Here are 8 books that Surge fans have personally recommended if you like
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I had a difficult past; from living in war, poverty, and doing various jobs to help with the family economy, to losing my life, imprisonment, and exile. I was one of millions of Iranians who were trapped in a prison called “oppression” by a dictatorial and totalitarian regime. They called us “the burnt generation.” Despite all the hardships, I immigrated to America, became a successful scientist, and achieved all my goals. Then I told myself to write my biography to inspire and motivate people all around the world and convey this universal message to them: protect your freedom, cherish your democracy, and never forget the ones left behind.
Behrouz described his journey with beauty and exemplary courage in the Manus prison. This book is reiminisent of my life story and the lives of millions of Iranians trapped in a prison called “oppression.” This biography speaks of the importance of life and the need for every human being to tell their own story.
I narrated life in Iran in shocking detail of cruelty, destruction, discrimination, humiliation, and constant surveillance, and like many Iranians, found beauty in simple things like rain and paper flowers that soothed us in our loneliness and misery.
This is a testament to the power of writing to overcome difficulties and loneliness.
The Award-winning International Bestselling Story of One Man's Six Year Detention in Australia
'A powerfully vivid account of the experiences of a refugee: desperation, brutality, suffering, and all observed with an eye that seems to see everything and told in a voice that's equal to the task.' - Phillip Pullman
In 2013, Kurdish journalist Behrouz Boochani sought asylum in Australia but was instead illegally imprisoned in the country's most notorious detention centre on Manus Island. This book is the result.
Boochani spent nearly five years typing passages of this book one text at a time from a secret mobile phone…
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…
My psychotherapist has always described me as a black and white thinker. Good and evil. Happy or sad. Up or down. I struggle with shades of gray in my day-to-day life. Which is maybe the reason I am drawn to literature that explores morally ambiguous characters and settings. Not only does every book on this list have no clear hero or villain, but each story forces the reader to question what they think they know about right and wrong. I may be a black and white thinker in every practical sense, but I read and write about people and situations that occupy that very human space of in-between.
Kazuo Ishiguro is known for stories rooted in real world contexts. Even his various forays into science fiction (Never Let Me Go and Klara and the Sun) are deeply grounded in contemporary, true-to-life settings. So, when I stumbled upon this classic fairytale by one of my favorite authors, I didn’t know what to expect. Talk about a gut punch!
This book explores morality and hope in creative and magical ways. And the twist at the end will leave you reeling—in true Ishiguro form.
*Kazuo Ishiguro's new novel Klara and the Sun is now available*
The Romans have long since departed, and Britain is steadily declining into ruin.
The Buried Giant begins as a couple, Axl and Beatrice, set off across a troubled land of mist and rain in the hope of finding a son they have not seen for years. They expect to face many hazards - some strange and other-worldly - but they cannot yet foresee how their journey will reveal to them dark and forgotten corners of their love for one another.
As the photographer Stieglitz once wrote, “Everything is relative except relatives, and they are absolute.” I was born into what was considered a mixed marriage in Argentina, then moved to LA, where I became a foreigner on top of being a mongrel. My family life was turbulent, but I found surrogate parents through my circle of school friends and, eventually, a close-knit community in the local motorcycle world. As I had no roots in my new culture, I spoke freely to anyone, and found family in all sorts of extravagant situations. I’ve continued to explore the permutations of family in my writing for decades now.
This was my favorite book the year I read it, and I will read it again, with no doubt the same result. The narrator is an anonymous 18-year-old woman navigating family, community, and romantic relationships in the midst of the Irish Troubles.
Almost every character is identified by a local nickname, part town culture and part a way to keep both authorities and rebels off track. I loved the strong writing and the surprising but always plausible twists. I’ve recommended it to every reader I know.
Liberty fabric covered editions bring classics from the Faber backlist together with important modern titles, putting them in conversation and celebrating both the history and the future of Faber & Faber.
In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister, our protagonist, is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle, and rumours start to swell, middle sister becomes 'interesting'. The last thing she ever wanted to be. To be interesting is to be noticed and…
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 biographer, and my biography of E.E. Cummings centers on his unjust imprisonment in France during the Great War in dangerously brutal conditions—cold, underfed, and subject to the sadism of the prison guards. It is hard to imagine anything more imperative than writing about injustice. But perhaps for that very reason, it is difficult to write without the consciousness of a deep inadequacy to the task. I feel therefore an enormous gratitude towards those writers, five of whom I have chosen here, whose honesty and courage in writing about injustice serves as an inspiration and a beacon.
Wilson Harris’s Palace of the Peacock is a wildly different way of writing about injustice – mesmerising and disorienting. The language swirls around itself and there is a bewildering feeling of never knowing quite what you are reading. I felt completely taken away from myself reading it, with no idea where I was being taken but utterly absorbed in its world. Originally published in 1960, it has now been republished in a wonderful new edition from Faber Finds, which includes a foreword by Harris reflecting on his own place in early postcolonial literature and a superb afterword by Kenneth Ramchand.
The visionary masterpiece, tracing a riverboat crew's dreamlike jungle voyage ... 'My new all time favourite book ... A magnificent, breathtaking and terrifying novel.' Tsitsi Dangarembga 'An exhilarating experience ... Makes visions real and reality visions ... Genius.' Jamaica Kincaid 'A masterpiece: I love this book for its language, adventure and wisdoms.' Monique Roffey 'Revel in the inviolate, ever-deepening mystery of Wilson Harris's work.' Jeet Thayil 'The Guyanese William Blake . Such poetic intensity.' Angela Carter
I dreamt I awoke with one dead seeing eye and one living closed eye ...
