100 Books Like The Memoirs of a Survivor

A tropical forest in Africa is the epicentre of a bizarre and very troubling phenomenon. Through a sort of “leak” in space-time, everything is slowly turning to crystal, and this “disease” will eventually seep out into the rest of the world. An English doctor goes on an Apocalypse Now-style journey into the forest to try and understand. Ballard’s sci-fi classic is as weird and thought-provoking as always, and the forest itself is a palpable presence throughout. 

I’ve always been fascinated by surrealism and expressionism—and The Unconsoled takes those dreamlike images and expresses them in a fascinating and disorienting story. Reading this novel makes you feel like you’re trapped in a terrifying and anxious nightmare—and I mean that in the best possible way. The novel uses dream logic: characters appear out of thin air and morph into other characters. The setting is a strange labyrinth in some nameless European city. If you like David Lynch movies, you’ll dig this. If you’re looking for a linear narrative, stay away!

I recently re-read this book, and it returned me at once to the joy and strangeness of the first time I read it.

Lewis offers up the theory that perhaps what we know in this world as myth and archetype exists in reality on other planets. The book brings that thought to vivid life. It detonates all the power and perplexity of the first chapters of "Genesis" and replays "Paradise Lost" on the floating blissful islands of Venus.

Though the endnote is one of glorious joy, few have been as good at depicting evil as Lewis was. Written at the height of the horrors of the Second World War, the Un-Man has haunted my nightmares for much of my life.

Set among the dilapidated Anglo-Irish gentry in rural Ireland as they sink slowly into decline, what makes this book strange and unique among country house novels is the way it deals with its narrator. The daughter of a landowner in a big run-down house, in a social world dominated by horses and hunting, she sees what’s going on around her but fails to understand it, hemmed in by rules of behaviour that make many things simply impossible to name. We see that her brother is gay, for instance, but she never spots it, even when she walks in on her brother and his boyfriend in a state of undress, and she never finds her own way out of this strange doomed world. 

This book is darkly funny, tinged with gothic, and completely merciless.  No less a writer than Hilary Mantel has said she wishes she’d written this novel.

Nelson’s book is a revelation in how it explores the work that both religion and popular culture can do – her readings of Lovecraft’s work are particularly evocative. I’m not on board with the sharp line she draws between high and low culture, but it’s one of those books that’s fascinating even when you disagree with it.

When I was a student I found this book an inspiration. Beautifully written, it brings out deep affinities between the poetry and ideas of Wordsworth, Shelley, and other poets in England and the idealist philosophers in Germany, and the ways both groups rewrote the cosmic ideas of Christianity and ancient esoteric systems. It continually sets off sparks with its surprising comparisons. In the fifty years since it appeared, scholars have complained about how many writers the book leaves out, but given that its theme is “The High Romantic Argument” and not all of Romanticism, I am still impressed by how much it takes in.

For as long as I can remember, I have always enjoyed submarine stories. This author got my attention when he put a post-apocalyptic twist on it. Action and adventure are blended with mystery solving in a way that I still enjoy. The author describes a variety of familiar locations around the world in haunting ways that remind us just how fragile civilization can be.

Sh*t happens (bad relationships, business failures, burnt toast). That’s OK, says Scanlan, because making garbage is an essential part of any activity. In fact, you can’t get anywhere, or achieve any kind of personal or intellectual growth, without some detritus. To me, this explains why humans make so much trash of the kind that I’ve spent my life digging up in archaeological sites. And it makes me feel quite OK about spending a day writing stuff that might go straight into the shredder tomorrow…

This is the darkest of Hermann Hesse’s well-known spiritual journey novels. Unlike works such as Siddhartha, and Demian, Harry Haller in Steppenwolf is a despondent, surly, and suicidal misfit, incapable of coming to grips with the bourgeois culture around him, which seems to him irreparably antithetical to the classical art and literature he worships.

Haller’s eventual spiritual awakening is far more subtle and less dazzling than those Hesse portrayed in other works, and for me, therefore, in many ways more relatable. Deeply ingrained in my mind is Hesse’s image of the gramophone playing tinny, distorted works by master classical composers—which Haller at first despises— but then comes to see that it is much like his trying to decipher mystical truth, which manifests to him in a sort of abridged and imperfect form—because that is all that we, as corporeal humans, are able to discern.

Ariès was a masterful medieval historian, and in this slim volume, based on a series of lectures he gave at Johns Hopkins University, he traced big cultural shifts in the way Western culture has thought about death and dying.

Medieval traditions lauded a so-called “tame death,” in which the dying person calmly accepted their fate, received visitors at home, and directed the rituals and ceremonies that would accompany their impending demise. Death was a normal part of domestic life, witnessed by young and old alike.

This is eventually contrasted with the modern way of dying, in which people die in hospitals, not at home, hidden away from most of a society that has come to believe people need to be shielded from sad and upsetting matters like illness and death. It is a fascinating work of history and a powerful critique of contemporary mores around mortality.