Here are 100 books that Love Like Water, Love Like Fire fans have personally recommended if you like
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I arrived at Halifax’s Pier 21 at 19 months old and have lived in Montreal for most of my life, yet I have always considered myself a displaced person. My father was from Belarus, my mother from Poland, and I was born in Germany. Yet, I am not from any of those places. I have lived in Canada, in Quebec, all my life, but I’m not from here either. I denied my ‘otherness’ until my mid-forties when suddenly, I finally understood that most of the planet is comprised of people just like me, struggling to understand how we fit in a world that is in constant flux.
This is a sweeping saga, the kind I love because it keeps me turning pages.
Against a backdrop of 20th-century China, I was drawn into the fate of a cast of captivating characters. Split into two locales and timelines—Vancouver in 1991 and China from the mid-20th century to the tragedy in1989—the novel is a jigsaw puzzle of countless bits, revealed with skill and delicacy as the pieces finally fit together.
Here is the Cultural Revolution; there Tiananmen Square and in between I was caught up in the lives so cruelly marked by history.
"In a single year, my father left us twice. The first time, to end his marriage, and the second, when he took his own life. I was ten years old."
Master storyteller Madeleine Thien takes us inside an extended family in China, showing us the lives of two successive generations-those who lived through Mao's Cultural Revolution and their children, who became the students protesting in Tiananmen Square. At the center of this epic story are two young women, Marie and Ai-Ming. Through their relationship Marie strives to piece together the tale of her fractured family in present-day Vancouver, seeking…
A moving story of love, betrayal, and the enduring power of hope in the face of darkness.
German pianist Hedda Schlagel's world collapsed when her fiancé, Fritz, vanished after being sent to an enemy alien camp in the United States during the Great War. Fifteen years later, in 1932, Hedda…
I arrived at Halifax’s Pier 21 at 19 months old and have lived in Montreal for most of my life, yet I have always considered myself a displaced person. My father was from Belarus, my mother from Poland, and I was born in Germany. Yet, I am not from any of those places. I have lived in Canada, in Quebec, all my life, but I’m not from here either. I denied my ‘otherness’ until my mid-forties when suddenly, I finally understood that most of the planet is comprised of people just like me, struggling to understand how we fit in a world that is in constant flux.
This is a masterpiece of storytelling that paints scenes with a featherlight touch.
With an economy of words I greatly admire, Kim Thúy’s semi-autobiography reveals a rich story about a young girl’s escape from war-torn Vietnam. Ru explores the hardships of being a refugee, one who must grapple with finding her identity in a foreign culture.
I love the lyricism and Thúy's ability to conjure a scene through small, haunting vignettes.
Ru: In Vietnamese it means lullaby; in French it is a small stream, but also signifies a flow - of tears, blood, money. Kim Thuy's Ru is literature at its most crystalline: the flow of a life on the tides of unrest and on to more peaceful waters. In vignettes of exquisite clarity, sharp observation and sly wit, we are carried along on an unforgettable journey from a palatial residence in Saigon to a crowded and muddy Malaysian refugee camp, and onward to a new life in Quebec. There, the young girl feels the embrace of a new community, and…
I arrived at Halifax’s Pier 21 at 19 months old and have lived in Montreal for most of my life, yet I have always considered myself a displaced person. My father was from Belarus, my mother from Poland, and I was born in Germany. Yet, I am not from any of those places. I have lived in Canada, in Quebec, all my life, but I’m not from here either. I denied my ‘otherness’ until my mid-forties when suddenly, I finally understood that most of the planet is comprised of people just like me, struggling to understand how we fit in a world that is in constant flux.
This book has a premise that resonates with me, rooted in my belief that at birth, we are handed a suitcase that someone else packed.
A haunting, heartbreaking drama, the novel follows a mysterious WWII mail-order bride who assumes a dead woman's identity to immigrate to Canada. After she gives birth, she abandons her daughter, leaving behind only a diary.
