Here are 47 books that This Earth of Mankind fans have personally recommended if you like
This Earth of Mankind.
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As an English professor, I teach all kinds of literature, but I’m especially drawn to creative and experimental works that cross over different languages, cultures, and geographical regions. I’m drawn to writers who test the limits of language. Joseph Conrad chose to write in English, his third language (after Polish and French), which he learned from the polyglot world of sailing. Conrad’s English is populated by multiple other languages. When I discovered the Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, I was compelled to learn both Dutch and Indonesian in order to read the prison notes, then available only in Dutch, and the many stories and novels not yet translated into English.
I love this book for the poetic and multilingual effect in just about every line of writing. Although its explicit descriptions of bodily violence are visceral and challenging, there is something utterly compelling about the impossibility of disentangling literal from metaphorical descriptions.
I love the way the book revisits and also queers some of the themes of Maxine Hong Kingston’s A Woman Warrior (e.g., the story of immigration to the U.S., the woman warrior theme). Linguistically, it is even more complex than A Woman Warrior.
It combines American English and Chinese—sometimes breaking up the Roman letters with Chinese characters—and then subverts both English and Chinese through references to the indigenous Taiwanese language, Atayal.
Three generations of Taiwanese American women are haunted by the myths of their homeland in this blazing debut of one family's queer desires, violent impulses and buried secrets.
One evening, Mother tells Daughter a story about a tiger spirit who lived in a woman's body. Her name was Hu Gu Po, and she hungered to eat children, especially their toes. Soon afterwards, Daughter awakes with a tiger tail. And more mysterious events follow: Holes in the backyard spit up letters penned by her estranged grandmother; a visiting aunt leaves red on everything she touches; a ghost bird shimmers in an…
The dragons of Yuro have been hunted to extinction.
On a small, isolated island, in a reclusive forest, lives bandit leader Marani and her brother Jacks. With their outlaw band they rob from the rich to feed themselves, raiding carriages and dodging the occasional vindictive…
Ever since I followed a girlfriend on the hippie trail through Asia (see: Around the World In A Bad Mood) at 25, I had my life changed from fledgling novelist to travel writer—when, despite my professed difficulties, major magazines started calling me to see the world on their dime. I also was able to center three more book accounts of my wanderings on major life passions (Latin baseball, Brazilian music and Chinese food), so that I had enriching experiences even when the royalties weren't. I have taught courses on "travel lit" everywhere from Berkeley to Kuala Lumpur and honed a philosophy of travel writing as the ultimate in wide-eyed amateurism.
In the hands of Jose Saramago, a baroque stylist yet radical thinker, this tale of a reclusive proofreader and the definitive account of a 12th-century battle moves between the most stubborn boundary of all—separating the present from a still vivid past and a place where many of his Portuguese countrymen still live.
An editor at a Portuguese publishing house, Raimundo Silva, undertakes to rewrite a crucial episode in Portuguese history as a romantic saga, with the amorous encouragement of his supervisor.
As an English professor, I teach all kinds of literature, but I’m especially drawn to creative and experimental works that cross over different languages, cultures, and geographical regions. I’m drawn to writers who test the limits of language. Joseph Conrad chose to write in English, his third language (after Polish and French), which he learned from the polyglot world of sailing. Conrad’s English is populated by multiple other languages. When I discovered the Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, I was compelled to learn both Dutch and Indonesian in order to read the prison notes, then available only in Dutch, and the many stories and novels not yet translated into English.
I love the way this book moves between Scotland and Sudan, as told from the perspective of a devout Muslim woman working as a translator for a Scottish academic at Aberdeen University. The story itself is a work of translation and a highly original rewriting of the encounter between East and West, Islam and Christianity, English and Arabic.
All those binaries break down: the English, for example, is Scottish, and the way to pronounce Arabic turns on a difference between Arab-speaking regions so that in both speech and writing, the reader encounters subtleties of translation usually overlooked in the tiresome cliches about “West” and “East.”
