Books like The Long Field — picked by fans

In the summer of 1996, Ms. Brkic joined a Physicians for Human Rights forensic team in Eastern Bosnia to excavate the mass graves of the Srebrenica massacre. Ms. Brkic, who grew up in Northern Virginia, had family connections in the Balkans. Her grandmother, Andelka, was from Herzegovina, in a small village among limestone hills. The family survived the Second World War and the Communist takeover of their country. Her father escaped from Yugoslavia in 1959 and settled in America. 

Stone Fields juxtaposes the family story with the story of the summer Ms. Brkic spent on the forensic team in Tuzla and with her friends and relatives in Zagreb. The author portrays the many ways that people can lose their homes—through war, genocide, political oppression, emigration, family discord—with heartbreaking clarity, always aware of the dignity, as well as the tragedy, of the survivors’ lives.

Katherine Russel Rich, who had spent 20 years as a magazine editor (and just as long as a cancer survivor: recounted brilliantly in her first book, The Red Devil: To Hell with Cancer—and Back), started studying Hindi because she needed a new language to describe her life during the messy process of remaking herself as an artistic rather than commercial writer. Dreaming in Hindi: Coming Awake in Another Language is a memoir of the year she spent in the ancient city of Udaipur, where she lived with a local family and attended a Hindi language school. 

This personal story is combined with fascinating information about second-language acquisition, as well as the profiles of various Americans and Europeans who made a home in India as a teacher, aid-worker, scholar, spiritual seeker, or in the case of one memorable character, a fortune/husband seeker. At times hilarious, other times heartbreaking, this is… show more.

Come On Shore and We Will Kill and Eat You All portrays the contact between seeming opposites: the author who grew up in Boston and traveled to New Zealand when she was a graduate student in Australia and the Maori man she met there and married; the “colonizers” who were her direct ancestors and the “natives” her husband descended from; the history of the encounters between the two groups (including the story of Captain Cook).  At the heart of this complex, mesmerizing, and unflinching story is the couple’s devotion to their three sons—boys growing up in a Boston suburb and navigating their identities as “a little bit of the conqueror and the conquered, the colonizer and the colonized” as Ms. Thompson explains to them in a letter she tucks into the folder containing her life insurance policy.

Christopher Davenport, who later became a Foreign Service Officer with the U. S. Department of State and served in various countries including Vietnam, Guatemala, Tajikistan, and Georgia, was a Peace Corps volunteer in 1994. In Papua New Guinea’s Eastern Highlands, he was placed with a local family in a village of subsistence farmers. Except when attending classes in town (a hike and a long car ride away) with other Peace Corps volunteers scattered through the area, he worked, attended village gatherings, ate, and slept with his host family who treated him like an adopted son. The Tin Can Crucible—the title refers to the ingenuity of the local people—tells an honest, unsettling, and thoughtful story about what happened when the rhythm of this peaceful life was shattered by an accusation of witchcraft and examines the moral and ethical ambiguities and complexities of the role of philanthropy and the well-meant intentions… show more.

M. Wynn Thomas is the foremost literary critic writing in Wales today, and a writer I particularly admire.

He pioneered the concept of ‘Welsh writing in English’ as distinct from ‘Welsh writing’ (in Welsh), honouring the bilingual culture of Wales. Thomas’s twelve poems are selected from three key periods of Welsh history, the Middle Ages, the pre-modern period, and our own time.

Each poem is read in the context of its social and political background, educating us about the politics of Welshness, the cultural assumptions written into the literature, and above all what it means to be Welsh in a nation that is not a state.

This is such an elegant and original way to foreground the creativity of Welsh poets alongside the cultural forces that shaped them.

Not only is this a heartfelt evacuee story, it’s also a brilliant mystery. When Jimmy and his brother, Ronnie, are sent to the Welsh countryside to escape the bombings, Jimmy is angry at the adults responsible – “They think they know everything but all they do is leave or make wars or send their children away.” The boys eventually warm to their kind foster parents, but some of the villagers aren’t so welcoming. When Jimmy finds a skull in a hollow tree, he has no idea how it’s tied to an unsolved mystery, and the reader has no idea how it will figure in this story’s gripping, satisfying, and emotional conclusion. 

This is another historical novel set in my favourite time period AD 600’s, this time in Powys. The main character is Heledd – a peace-weaver bride, she is human, flawed, compelling, and courageous. The background detail is vivid and well researched, but what I love most about this book is the lyrical style of writing, which may almost give the reader the sense that the story is being sung,  reflecting with feeling and humanity, the real Anglo-Saxon poetry that has come down to us. Here is a powerful sense of sadness, regret, and gathering doom, lifted by moments of pure joy – a true lament!

Written in the 1950s by a museum curator-geologist, Sunken Cities is one of the earliest expositions of ‘myth and legend’ and their plausible geological meanings. The author marries his deep knowledge of Welsh traditions about submerged places with contemporary geological understandings. Of course, geology was transformed the following decade but North’s book remains insightful and grounded in ways that many more recent accounts are not. If I lived in Wales, I would be off every weekend with it in hand!

I was fascinated by this tale of a Welsh clergyman’s daughter who, remarkably, became a Strongwoman in late Victorian London. And, even more amazing is the fact that it’s based on a true story! The plucky and talented Miriam Kate Williams becomes known as Vulcana and joins a troupe of performers.

Told like a five-act play with intermissions, we follow her fortunes, her loves, the pull and dangers of the city, motherhood, and much else. I loved this breathless, exhilarating, and highly original novel that exposes an aspect of performing on stage that receives little attention today.

Rees Davies was one of the first historians to seek to explore the histories of Britain and Ireland as both unique and intertwined narratives. Although this book focuses on the Welsh revolt of the early 15th century it shows the author’s formidable understanding of the relationship between England and Wales in the century after the Edwardian conquest. An object lesson in academic history written with the general reader in mind.