When I came across Richler’s novel, I was stunned to find echoes of my own novel’s plot. Richler’s daughter—in search of her missing mother—is an achingly poignant reminder of the power exerted by buried family secrets and mother-daughter bonds gone awry, a theme that will always draw me in.
The Imposter Bride by Nancy Richler is an unforgettable novel about a mysterious mail-order bride in the wake of WWII, whose sudden decision ripples through time to deeply impact the daughter she never knew
In the wake of World War II, a young, enigmatic woman named Lily arrives in Montreal on her own, expecting to be married to a man she's never met. But, upon seeing her at the train station, Sol Kramer turns her down. Out of pity, his brother Nathan decides to marry her instead, and pity turns into a deep―and doomed―love. It is immediately clear that Lily…
This book is an elegiac meditation on the will to survive. Tor, a beluga whaler, and his wife, Astrid, a botanist specializing in Arctic flora, are stranded during the dark season of 1937-38 at his remote whaling station in the Svalbard archipelago when they misjudge ice conditions and fail to…
I arrived at Halifax’s Pier 21 at 19 months old and have lived in Montreal for most of my life, yet I have always considered myself a displaced person. My father was from Belarus, my mother from Poland, and I was born in Germany. Yet, I am not from any of those places. I have lived in Canada, in Quebec, all my life, but I’m not from here either. I denied my ‘otherness’ until my mid-forties when suddenly, I finally understood that most of the planet is comprised of people just like me, struggling to understand how we fit in a world that is in constant flux.
Freedman explores all the themes I love and write about in my own work: long-buried family secrets, inherited trauma, and the lasting effects of being displaced.
I related to the protagonist’s search for identity while uncovering her family secrets, something I only began doing in my late 40s. To my surprise, I discovered I was not alone. And that is why we read: to know we are not alone.
Alice Stein, a young graduate student living in a vivid and chaotic late-90s East Village, loses her father and grandmother in a single year. In the process of cleaning out her grandmother's Brooklyn apartment, she begins to unlock a family secret. Accompanied by her precocious downstairs neighbour, a twelve-year-old girl named Persephone, she sets out on a quest to understand her family and herself. In the process, she will discover lost children and buried love affairs, histories she wants to believe and people she can't trust, a village in Hungary and an artist's loft in Harlem. A coming-of-age story about…
I am a professor of Russian history at Carnegie Mellon University.I have visited Russia many times and spent years working in Russian archives. I am keenly aware of the impact World War II and the Nazis had on the country: a loss of 26-7 million people, wide-scale suffering, mass murder of civilians, and destruction of cities, towns, and villages. The majority of German divisions were concentrated on the eastern front, and it was here the Red Army broke the back of the Wehrmacht. Yet because of divisions created by the Cold War, Americans are taught little about the central role the Soviet Union played in this victory. As a historian, I am strongly committed to bringing the full story of the war to light.
Most Western readers are familiar with the holocaust carried out by the Nazis in Europe, but know little about the almost two million Jews murdered by the Nazis in the occupied territories of the Soviet Union. Here, the Germans embarked on a “holocaust by bullets,” rounding up the Jewish inhabitants, imprisoning them in camps and ghettos, and then shooting them at the edge of vast pits and ravines.
Grossman and Ehrenburg, renowned Soviet war journalists and members of the Jewish Anti Fascist Committee, began collecting eyewitness testimonies and other documents during the war. Yet the Soviet state, following the policy, “we do not divide the dead,” refused to permit publication of the book they assembled because it was too focused on the particularity of Jewish suffering. The Complete Black Book, a powerful compilation of firsthand reports, is essential to understanding the full scope of the German campaign for Jewish…
The Complete Black Book of Russian Jewryis a collection of eyewitness testimonies, letters, diaries, affidavits, and other documents on the activities of the Nazis against Jews in the camps, ghettoes, and towns of Eastern Europe. Arguably, the only apt comparism is to The Gulag Archipelago of Alexander Solzhenitsyn. This definitive edition of The Black Book, including for the first time materials omitted from previous editions, is a major addition to the literature on the Holocaust. It will be of particular interest to students, teachers, and scholars of the Holocaust and those interested in the history of Europe.
