The best books that combine international political intrigue, romance, and family drama

When I read Poisonwood Bible, I was instantly with the characters, especially the children as they boarded the plane for the Congo dressed in layers of clothing because they could only bring a limited amount. The story of the evangelical preacher Nathan Price and his family who arrive in the Belgian Congo in 1959 completely unprepared for what they will see and experience does what great fiction can do. It dramatizes the intimate at the same time illumining the larger story and forces at play.

Barbara weaves history, politics, and family drama masterfully with the compelling narrative voices of the wife and children. The story includes the political intrigue of the Congo’s fight for independence from Belgium, murder, and CIA intrigue.

I was in Africa when I read the novel, and I remember the pilot of the airplane announcing that we were flying over where the Blue and the White Nile merged just as I was reading the climax of the book.

This was one of the first novels I read in the late sixties as I began reading African writers and studying the novel form and possibilities. Chinua Achebe tells the story of Okonkwo, a warrior in the late 1800s as he tries to resist the British political and religious powers encroaching on his home. Okonkwo is in conflict with his community as they allow the intrusion and succumb to the British.

Through his proverbs, rhythmic prose, and poignant storytelling, Chinua Achebe brings to life this story without polemics and the drier narrative of history books but instead through the passion of a man and his world. As I studied how novels could affect this empathetic magic, I looked to books like Things Fall Apart.

This story is set in Sudan among rebel leaders in a war-torn country with hardened guerillas, idealistic aid workers, evangelical young women, and a pilot responsible for bringing aid and people in and out of the area. I was quickly drawn into this complex world through the varied voices and life experiences of the characters, especially as an unlikely and tragic romance emerges.

History, politics, and the human heart are all in play. As a reader I struggled along with the characters as the narrative took on fraught moments of international intrigue and probed the hearts and emotions of the characters, suggesting that in the end, politics is an extension of the human heart in conflict, often in conflict with itself. 

This book revealed a threat new to me and to many readers in a culture where mothers had to hide their daughters in shallow graves in Guerrero, Mexico, adjacent to the drug cartels in order to avoid their abduction. They often masqueraded their daughters as boys or tried to make them ugly by chopping off their hair and blackening their teeth.

I was riveted by the story of Ladydi and her friends as they sought a larger world and future they instinctively knew existed. They supported each other but were constantly at risk and challenged by the dangerous drug culture and misogynistic environment they were born into.

Prayers for the Stolen is filled with vignettes and images that stayed with me, written in Jennifer’s poetic prose—she is also a poet. With imagination, narrative drive, and suspense, it explores the struggle and limited triumph of some of the women and reflects the intrepid imagination of its author.

For me Graham Greene is the master of the literary novel of political intrigue, the literary political thriller writer who spans the globe in his narrative reach. It is difficult to focus on only one of his novels, all have influenced, moved, and taught me, but for the purposes of this list I chose The Comedians.

When I discovered Graham Greene decades ago, I started reading his many novels and then rereading them, immersed in his worlds, trying to learn how he did what he did, but of course, what he did was unique to his perspective, experience, and talent.

The Comedians spins out its story in the dangerous landscape of Haiti under the regime of Papa Doc and the Tontons Macoute secret police. I still remember the sinister tone and compelling narrative drive of the book on my first reading as the innocent American, the sophisticated returning hotel owner, and the colonial conman arrived on the same boat.

The atmosphere is part of the story in this drama which I consider Graham Greene’s best. I have reread this book many times to revisit the soulful people of Haiti and Brown, Smith, and Jones—the comedians—who are doomed in the beautiful but tragic landscape. How prescient Greene proved to be.