The most recommended exile books

Tanya Harmer is a noted diplomatic historian who focuses on the left-wing presidency of Salvador Allende in Chile during the early 1970s. Allende, as most people know, was violently overthrown in a CIA-backed coup d’etat in 1973. That event ushered in 15 years of brutal dictatorship and transformed Chile’s experiment with democratic socialism into the first example of neoliberalism in Latin America and the world. Harmer’s biography of Allende’s youngest daughter, Beatriz, is a brilliant, intimate portrait of a young activist torn between loyalty to her Socialist (and non-violent) father and the appeal of Cuba’s revolutionary fervor, with its emphasis on violent insurrection against the old order. It is a tragedy, much like the 1960s itself.

Patenaude focuses just on the Mexican period, from January 1937 to August 1940, of Trotsky’s exile, although the previous stages of his exile — Kazakhstan in 1928, then Turkey for four years, France for another three, followed by interment in Norway — are dealt with in a series of flashbacks. In fact, the whole book is written as if Trotsky in Coyoacán were recalling his past, from his prosperous farmer’s boyhood to his underground militancy, his Civil War military brilliance, and his blundering incompetence as a Bolshevik power-broker. The danger that Patenaude flirts with is to let Trotsky’s charisma and undoubted genius charm him into overlooking his subject’s monstrous indifference to the suffering and deaths of others, sometimes even of those close to him, as well as his overweening conceit.

By dealing with the last phase of the tragedy, nemesis, Trotsky is seen to pay in fear, resignation, failure, and… show more.

I studied with Jane Kamensky while I was working on a MA in American History. Little did I know that she had a wicked historical character hidden inside. Learning that inspired me to write good history inside a realistic and sexy historical plot. This is a story of hidden identity and unexpected love. 

The characters are a portrait artist and his apprentice. The apprentice appears to be a young man, as only young men would take such a position in 18th-century Boston, and the artist is surprised at his yearning for him. 

On the planet of January, one side is in permanent daylight and the other side is permanent night, with people managing to live on a strip of moderate light between the two extremes.

Sophie, a shy teenager, breaks the rules and is sent to the dark side to die, only she survives.  While she is in the dark, she meets telepathic creatures who, despite their terrifying visage, are kind-hearted—a shock to someone raised in a community who believes the creatures (and others) are awful because of the way they look.

Together with her best friend, Bianca, they decide to save the human race, against all dark odds, including secret outlaws. 

This TV series would showcase all the strange glory of Anders, along with the emotional depth that will have us rooting for our young heroines who literally go between the darkness and the light. Hey, J.J. Abrams, you listenin’?

Cristina Garcia has become the definitive chronicler of both Cuba and Cuban exiles. King of Cuba tells the story of two men: El Comandante (also called the despot, the tyrant, or El Líder—clearly this is Fidel) and a Miami exile, Goyo Herrera, who is as old and infirm as Castro himself. Garcia’s portrait of the desperation and ignominies these two old guys suffer, and of their hopeless attempts to cleave to past glories, transcends Cuban history and brings us two men I found cantankerous and self-inflating, but irresistible.

I loved a number of things about Pennyblade. For starters, the main character’s (Kyra’s) race, the Commrach, who are like elves, are ruthless libertines and hedonists. 

The Pennyblade world is a fascinating and grim place where same sex relationships are punishable by death and the action, which is visceral and very explicit, just keeps coming.

I really liked that this is a novel about prejudices, it appealed to me as someone from an ethnic minority group who grew up in London in the late 1970s / early 80s and experienced racism.

Fortunately, Pennyblade has plenty of humour which makes the grimdark nature of the book more palatable.

This book made me a traveling companion of Lenin. Together with him we go on an incredible journey: from Switzerland across Europe via Finland to Petrograd. This journey changed the world, because it brought Lenin back to Russia, Russia the October coup, and the century of a Soviet regime. Merridale depicts the unique moment of the dawn of a new age as banally and grotesquely as if she had really been there. The best part: just before he left, Lenin called the American embassy because he would have preferred to be transported by the Americans rather than the Germans. But it was Easter Sunday and no one could be reached at the embassy, and so the story took its course....

I love the writing in this collection of short fiction and memoir.

It takes us traveling along the life journeys of migrants from many cultures to many destinations, for a variety of causes and motivations. I deeply empathize with and appreciate the migrants’ well of complex emotions of loss, torment, and fear, while maintaining a layer of hope that kept these people going.

Having lived in various corners of the world has taught me to be respectful and open to people who are different from me culturally and ethnically. I believe the world will be a more peaceful place when we gain a better understanding of people outside of our own experience

This book serves such a purpose of educating us in this aspect.

I knew the names of the nine already: the scientists Leo Szilard, Edward Teller, John von Neumann, and Eugene Wigner; the photographers Robert Capa and André Kertesz; the film-makers Michael Curtiz (Casablanca) and Alexander Korda (The third man); the writer Arthur Koestler (Darkness at Noon).

I did not know that they were all Hungarians who fled to Britain and America because they were all Jews (albeit lapsed).

Isolated by both language and ethnicity, they learned early that their choice was “innovate or die” – and their innovations would shape the world in which we live.

Marton, herself a Hungarian exile, uses her language skills and her insights to provide a riveting collective biography of the nine and their breathtaking journey from Budapest to the Anglo-Saxon World. Hitler shook the tree, and we picked up the fruit.

I wish I’d read this book before visiting Lebanese friends there.

The story of a man who returns to his native Lebanon years after the civil war, it portrays the complexity of their society through the impact the war had on a group of university friends.

It gives a wonderfully accurate feel of the sights, sounds, and tastes of the country, and an astute description of the psyche of the Lebanese people from the point of view of a returnee.