Yohanan Petrovsky-Shtern is the Crown Family Professor of Jewish Studies and a Professor of Jewish History in the History Department at Northwestern University. He teaches a variety of courses that include early modern and modern Jewish history; Jewish mysticism and Kabbalah; history and culture of Ukraine; and Slavic-Jewish literary encounters.
Written by one of the key scholars of Jewish history in the USSR, who died untimely in 2020, this book challenges our bias about the USSR and its Cold-War era culture. Shneer tells how the Soviet photographers, many of whom where Jews, documented the Nazi atrocities during World war II and how the Soviet officialdom used their visual narratives to create new cult of the Great Patriotic war and the image of the USSR as a humanistic society.
Finalist for the 2011 National Jewish Book Award in the Holocaust category
Most view the relationship of Jews to the Soviet Union through the lens of repression and silence. Focusing on an elite group of two dozen Soviet-Jewish photographers, including Arkady Shaykhet, Alexander Grinberg, Mark Markov-Grinberg, Evgenii Khaldei, Dmitrii Baltermants, and Max Alpert, Through Soviet Jewish Eyes presents a different picture. These artists participated in a social project they believed in and with which they were emotionally and intellectually invested-they were charged by the Stalinist state to tell the visual story of the unprecedented horror we now call the Holocaust.
Tina Edwards loved her childhood and creating fairy houses, a passion shared with her father, a world-renowned architect. But at nine years old, she found him dead at his desk and is haunted by this memory. Tina's mother abruptly moved away, leaving Tina with feelings of abandonment and suspicion.
I love books where the setting is just as big and alive as the characters. It doesn’t matter to me if it’s a familiar place or someplace new: if a vivid setting is a key element of the story, I’m in. I think it’s because I grew up in one of those small towns in the beautiful middle of nowhere where if someone asks where you’re from, it’s just easier to say someplace else. I wanted to see the world, and books let me do that. I also wanted validation in reading—and writing—about the small places I knew, and books let me do that, too.
This middle-grade memoir written and illustrated by Eugene Yelchin is hands down one of my favorite books in any category, period.
It is a short but rich story with layers of setting, from the Soviet Union during the Cold War, the courtyard of the narrator’s communal apartment building, to his private world under the family table in their one-room apartment. I laughed out loud, except for when I was crying.
An Association of Jewish Libraries Sydney Taylor Honor Winner
With a masterful mix of comic timing and disarming poignancy, Newbery Honoree Eugene Yelchin offers a memoir of growing up in Cold War Russia.
Drama, family secrets, and a KGB spy in his own kitchen! How will Yevgeny ever fulfill his parents’ dream that he become a national hero when he doesn’t even have his own room? He’s not a star athlete or a legendary ballet dancer. In the tiny apartment he shares with his Baryshnikov-obsessed mother, poetry-loving father, continually outraged grandmother, and safely talented brother, all Yevgeny has is his…
I’m the writer of an award-winning, best-selling series called the Lane Winslow Mysteries. They take place in British Columbia right after the Second World War, and feature an intelligent, canny, beautiful, polyglot who has just retired from spying for the British—this character inspired by my own beautiful multilingual mother, who did intelligence work in the war. I love the mystery genre, and while no one loves a burned-out, borderline alcoholic inspector who's divorced and has children who won’t return his calls more than I, I've always really adored what I call the “gentleman inspectors.” Men who are happily married, or will be soon, smart, educated, ethical, emotionally complex people you’d like to meet one day.
Stuart Kaminski brings us the wonderful detective, Porfiry Rostnikov, a barrel of a man who wanted to be a wrestling champion in his youth, and surely the only honest policeman in the Soviet system. He is kind and generous and will fix the plumbing of anyone in his building for the sheer joy of it. He is entranced by the geometry of pipes and their challenge. He is also a man of a certain age who has seen it all and has no illusions. His relationship with soviet authorities is tricky; they suspect his Jewish wife, and his love of Ed McBain books, but he’s the only man who can catch the crook and save the state embarrassment.