I love teaching it to learn with my students the politics of translation. The book has my favorite rewriting of that famous map-pointing scene at the beginning of Conrad’s “Heart of Darkness”—Aboulela restores as Arabic names the blank spaces on the map of…
A New York Times Notable Book: “Aboulela’s lovely, brief story encompasses worlds of melancholy and gulfs between cultures” (Kirkus Reviews, starred review).
American readers were introduced to the award-winning Sudanese author Leila Aboulela with Minaret, a delicate tale of a privileged young African Muslim woman adjusting to her new life as a maid in London. Now, for the first time in North America, we step back to her extraordinarily assured debut about a widowed Muslim mother living in Aberdeen who falls in love with a Scottish secular academic.
Sammar is a Sudanese widow working as an Arabic translator at a…
When Annie Thornton, midwife and apprentice witch, falls through time to a 15th-century Yorkshire village with her telepathic cat, Rosamund, she befriends Will and Jack, two soldiers returning from the French Wars. Mistress Meg, Annie’s ancestral aunt living in the 15th century, is…
Ever since I followed a girlfriend on the hippie trail through Asia (see: Around the World In A Bad Mood) at 25, I had my life changed from fledgling novelist to travel writer—when, despite my professed difficulties, major magazines started calling me to see the world on their dime. I also was able to center three more book accounts of my wanderings on major life passions (Latin baseball, Brazilian music and Chinese food), so that I had enriching experiences even when the royalties weren't. I have taught courses on "travel lit" everywhere from Berkeley to Kuala Lumpur and honed a philosophy of travel writing as the ultimate in wide-eyed amateurism.
This novel is about an exiled Turkish journalist returning home to investigate the suicides of girls over being denied headscarves is Orhan Pamuk's masterwork.
It is the most profound and poetic statement I've ever read on the collision between the conflicting consciousness of the modern and the traditional mind.
Returning to Turkey from exile in the West, the secular poet Ka is driven by curiosity to investigate a surprising wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden by the government to wear their head scarves in school. But the epicentre of the suicides, the bleak, impoverished border city of Kars, is also home to the beautiful Ipek, a friend of Ka's youth whom he has never forgotten and whose spirited younger sister is a leader of the rebellious schoolgirls. As a fierce snowstorm descends, cutting them off from the world, violence between the military and local Islamic radicals begins to…
Ever since I followed a girlfriend on the hippie trail through Asia (see: Around the World In A Bad Mood) at 25, I had my life changed from fledgling novelist to travel writer—when, despite my professed difficulties, major magazines started calling me to see the world on their dime. I also was able to center three more book accounts of my wanderings on major life passions (Latin baseball, Brazilian music and Chinese food), so that I had enriching experiences even when the royalties weren't. I have taught courses on "travel lit" everywhere from Berkeley to Kuala Lumpur and honed a philosophy of travel writing as the ultimate in wide-eyed amateurism.
This is ostensibly a travel book, a journey of discovery for VS Naipaul, a product of the Indian diaspora deeply imbued with Western Anglo values. It's also reportage, essay, and passionate horror-filled screed. It's not a fair or objective portrait of his homeland, but it is brilliantly observed and profoundly argued.
In this book, V.S.Naipaul returns to the country which continues to intrigue and inspire him and about which he wrote "An Area of Darkness" in 1964, a semi-autobiographical account of a year spent in India. Now, twenty-five years later, he goes back to that country, returning to the places he visited years ago and talking to people of all types and at all levels of society. Naipaul started writing in 1954 he has won the John Llewelyn Rhys Memorial Prize, the Somerset Maugham Award, the Hawthornden Prize, the W.H.Smith Award and the Booker Prize, the latter with the novel "In…
Ever since I followed a girlfriend on the hippie trail through Asia (see: Around the World In A Bad Mood) at 25, I had my life changed from fledgling novelist to travel writer—when, despite my professed difficulties, major magazines started calling me to see the world on their dime. I also was able to center three more book accounts of my wanderings on major life passions (Latin baseball, Brazilian music and Chinese food), so that I had enriching experiences even when the royalties weren't. I have taught courses on "travel lit" everywhere from Berkeley to Kuala Lumpur and honed a philosophy of travel writing as the ultimate in wide-eyed amateurism.