I am a professor, writer, and musician who performs and produces Jamaican influenced music. I have always loved ska, reggae, dancehall, and dub music since I first heard it as a child. Since starting in ska bands, I have been lucky enough to travel around the world performing and was extremely lucky to be able to study and record in Jamaica at the University of the West Indies Reggae Studies Unit and Anchor Music Studios. In writing about music, I had always taken an outsider looking in approach before this book. For this book I wrote from the inside, and everything changed because of it.
This book was essential in my research and longing to develop a relationship to affect theory through Jamaican dub and sound system culture. I could not stop reading this book, as it connected many of the ideas that I had in my head.
I was amazed that someone could write about this topic in this way, and it shifted my thought process to make me more detailed and affect based in my approach to dub music.
Breaking new ground in the field of Sound Studies, this book provides an in-depth study of the culture and physicality of dancehall reggae music. The reggae sound system has exerted a major influence on music and popular culture. Every night, on the streets of inner city Kingston, Jamaica, Dancehall sessions stage a visceral, immersive and immensely pleasurable experience of sonic dominance for the participating crowd. "Sonic Bodies" concentrates on the skilled performance of the crewmembers responsible for this signature of Jamaican music: the audio engineers designing, building and fine-tuning the hugely powerful "set" of equipment; the selectors choosing the music…
As a poet and a novelist, I'm fascinated by the places where these two genres meet, undo each other, and create something new again. That sounds a lot like what love can do, and whenever I read a long poem that achieves a unique aesthetic unity, I feel the writer has found a new way to love the world, to love the reader. And, as usual, both the world and the reader are challenged by that love—to grow.
I studied this book with my graduate students a few years ago, and it’s truly a remarkable achievement. If there’s a (somewhat artificial) spectrum of book-length poems ranging from fragmented lyricism to linear narration, Dawes’ Prophets is fascinating because it lives somewhere in the middle: a powerful narrative informs the lyrical intensity throughout.
I highly recommend this book to writers who want to expand their ideas of what can be done with narration.
Set in Jamaica in the late 1980s and 1990s, Prophets is a poem of rhythmic and metaphoric inventiveness that portrays the social and cultural resonances of Jamaican society along with the tension between an ebullient cynicism and a heartfelt desire for faith. As 24-hour television, belching out the voices of American hellfire preachers, competes with dancehall, slackness, and ganja for Jamaican minds, Clarice and Thalbot preach their own conflicting visions. Clarice has used her gifts to raise herself from the urban Jamaican ghetto. She basks in the adulation of her followers as they look to her for their personal salvation.…
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 write cross-genre fiction with a pen in one hand and a vintage cocktail in the other, filling the romantic void, writing novels when my husband deployed. When in port, we taught swing dancing and have been avid collectors of vintage sewing patterns, retro clothing, and antiques. All of which make appearances in my stories. I’ve always been fascinated with the paranormal and have had some unexplained experiences, some of those made their way into my stories as well. I live in a 1908 home in Texas that may or may not be haunted. I have book reviews, vintage lifestyle tips, recipes, interviews, giveaways, and games on my site!
I was fascinated with the depiction of the 1930s Malaysian dance halls steeped in music, fashion, and dance. As a writer who dabbles in the paranormal, the cultural spirits and supernatural elements were intriguing. The split narrative appealed to me since my Jitterbug Dress series is a dual narrative set in the 1940s and 1990s. The author also set the narrative apart by telling the story in different tenses and POVs (Ren and William’s story is in third person past, while Ji Lin’s story is first person, present). Choo did a great job of juxtaposing the beast or wild animal inside each person, where the line of who we are inside and what we present to society is drawn all while creating tension and suspense, keeping me guessing on how all these narratives intertwine.
THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER | REESE BOOK CLUB PICK | BBC BIG JUBILEE BETWEEN THE COVERS READ
'It reminds me of Where the Crawdads Sing . . . it's an amazing book' Rhys Stephenson on BBC's Between the Covers
'You won't be able to put this one down!' Reese Witherspoon
They say a tiger that devours too many humans can take the form of a man and walk among us...
In 1930s colonial Malaya, a dissolute British doctor receives a surprise gift of an eleven-year-old Chinese houseboy. Sent as a bequest from an old friend, young Ren has a…
I am an author, film composer, guitarist, multimedia artist, and perfumer. As a music journalist, I’ve written extensively for many major U.S. and international guitar publications before launching the website, The Guitar. My music has been featured on National Public Radio and worldwide at major U.S. and international art and design museum festivals. Part of being a writer is about expressing one’s curiosity through constant delving and engaging in the ongoing process of discovery. What compels me is the attempt to understand the inspiration that drives an artist to create a distinctively beautiful melody, fragrance, or artwork—one that grabs your attention with a mesmerizing, transfixing, and soulful quality.
Frey’s book is a vivid account of the fin-de-siecle French painter who was born into aristocracy but did not fit in, due to hereditary dwarfism. Lautrec devoted himself to studying painting in Paris, where he fell in with the cabaret theatre and dancehall crowd, along with its contingent, shadier side of sundry misfits, whom he embraced wholly. In the milieu that permitted a laundress (La Goulue) to become a can-can star, Lautrec put himself on the map with his spectacular cabaret posters. I chose this book because though I do not draw portraits, I can relate to my enjoyment of capturing artistic photographs of musicians.
Debauched aristocrat, cabaret painter or accidental dwarf: Julia Frey's definitive biography uses meticulous research to strip away the myth of Toulouse-Lautrec and reveal for the first time the tortured man beneath. 'The book deals seriously and sensitively with Lautrec's progress as an artist, his academic training and the audacious use he put it to. Equally, readers in search of the ooh-la-la side of Paris during the Belle Epoque won't feel short-changed. Almost everyone from Manet to the young Picasso crosses the stage. It is of course a tragic story, but a triumphant one also' George Melly, Mail on Sunday