“Never miss a Kaminsky book, and be especially sure not to miss Death of a Russian Priest.” —Tony Hillerman, New York Times–bestselling author
In the darkest hours of communist rule, Father Merhum fought to protect the sanctity of the Orthodox Church. Now the Soviet Union is gone, but the bureaucracy survives, and within it lurk men who would do anything to undermine the fragile new Russian democracy. Father Merhum is on his way to Moscow to denounce those traitors when he is struck with an ax and killed.
As police inspectors Porfiry Rostnikov and Emil Karpo dig into…
My passion for the topic of migration was kind of overdetermined, given that my grandparents were refugees, my father is an immigrant, and I have been on the move quite a bit myself. It might not have been a conscious choice to study something so close to home, but the more I think about it, the less likely it seems that this was all a coincidence. This personal dimension might also explain my choice of books, which all combine scholarly-analytics with deeply human perspectives on the topic of migration.
Yuri Slezkine’s classic book on the history of Russian Jewry is not a work of migration history strictly speaking. But there is no Jewish history without migration, and Slezkine shows us, among many other things, how Russian Jews ended up in the US, Israel, and the Soviet Union, representing three ideological choices—liberalism, nationalism, and communism.
I read this book back in university, and few works, if any, have had such a profound impact on my historical thinking.
This masterwork of interpretative history begins with a bold declaration: "The Modern Age is the Jewish Age, and the twentieth century, in particular, is the Jewish Century." The assertion is, of course, metaphorical. But it drives home Yuri Slezkine's provocative thesis: Jews have adapted to the modern world so well that they have become models of what it means to be modern. While focusing on the drama of the Russian Jews, including emigres and their offspring, The Jewish Century is also an incredibly original account of the many faces of modernity-nationalism, socialism, capitalism, and liberalism. Rich in its insight, sweeping…
The Duke's Christmas Redemption
by
Arietta Richmond,
A Duke who has rejected love, a Lady who dreams of a love match, an arranged marriage, a house full of secrets, a most unneighborly neighbor, a plot to destroy reputations, an unexpected love that redeems it all.
Lady Charlotte Wyndham, given in an arranged marriage to a man she…
I'm a child of Holocaust survivors who spent three years in slave labour camps. My mother told me stories of her experiences a child should probably not hear. The result is that my philosophy of life, and sometimes my writing, can be dark. It’s no surprise that this period of history imbues my novels. I chose to write mysteries to reach a wider audience, the Holocaust connections integral to the stories. During my research, I discovered a wealth of information on the Holocaust but learned that memoirs revealed best what happened to people on the ground. Memoirs draw you into the microcosm of a person’s life with its nostalgia, yearning, and inevitable heartbreak.
Ann Szedlecki’s richly detailed memoir starts: “I am the daughter of nobody... Who am I? My past is gone, disappeared.” As a student in my writing class for seniors, her slightly-accented voice read out excerpts of her poignant manuscript. How do you remember all this, I used to ask. She would just smile sadly. Her story begins in pre-war Poland, showing us the loving family later destroyed. When the Nazis invade, Jews are beaten and killed at random in the streets. At fourteen, she and her older brother head east to the Soviet Union, ending up in Siberia. A gifted writer, she depicts the brutality of life in a labour camp but also the kindness of strangers; then the heartbreaking description of returning to Poland to find none of her family survived.
Ann Szedlecki was a Hollywood-film-loving fourteen-year-old when the Nazis invaded Poland in 1939 and she fled to the Soviet Union with her older brother, hoping to return for the rest of her family later. Instead, she ended up spending most of the next six and a half years alone in the Soviet Union, enduring the harsh conditions of northern Siberia under Stalin’s Communist regime. Szedlecki’s beautifully written story, which lovingly reconstructs her pre-war childhood in Lodz, is also compelling for its candour about her experiences as a woman in the Soviet Union during World War II. As a very young…
