflections on being Palestinian is the first book of its kind. Reflecting on Palestinian identity as it is experienced at the individual level, issues of identity, exile, refugee status, nostalgia, belonging and alienation are at the heart of the book. The contributors speak in many voices, exploring the richness and diversity of identity construction among Palestinians in the diaspora. Included are contributions from Palestinians living in the Anglo-Saxon diaspora, mainly the UK and North America. They come from a variety of professional backgrounds: business people,…
I am a historian at University College London, where I examine Palestinian refugee history in both my writing and my teaching. I first visited a Palestinian refugee camp 15 years ago, and I’ve spent much of my life since then researching the subject’s history and politics. As I see it, this topic is really the key to understanding the political dynamics of Israel-Palestine today. While a huge amount has been written on Israel-Palestine, I have always found that the most striking and informative works focus on refugees’ own experiences – and that’s the common thread running through the books I’ve chosen here.
If you only ever read one Palestinian memoirist, it should be Fawaz Turki.
He published three book-length memoirs, all excellent, but this is his most comprehensive autobiography and as such the must-read of all his works. It covers his early years in Haifa, his family’s displacement to Lebanon in 1948, and his subsequent adolescence in Burj al-Barajneh refugee camp; as well as his later studies and career in the US.
Exile’s Return is organized around his first return visit to Palestine in the 1990s, where he comes face-to-face with the realities of the Israeli occupation and continuing Palestinian dispossession. There are now many brilliant memoirs and autobiographies by Palestinian refugees, but Turki remains the memoirist par excellence in this genre.
A memoir tells of a Palestinian exile's return to his family's West Bank home after forty years of Western life, his dismay at the rigid conformity of Palestinian society, and his recognition that he has become a Palestinian American
I spent ten years uncovering hidden histories consulting with historians, conducting interviews, sourcing archival records, and visiting Poland and Germany to determine how my mother and grandparents survived the Holocaust. And how, as refugees starting again in new countries after the war, they dammed in their traumas with silence. I became fascinated by how repressing war traumas affects relationships and families—for example, in my family, a father who gave his daughter away, my mother’s loveless childhood with parents who turned out not to be hers, and the lies told that both protected and harmed her.
Anne Berest embarks on a detective journey after an anonymous postcard arrives at her family home listing the names of her maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques—all killed at Auschwitz. Anne and her mother are determined to find out who sent the postcard and why. For sixteen years, Anne pursues her quest to uncover the sender’s identity and her family’s hidden past while grappling with her own identity—what it means to be Jewish and how she embodies the legacy of her murdered family members.
Although Berest wrote her family’s Holocaust history as a novel, she describes it as a ‘true novel.’ She changed the name of the village where family members were arrested in order to protect the people living there now. She also changed the names of perpetrators to protect descendants who did not get to choose their parents but had to…
Winner of the Choix Goncourt Prize, Anne Berest’s The Postcard is a vivid portrait of twentieth-century Parisian intellectual and artistic life, an enthralling investigation into family secrets, and poignant tale of a Jewish family devastated by the Holocaust and partly restored through the power of storytelling.
January, 2003. Together with the usual holiday cards, an anonymous postcard is delivered to the Berest family home. On the front, a photo of the Opéra Garnier in Paris. On the back, the names of Anne Berest’s maternal great-grandparents, Ephraïm and Emma, and their children, Noémie and Jacques—all killed at Auschwitz.
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…
Do you love YA fantasy, but want some titles you feel confident sharing with your grandmother, younger sibling, mom, teacher? As an avid YA fantasy reader, I know the struggle of finding book recs that are exciting, magical, and wouldn’t make my mother blush. Upon entering the publishing industry, I made this my focus as an agent and now as an editor. As an author, I write YA and NA titles that don’t pull any punches but can be enjoyed by anyone. All 10 of my published books and upcoming releases can be enjoyed by teens, adults, and yes, your grandmother—and here are five more books I think achieve that as well.
I love the movie and musical adaptations of Anastasia, so it’s no wonder I love this magical family saga from Nadine Brandes. Brandes effortlessly weaves magic into the tale we thought we knew about Anastasia Romanov. And yes, there is both magic and romance.
With the leader of the Bolshevik army after her, Anastasia “Nastya” Romanov is given a mission to smuggle an ancient spell that might be her family’s only salvation into exile in Siberia. Nastya has barely dabbled in magic, but her only chances of saving herself and her family are to release the spell and deal with the consequences, or to enlist help from Zash, the handsome Bolshevik soldier who seems to be different. This story does contain violence, but overall is another read I both love and could recommend to anyone.
My name is Anastasia. The history books say I died. They don't know the half of it.
Anastasia "Nastya" Romanov was given a single mission: to smuggle an ancient spell into her suitcase on her way to exile in Siberia. It might be her family's only salvation. But the leader of the Bolshevik army is after them, and he's hunted Romanov before.
Nastya's only chances of saving herself and her family are either to release the spell and deal with the consequences, or to enlist help from Zash, the handsome soldier who doesn't act like the average Bolshevik. Nastya has…
