Books like The Theory of Flight — picked by fans

Few other books romanticize Africa the way this book does. A great deal has changed since it was published in 1937, but Danish author Karen Blixen’s whimsical account of her eighteen years in Africa remains enchanting.

I am particularly partial to the theme of determined, independent women living largely alone in remote places, enjoying the wonders of the natural world, and being adventurous and resourceful. I grew up on a farm in Africa and relate to the associated joys and challenges. 

First published in 1948, this book will forever occupy a special place in my heart.

Not only is the book partially set in the very countryside where I was raised in South Africa, but it was also responsible for awakening my young conscience to the harsh realities of what many South Africans endured leading up to and during the apartheid years.

I was forever moved by the story and characters, and discovered the power of fiction by reading it.

I’ve loved Andre Brink’s books ever since I discovered them in my late teens. He’s a celebrated South African author of protest literature, and his historical fiction, Philida, is one of my favourites. 

It’s a tender and yet powerful story about a woman born into slavery to a white family, who becomes the mother of four children by the son of her master. Although it reveals the sordid past of the country, much of Philida’s power lies in how personal it is.

I love how nuanced and intimate the story is and how one woman’s story says so much.

I’m fascinated by the role fiction plays in helping us understand one another, the power it has to evoke empathy and awareness, and its place in teaching us humanity and helping us heal. After all, as Nadine Gordimer said, "Fiction uses metaphor to help us see the truth."

If I were a literary doctor, I’d prescribe this book, set during Zimbabwe’s economic collapse, as obligatory reading. You might consider it a vitamin. Dosage and directions for use? Read it once and, if you’re still unmoved, read it again...and again until you get it. Or read it simply because it’s an excellent book, and reading fiction is good for you.

I’m in awe of this author’s trilogy of award-winning novels about Zimbabwe’s colonial history. Haunting and hypnotic, they blend magical realism, epic history, and social satire. Although they form a series with some recurring characters, all are standalone reads.

Her first, The Theory of Flight, won South Africa’s biggest literary award. The second, recommended here, is a sustained act of grace in which the author climbs into the skin of an alpha white male Rhodesian, Emil Coetzee, whose ambitions lead to his running the doomed colony’s sinister secret police. It humanizes him without excusing him in an imaginative tour de force that asks a burning question: why do we sometimes choose evil?

If you love this book (you will), Ndlovu’s third novel, The Quality of Mercy, brings the series to a redemptive close.

I’m going to say right off the top that this book is not well written: it’s turgid and florid and hard to follow. But it’s also recent, unlike most of the books on my list, and it’s the first comprehensive accounting of PEPFAR, the extraordinary US intervention into the African pandemic.

It’s impossible to understand the huge shift in the dynamic of the pandemic without understanding how massively George Bush’s decision to support HIV treatment in Africa changed – well, everything – and Bass is the first writer to try to really dig into that story.

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.

Yusuf is a young boy, an indentured servant to an Arab trader, living in a cloistered environment amidst much he doesn’t understand. On a trading trip from the Swahili coast, through the foothills of Kilimanjaro, and on to Lake Victoria, he has the opportunity to see foreign wonders, learn how the trader negotiates, and see the attitudes of the Swahili traders toward the people from the interior, the relatively new Indian immigrants, and the German colonizers. The trip is brutal; descriptions are straightforward and realistic but the author never sensationalizes events. This is an important piece of the incredible variety in the mosaic of African culture and history. The honesty and authenticity the author provides make it clear what he has to offer the literary world and why he was awarded a Nobel prize. 

Anansi the Spider is one of the classic African stories that inspired me to go into storytelling as a career. Reading this book, and watching its animated counterpart as a child, totally enthralled me. The combination of the bright, bold colours and graphical aesthetic, with the mystique of the folklore felt just like magic to me. The fable told here comes off as profound yet funny and quirky. This book is a must for anyone interested in fables and African folklore in particular.

Set in the fictitious West African country of Kinjanja, the hapless exploits of an ill-fated British High Commission delegate in the wrong place at the wrong time left me exhausted from laughing out loud so hard.

It’s a sliding-door adventure thriller about the comic yet tragic downfall of a good man trying to do his best in the face of unrelenting adversity. I read it while living in Nigeria (Kinjanja is a cross between Ghana and Nigeria) and found it to be the perfect fusion of exotic location and sense of place, combined with a headlong descent into mayhem and madness.