100 Books Like The Old Drift

I love this book because it explores the end of the world in the most intimate and emotional way possible.

What moved me deeply was not the apocalypse itself, but the quiet relationship between father and son, trying to preserve goodness in a world where goodness no longer seems to matter. I felt a constant weight while reading, as if hope itself was fragile and rare.

It made me reflect on what it truly means to carry faith and humanity when everything else is gone.

How could I not love a book about an Indian surgeon who finds himself living and working in Ethiopia, especially when the book has a plot that simply refused to allow me to put the book down?

I was deeply touched by the struggles of a surgeon trying to apply his craft in circumstances that seemed nearly impossible. I was equally affected by the fulfillment he experienced by being welcomed and so deeply appreciated by a community. I was hooked when his trust and resilience were put to the ultimate test.

I had my doubts about reading this because, well… Tudor history.

I love Mantel’s work but…another trot through Henry VIII’s marriages and murders? I wasn’t sure it was for me. But within moments of opening the book, I was away with Mantel and Thomas Cromwell.

Even the title, Wolf Hall, demonstrates her gift. It was the name of the Seymour family’s seat, and the book never takes us there—but it was Jane Seymour who replaced Anne Boleyn and gave monstrous Henry his heir. The title hangs over the action, echoing, Man is wolf to man.

Mantel’s Cromwell is complex, often kind as well as ruthless, but Mantel herself said that she presents only one possible view of him. Read it and make up your own mind!

Okay, he was my dissertation advisor. Sorry! But Thompson’s is a concise, perceptive, and readable one-volume history of the great country, a splendid introduction. Born and raised in South Africa, the late Thompson was a Rhodes Scholar before seeing extensive service in World War II. Like so many talented South Africans from many fields, he went into exile around 1960 when the apartheid regime moved toward a no-holds-barred stranglehold on all opposition. This was his last book, and in it he distills a lifetime of research, teaching and experience. The fourth edition has an update and new preface by Lynn Berat.

I read this book first on a long flight, and I had bought it at my departure airport. It was chosen because of my belief that Mandela thus far remains the quintessential leader that most of Africa still lacks!

An autobiography captures the nuanced structural trajectories and diverse challenges of the African state. A story of struggle, but it demonstrates the value of resilience and the need for painstaking commitment to the ideals of national development, despite the pain it may cause to the leader. A must-read for leaders and aspiring leaders in Africa, since despite focusing on the peculiar context of South Africa and the struggles of Mandela, it also embodies fine examples for principled leadership and statecraft that are still very much relevant now.

I love this book and have taught it a number of times because the protagonist challenges us not to like her, and we do anyway. The novel's first line is that her brother died, and she is not sad. From that point on, you are enveloped in the complex and conflicting dynamics of an extended Shona family that has been changed by missionary education in what was then Southern Rhodesia.

It becomes clear that Western education, mostly by design, introduces students to concepts (if not languages) foreign to their families of origin. The result can be estrangement and division. The novel is semi-autobiographical and a moving illustration of colonialism's social and cultural impact.

Move Your Shadow is a masterpiece of reportage. Lelyveld, a former executive editor of the New York Times, spent considerable periods in apartheid South Africa in both the 1960s and the 1980s. The sixties was the period of “baaskap”—“bosshood” apartheid, when the perverse racist cruelties of the system were imposed with a sledgehammer. I would call the eighties the era of “facelift” apartheid—why, the word was hardly used by the regime anymore. 

To paraphrase Gramsci, the old world was dying, a new one struggled to be born. Monsters abounded. Nobody captured the period better than Lelyveld. The chapter on Philip Kgosana, the idealist who led Cape Town demonstrations in 1960—at age 19—was betrayed by the state, and wound up in exile in Sri Lanka—is worth the price of the book.

I don’t think Garcia Marquez needs a review or introduction. Reading any of his books is a pleasure, with easy and delightful writing and striking sentences.

These sentences often describe things or people in a way that feels natural and perfectly captured. For instance, he describes the world as so new that many things lack names. His eloquent descriptions, like that of ice, create vivid images. The characters are relatable, and you feel a happy exhaustion after finishing the book, reminiscent of great works like Steinbeck’s East of Eden.

Those who find the stories too unbelievable should learn about Colombian history, as they provide real context. I simply love the book!

People kept telling me to read it, so I finally did–just in time to include it on this list. Rotating narrators–a White missionary’s wife and four daughters from the American South–represent disparate points of view concerning their family’s move to the Belgian Congo in 1959.

One thing I loved is the attention to historical detail and Kingsolver’s ability to include multiple, complex subplots to better frame the colonial history of this particular time/place and to better demonstrate the insidious ongoing brutality of colonization in terms of inequitable global wealth.

Language and religion play a major role in the plundering resource extraction industries, as do political and military interference, apartheid, and so much more. I loved her exploration of language(s): the power held in naming and misnaming. The youngest daughter sums it up best. “My life: what I stole from history, and how I live with it.” Characters are primarily White… show more.

This is the story of the relationships and legacy of surgeon Kweku Sai, who passes away of a heart attack in his garden in Ghana in the opening pages of this page-turning family drama. The novel explores Kweku’s relationships with each of his four children and how each makes sense of and mourns his death.

While slightly different than the other selections in this list in that it doesn’t focus on a single father-daughter relationship, the novel nonetheless explores the complexity of Kweku’s estranged relationships with each of his children, including his daughters Taiwo and Sadie.