The one piece of standard travel literature on this list, its gentle, almost tender evocation of first impressions of Thailand, has truths that stayed with me through ten years of living there.
On his way to a meditation center and seeking nirvana, Englishman Charles Nicholl finds bliss in reality and his own disillusionment.
In 1986, Charles Nicholl travels through Thailand to learn about the spiritual traditions of forest Buddhism in the north of the country. But interesting things have a habit of getting in the way. When Nicholl meets Harry, an old French Indochina hand, on the night train north with his tales of Kachin jade and Shan opium it leads to a journey along the banks of the Mekong, into the Golden Triangle and then across the border into Burma, in the company of the book s Thai heroine, Kitai.
Chasing Light is a lyrical meditation on grief, memory, and the fragile beauty of everyday life. At its core, it is a story of resilience, forgiveness, and the transformational power of human connection. It sheds light on the overlooked realities of homelessness and addiction, while emphasizing the importance of compassion…
As an English professor, I teach all kinds of literature, but I’m especially drawn to creative and experimental works that cross over different languages, cultures, and geographical regions. I’m drawn to writers who test the limits of language. Joseph Conrad chose to write in English, his third language (after Polish and French), which he learned from the polyglot world of sailing. Conrad’s English is populated by multiple other languages. When I discovered the Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, I was compelled to learn both Dutch and Indonesian in order to read the prison notes, then available only in Dutch, and the many stories and novels not yet translated into English.
I love this book for the epic story it tells of two Native American sisters kidnapped from their home and reunited after separate journeys. There’s something extraordinary about Silko's ability to craft a novel about the horrors of violence against Native Americans and make it a book of resilience and affirmation.
It may not have the heft of her other epic novel, Almanac of the Dead (which I also love), but whereas Almanac has no likable characters and many brutal stories, this one manages to have no unlikeable characters despite the underlying brutality of the stories it tells.
It is deceptively childlike in its focus on children and its inclusion of animal characters, although the animal-human relation is far from simplistic, forming part of its deep linguistic, cultural, and ecological world-changing perspective.
A sweeping, multifaceted tale of a young Native American pulled between the cherished traditions of a heritage on the brink of extinction and an encroaching white culture, Gardens in the Dunes is the powerful story of one woman's quest to reconcile two worlds that are diametrically opposed.
At the center of this struggle is Indigo, who is ripped from her tribe, the Sand Lizard people, by white soldiers who destroy her home and family. Placed in a government school to learn the ways of a white child, Indigo is rescued by the kind-hearted Hattie and her worldly husband, Edward, who…
As an English professor, I teach all kinds of literature, but I’m especially drawn to creative and experimental works that cross over different languages, cultures, and geographical regions. I’m drawn to writers who test the limits of language. Joseph Conrad chose to write in English, his third language (after Polish and French), which he learned from the polyglot world of sailing. Conrad’s English is populated by multiple other languages. When I discovered the Indonesian writer Pramoedya Ananta Toer, I was compelled to learn both Dutch and Indonesian in order to read the prison notes, then available only in Dutch, and the many stories and novels not yet translated into English.
I love this book for the way it brings together in one place (a graveyard) a panoply of different characters from different walks of South Asian life. I find Anjum (the third gender “hijra” character who begins the narrative) most compelling. Her marginal relation to all the various mainstream cultures sets a template for how storytelling works across cultures, languages, and political perspectives.
I also love a part of the book critics found puzzling–when the novel shifts to the perspective of the former intelligence officer. It’s reminiscent of Conrad’s The Secret Agent and Under Western Eyes, Ngugi wa Thiong’o’s A Grain of Wheat, or House of Glass, the final novel in the Buru quartet of novels by Pramoedya Ananta Toer.
