100 Books Like Moth Smoke

I loved the way this anti-colonial narrative turns our idea of colonialism in India on its head. It goes beyond the obvious wrongs of the Raj to examine the 17th—and 18th-century roots of the empire—namely, the corporate greed, corruption, and outsized influence of the East India Company. It's an incredible read!

I think more than anything, I loved the way she described everything. Her language is as if her words were first sent to her heart and then to her soul before they came onto the page. The warmth and the power are overwhelming in her style. It is obvious she loved grandly Africa and its denizens, and as a reader, I couldn’t help but feel the same.  

I love heroines in exotic places and situations, especially if it is much of their own makings or seemingly destiny. This book is a memoir of a tomboy girl in East Africa, so even though it is all true, it feels epic.  

I could really relate to Beryl as a girl with her animals. (Growing up, I loved and collected animals from nature, too.)  Beryl grew up with a zebra for a pet, horses for friends, and, of course, the most loyal dog.… show more.

During my student days in the early 1970s, I travelled throughout North India by train and country bus, often staying in the countryside in former colonial rest houses from days of British rule in India. I tried to imagine what it was like for the British East India Company officials before 1857, and then for the British colonial officials who replaced the company officers after the Indian Sepoy Mutiny. The Siege of Krishnapur vividly recreates the 1857 mutiny from the perspective of British company officials and their families trapped by the local soldiers they had employed. 

Farrell used a diary and letters from those besieged in the real city of Lucknow to illustrate the horrors of hunger, impending rape, torture, and eventual death that many of the British faced. The scenes are graphic, and the portrayals of the relationships among those trapped have stayed with me for years. The novel… show more.

Kenya was an exotic territory for British colonial interests in the late 19th century. For reasons almost impossible to understand today, the British decided to build a railroad from Mombasa, the seaport on the Indian Ocean, through the Kenyan savannah, to Kampala, a city of some riches in the far interior of what is now Uganda. The story of the building of the railroad at the end of the 19th century is hair-raising, thanks to Miller’s classic history, as imported Indian workers had to endure predatory lions, harsh climates, and raging rivers to forge across the frontier. That the railroad to nowhere was completed is a tribute to those Indian workers and their intrepid British overseers.

Today, one can take the train from Mombasa to Nairobi, some three hundred miles distant, either in the daylight, hoping to spy some wildlife, or in a sleeping berth at night. I… show more.

Indispensable. And the scandal of this autobiographical novel hasn’t worn off in a hundred-plus years. Stephen Dedalus is our young man, the self-appointed artist-priest. We see turn-of-the-century Ireland through his eyes and Irish Catholicism, too, each with its special richness and oppressiveness. Ultimately, it’s Stephen’s desire to escape "these nets" that drives his story. He’ll find God in his own way or, failing that, replace him with Art. 

What can you really say about this one—besides the obvious: it’s perfect. 

Chuck Palahniuk isn’t like the rest of us. He’s sharper, more cynical, funnier, more original. Calling myself a writer in his presence would be like hanging a finger-painting at the Louvre.

Fight Club digs straight into the restless undercurrent of modern life—that gnawing sense that comfort, convenience, and consumerism have carved a hollow right through your chest. We’re one Amazon delivery away from losing whatever’s left of our humanity. Or our masculinity. It reminds me of that line in Jurassic Park: “A T-rex doesn’t want to be fed, he wants to hunt.” More applicable to us now than we’d like to admit.

I love this book because it doesn’t let up where others might. It doesn’t edit its message to fit some form of Overton window. It laughs in your face while stripping everything down to bone. Less… show more.

This book is probably the most out-of-place of the five novels on this list. Where the others make their high-concept elements obvious early, the author chooses a different route in this one.

Like so many of his novels, Bret Easton Ellis opens his story with shallow and vapid characters behaving in absurd ways and uttering dialogue so outrageous I wondered if the entire enterprise was a joke. But despite the hilarious parody of substance-free celebrity and the inane repetition of idiotic phrases like “baby,” this story ultimately has more to say than, ahem, less than zero. It’s a takedown of capitalism and a bankrupt culture, so biting it would make Philip K Dick proud.

The second half of the novel, in fact, reads like PKD himself.

The Moviegoer was the first novel I read which had little plot and a great deal of meaning. Basically, it’s about one man’s search for meaning in a world which values shallowness and consumerism above all else. It’s as relevant today as it was when written and the prose is amazing!

First up in Fante’s famous quartet of Bandini novels—The Road to Los Angeles is a literary—Tour De Force. The central narrator—Arturo Bandini—is stuck out in Boulder Colorado, where it is freezing cold, and nothing ever happens. Not surprisingly a young Arturo is keen to escape to warmer climes, and pursue a writing career in Hollywood. Immediately I could relate to the books central idea, as I was keen to do exactly the same at exactly the same age, albeit on the other side of the world. This novel introduces Fante's alter ego Arturo Bandini who reappears in Wait Until Spring, Bandini (1938), Ask the Dust (1939), and Dreams from Bunker Hill (1982). It’s an important first novel by an important American author.

Damon Galgut recently won the Booker Prize for his riveting, satirical The Promise, but, much as I admire that novel, Galgut’s earlier (also Booker-nominated) semi-autobiographical novel, In a Strange Room, remains my favourite. It comprises three long short stories, all centred on a character called Damon, alerting us to the autobiographical element of the stories. And yet Galgut resists the total identification of autobiography, partly by his device of switching disconcertingly between first and third-person narration (sometimes ‘Damon,’ sometimes ‘I’), and present and past tenses. But the novel is more than technical trickery: the shifting perspectives allow us different angles on the complex relationships depicted in the different sections, rather as a cubist painting affords us a multifarious perspective on its subject. And like other books on this list, this one features a protagonist who travels: something of a trope in South African writing.