The best novels about expat adventures

Graham Greene is considered by many to be the acknowledged master of expat tales. This is actually one of his lesser-known novels. It tells the story of Querry, an internationally famous architect suffering from terminal ennui. Life no longer holds meaning for him, or even pleasure. He takes a boat up river in Africa to its last stop, a leper village in the Congo. There, he attempts to lose himself by helping the indigenous afflicted, and in so doing begins to cure his own ills as well. But fate and the white community can’t let well enough alone. 

The setting is Shanghai, China in 1926. A mysterious city full of expatriates. One of the most beautiful is Natasha Medvedev, a former aristocrat in Russia who fled the revolution and now finds herself in the circle of a notorious drug lord. Her neighbor is murdered and suddenly she’s dealing with expats in the local police force like Caprisi, a tough Chicago cop, and a young Englishman named Fields who will fall in love with her, putting both in peril. This is a mystery, a love story, and perhaps most of all, a fresco of words illuminating a place and time that will be forever engraved in the reader’s memory.

It’s Berlin, 1949. The second world war has ended but the geopolitical intrigue hasn’t. Russia, the U. S., Great Britain, and France engage in cold war espionage as disparate citizens of the German city struggle to survive. A young Jewish writer who fled the Nazis for America is caught up in Joseph McCarthy’s communist witch hunt. For the sake of his family and to keep from being deported, he agrees to help the CIA by returning to Berlin for a secret assignment. Kidnapping, murder, and more ensue, as he’s forced to keep tabs on the woman he left behind. Then he himself becomes the hunted. After returning to a city trying to rise from the ashes, this expat may or may not wind up ever being able to leave Berlin. 

This novel brings readers up close and personal with Hong Kong. Clarke is a young Englishman doing a banking stint in the fabled city. He lives a relatively sedate existence in his corporately antiseptic neighborhood. But one day he decides to get off his beaten path and winds up having his life changed dramatically. He becomes enamored with a shantytown prostitute, embroiled in the geopolitical struggle with Mainland China, and involved in a potential swindle of international proportions. In addition to spinning an interesting tale, Craft is also able to weave in the ticking time bomb of environmental hazards that plague the area without pious preaching and totally within the confines of the story he’s telling. 

What would any list of expat literature be without this classic? The plot, if it can be called that, is basically American and British expatriates traveling from Paris to Pamplona, Spain. The heart of the novel however, is the relationships between the travelers. While the running of the bulls and bullfighting provides most of the physical drama, the psychological drama is inherent throughout. Particularly in the doomed romance between the promiscuous Lady Brett Ashley and war-wounded newspaper correspondent Jake Barnes. This is the novel most associated with the term, the lost generation. It should never get lost however, among the myriad of tales that have copied but never equaled it.