Like those novels, it compels a reader to undergo radical shifts in political and cultural perspectives. It’s simultaneously a political novel, a thriller, several coming-of-age novels spliced together, and…
FROM THE BOOKER PRIZE WINNING AUTHOR OF THE GOD OF SMALL THINGS
LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2018
LONGLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER PRIZE 2017
NOMINATED FOR THE NATIONAL BOOK CRITICS CIRCLE AWARD FOR FICTION
LONGLISTED FOR THE CARNEGIE 2018
THE SUNDAY TIMES NUMBER ONE and THE NEW YORK TIMES BESTSELLER
'At magic hour; when the sun has gone but the light has not, armies of flying foxes unhinge themselves from the Banyan trees in the old graveyard and drift across the city like smoke...'
So begins The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy's incredible follow-up to The…
I have always strived to speak out when surrounded by silence, whether in person through my own voice, or through the books I have written and had published. Not because I am heroic or noble, but because I am angered by suppressed truth, and I believe reality should be shown as it is, not as people believe it should be. That is why the books I chose are so important to me, because they fearlessly exposed the truths the respective authors were determined to show, risks be damned. I hope these books inspire you as much as they have inspired me.
Written over 160 years ago, this book was one of the earliest works of literature that exposed the horrors of European colonialism. By using scathing wit, Multatuli weaved together a story that shamed a system that committed terrible crimes that, at that point in time, many Europeans were ignorant of.
Despite the book being written so long ago, not a shred of its incisiveness has been lost. I believe this book is a great example of how fearlessly written prose about a reality people don’t want to, or can’t, see can lead to direct changes in that reality in the short and long term (Pramoedya Ananta Toer, author of the powerful "Buru Quartet" was quoted as saying, "Max Havelaar was the book that killed colonialism"). I remain in awe of how the story so skillfully utilized controlled outrage to take on something as terrible as the colonization of Indonesia.
Max Havelaar - a Dutch civil servant in Java - burns with an insatiable desire to end the ill treatment and oppression inflicted on the native peoples by the colonial administration. Max is an inspirational figure, but he is also a flawed idealist whose vow to protect the Javanese from cruelty ends in his own downfall. In Max Havelaar, Multatuli (the pseudonym for Eduard Douwes Dekker) vividly recreated his own experiences in Java and tellingly depicts the hypocrisy of those who gained from the corrupt coffee trade. Sending shockwaves through the Dutch nation when it was published in 1860, this…
Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman
by
Alexis Krasilovsky,
Kate from Jules et Jim meets I Love Dick.
A young woman filmmaker’s journey of self-discovery, set against a backdrop of the sexual liberation movement of the 1970s and 1980s. In Portrait of an Artist as a Young Woman, we follow Ana Fried as she faces the ultimate…
I’ve always loved how science deepens my appreciation of nature and fills me with awe and wonder. I’ve been a science teacher, a documentary producer for National Geographic and Discovery, and the author of What's Gotten Into You: The Story of Your Body's Atoms, from the Big Bang Through Last Night's Dinner. I’m astounded by how much scientists have been able to learn about how our world works and how they have revealed surprising and strange beauty. Their stories of wrestling with the unknown, marked by unexpected twists and great perseverance, captivate and inspire me.
I love a seamless blend of science and history that creates a gripping story, and Krakatoa is at the top of my list. The book left me in awe at the power of nature.
The Krakatoa eruption unleashed a 120-foot tsunami, killed tens of thousands, and cast ash into the atmosphere that cooled temperatures around the globe. I was fascinated by Winchester’s tale of how the cataclysm contributed to our understanding of volcanology, tsunamis, and the revolutionary theory of plate tectonics.
To top it off, he took me into another world by weaving in a moving story of Dutch colonization and Indonesian resistance. I was sorry to reach the end.
'Bracingly apocalyptic stuff: atmospheric, chock-full of information and with a constantly escalating sense of pace and tension' Sunday Telegraph
Simon Winchester's brilliant chronicle of the destruction of the Indonesian island of Krakatoa in 1883 charts the birth of our modern world. He tells the story of the unrecognized genius who beat Darwin to the discovery of evolution; of Samuel Morse, his code and how rubber allowed the world to talk; of Alfred Wegener, the crack-pot German explorer and father of geology. In breathtaking detail he describes how one island and its inhabitants were blasted out of existence and how colonial…
