100 Books Like Letters of Transit

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.

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.

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.

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.

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. 

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?

Patenaude focuses just on the Mexican period, from January 1937 to August 1940, of Trotsky’s exile, although the previous stages of his exile — Kazakhstan in 1928, then Turkey for four years, France for another three, followed by interment in Norway — are dealt with in a series of flashbacks. In fact, the whole book is written as if Trotsky in Coyoacán were recalling his past, from his prosperous farmer’s boyhood to his underground militancy, his Civil War military brilliance, and his blundering incompetence as a Bolshevik power-broker. The danger that Patenaude flirts with is to let Trotsky’s charisma and undoubted genius charm him into overlooking his subject’s monstrous indifference to the suffering and deaths of others, sometimes even of those close to him, as well as his overweening conceit.

By dealing with the last phase of the tragedy, nemesis, Trotsky is seen to pay in fear, resignation, failure, and… show more.

This book narrowly focuses on one of the most famous moments that putatively determined the course of Russian and world history in the 20th century—Lenin’s journey from exile in Zurich, through enemy territory, to Petrograd in April 1917. The journey acquired infamy because it was facilitated by the German Army and government.

Leaving to one side consideration of counterfactuals or “what-ifs,” I loved Merridale’s book because it manages to capture so many worlds—the world of Russian revolutionary politics and exile, of espionage during WWI, and the early weeks of the Revolution of 1917—all while maintaining a focus on the human level of a train journey.

Cristina Garcia has become the definitive chronicler of both Cuba and Cuban exiles. King of Cuba tells the story of two men: El Comandante (also called the despot, the tyrant, or El Líder—clearly this is Fidel) and a Miami exile, Goyo Herrera, who is as old and infirm as Castro himself. Garcia’s portrait of the desperation and ignominies these two old guys suffer, and of their hopeless attempts to cleave to past glories, transcends Cuban history and brings us two men I found cantankerous and self-inflating, but irresistible.

This book is almost a response to, or continuation of, Marq de Villiers’ historical account: one young man’s reflections on returning from exile to a country that had only recently rejected Apartheid.

It’s a deeply personal work in which the author grapples with his conscience as well as the wider culture in which he grew up.