Books like The Deceptions — picked by fans

This is a strong and painful biography.

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.

While Taylor Swift has not written a song about Isabel Allende or her daughter Paula, it may only be a matter of time.

Taylor is known for having a strong, tight-knit relationship with her mother, Andrea. If anyone can write about the tethers and ties that weave through a mother-daughter relationship with such precise detail and sorrowing pain, it is Isabel Allende.

Paula is a memoir about loss and the story about how Isabel lost her adult daughter to cancer. It is the only book to ever make me sob-cry. Once I picked it up, I couldn’t put it down. I felt Isabel’s pain deep in the depths of my soul in a similar light as when I listen to the song “Soon You’ll Get Better” on her Lover album, which Taylor Swift wrote about her mother’s treatment for cancer.

Kooshyar Karimi wrote this stunning memoir so beautifully it blew me away. Now a Sydney-based doctor and writer, he grew up as a Jew in Muslim Iran, hiding his origins from a brutal regime, always with a humorous eye. 

It is such a powerful story of survival, torture, and spying, plus forced deceptions and betrayal of others for helping desperate female rape victims. The struggle for redemption and eventual escape make his journey an unforgettable one.  

This wonderfully written true story is told as a wild madcap, can’t put it down, tragic comedy, which is incredibly funny but carries with it an underbelly of loss and heartbreak. 

As he struggles to straddle the demands of his Iraqi-Iranian cultural mix as a refugee in Australia, Osamah makes some disastrous choices, that lead him down a complex maze to the truth of where his own heart lies.

I first met Peter here in Chapel Hill, and we became fast friends. A Holocaust survivor from Prague, Peter often spoke to my classes about his experiences. What made his talks so powerful was his ability to remember what it was like to be an eight-year-old boy living in a city under Nazi occupation, and to tell a story that is humbling, moving, and real. Never have I seen a speaker connect better with young people. Peter first became inspired to begin telling his story to students and others after confronting a Holocaust denier, and his many presentations laid the foundation for this book. Part history, part memoir, A Boy’s Journey is also a story about family and the need for tolerance and empathy in our world today. 

Laurent Binet’s debut novel of “metafiction” draws its title from the chilling Nazi saying, “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich” (Himmlers Hirn heißt Heydrich), a reference to Reinhard Heydrich, an architect of the Holocaust and one of the most terrifying figures in the Third Reich.

Known as “The Blond Beast,” Heydrich governed occupied Prague through terror, executions, and mass repression. His assassination by Czech resistance fighters in 1942 forms the heart of the novel.

Binet approaches this story in an entirely original way. Rather than hiding behind an omniscient narrator, he constantly steps into the narrative himself, revealing his anxieties, obsessions, research struggles, and doubts about how we write historical fiction. The result is a daring blend of thriller, memoir, history, and philosophical inquiry. The novel is gripping, unsettling, and fiercely intelligent, not only exploring the past but also how we write about it.

This is a book that I never hesitate to go back to because it sums up perfectly a society that wants to find you guilty because of who you are.

As the protagonist searches for the rationale behind his arrest, it is a never-ending spider’s web designed to obscure the answers. The point is that at any moment, your personality, your character, your heartfelt beliefs can be the thing that you are guilty of, even if you have done nothing wrong.

The Trial is the abstraction of totalitarian systems. Freedoms that we think we have can be taken away at a moment’s notice, with no rhyme or reason.

There are several books I could recommend written by adults who were imprisoned as children in Terezin during the war, but this one stands out because of its artwork interspersed with factual accounts of daily life. Indeed, it’s the factual perspective she takes in her descriptions that makes them so heart-wrenching. Her map was my primary tool in writing descriptions of the camp, and her artwork, imitating her writing style, comes across as stark and factual. Written as a diary, not a novel, I cried at the cruelty with which her life unfurled before her. At the same time, however, she manages to capture the beauty of being a child, full of hope and promise. That balance makes the book a jewel.

Under Communism, two hundred thousand spectators gathered every five years to fill the largest concrete stadium in the world, Strahov Stadium, on a hill not far from Prague Castle. Why? To watch tens of thousands of their fellow countrymen perform synchronized gymnastics movements. Why? They were all taking part in a ritual, called the Spartakiad, which tells us much about Communist ideology as it evolved over time. For many participants and spectators, the Spartakiad was also an opportunity to visit their capital city and return with memories that were not part of the Communists’ ideological script. In Roubal’s telling, the Spartakiad also shows that Czechoslovak citizens were not simply cogs in a totalitarian machine. In 1960, for example, performers staying in Prague dormitories forced organizers to remove high-calorie butter cakes with cheese curd. They got beef goulash instead.

Bohemian Gospel is an unusual book. I wasn’t sure I’d like it at first because it has more supernatural and fantasy elements than the novels I typically read, but it is truly stunning. Set in thirteenth-century Bohemia, it features Mouse, another badass heroine, trying to survive in a world filled with dark powers that threaten to destroy her. While this novel isn’t strictly a gothic novel, it has the requisite spooky atmosphere and a compelling heroine in deadly peril. The highest compliment I can pay this book is that when I was reading it I was nearly late for my own book launch because I was so caught up in the story!