10 books like A Fortune-Teller Told Me

I read King Leopold’s Ghost when I was working on conflict resolution in the Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC) for the State Department.

The painful legacy of colonization can still be felt in the DRC and across the continent. Colonizing nations didn’t invest in education, public servants, infrastructure, or any of the necessary elements to create a strong nation-state because this was never colonization’s goal.

This book clearly outlines this upsetting reality with the real-life example of Belgium’s colonization of the DRC. It is upsetting to read, but so important to understand how we got to where we are in so many countries that were colonized around the world. 

"Nearly every night I dream of the Shan State, of Mandalay, of the jungle. The landscapes of my dreams resemble real ones, yet they shift like images on silver screens…" Pascal Khoo Thwe’s mesmerizing biography stretches from his grandmother’s creation stories to civil war and a chance conversation about James Joyce which leads to a new life in Britain. A minor masterpiece.

This classic of illicit passion is so beautifully written, so mesmeric in its poetic prose and recreation of a long-gone world, it blew my mind when I first read it and changed my ideas about the possibilities of writing. The young Duras meets a Chinese man on a ferry crossing the Mekong at the start of this autobiographical novel. Their differences in age, wealth, class, race, and expectations, all play out, and it’s a novel as much about exploitation as sexual desire. It’s multi-layered, experimental, but has a real narrative tug. I love it!

This classic about a young American teacher’s adventures in post Cultural Revolution China set the standard for “travel memoir”. Salzman’s journey is captivating and unique because it is, at its core, a love story with the country, the culture, the people, and martial arts—the sort of adoration that could only manifest in youth. He gives himself entirely to the experience and, thus, takes the reader along with him. A wonderful book that lingers in the memory for decades.

Haing Ngor, is still only one of three Asian actors to win an Oscar, received in 1985 for Best Supporting Actor in his portrayal of journalist Dith Pran for the film, The Killing Fields. Remarkably Haing Ngor himself was a survivor of the genocide in Cambodia, a trained Doctor at the time before the Khmer Rouge enacted their devastating atrocities upon the country. He would only survive torture by pretending to be an uneducated taxi driver. This book will leave you in awe and inspired, as it did for me, of Haing Ngor’s life. He resettles in America, doing jobs cleaning latrines to suddenly finding himself becoming Hollywood famous overnight. He was an important voice in the advocacy of human rights, until he, unfortunately, passed away in 1996.

This true story occurred over twenty years starting in 1920. A haunted garden on a small island of the Indonesian Maluku archipelago. Here, Felicia has spent her early childhood with her grandmother, the last of an old line of Dutch spice growers. Felicia returns from Europe, after a ruinous marriage, with her baby son Willem. The plantation, overgrown and abandoned, reaches down to the blue-green waters. Felicia and her grandmother settle down again together to the ebb and flow of life surrounded by clove and nutmeg trees, and mystery. But slowly strange events happen in that Garden of Eden and a fascinating story of violence and murder unfolds in a world dominated by the psychic forces of nature, where nothing is predictable or a cliche. 

In this wondrous book on Caravaggio, the world of Naples unfolds from the inside through an electrifying reading experience. Written with grace, almost every sentence imparts an epiphany. The author challenges us to undertake soul-work, even if one is a secular reader. Reading becomes an act of empathy and passion. In the words of Wallace Stevens, potential readers will become ‘necessary angels’.

This masterpiece - believed to be the oldest full-length ‘novel’ in existence - is an extraordinary exploration of human feelings, emotions, and relations as fresh and beguiling today as when it was first written one thousand years ago. I include this as non-fiction because it is a true account of daily life at the Heian Japanese court. Lady Murasaki’s characters draw the reader into their passion and terrors in an uncannily modern way, still so alive today. Readers will find themselves immersed in a strange and distant culture whose inhabitants’ loves, rivalries, suffering and follies they can easily identify with. It is an astonishing diary disguised as a “novel”, one of the greatest classics of all time, surprisingly written by a woman. 

This book became the starting point for many publications on slavery in Southeast Asia. It is a collection of essays that not only provides us with an overview of the entire region over the past 700 years but also suggests how we can study the multifarious forms of slavery and bondage in the region in a comparative manner. Although almost forty years old it is still indispensable reading for any course on slavery in Southeast Asia, including my own course.

Norman Lewis is best known for his non-fiction works such as The Golden Land (about Burma) and A Dragon Apparent (about Vietnam). Yet he also wrote a dozen novels that show a great flair for characterisation, dialogue and plot pacing, in addition to his incisive descriptions. A Single Pilgrim tells the story of John Crane, manager of a teak logging company in North Thailand, who revels in “the voluptuousness of routine and civilized triviality”. However, his company’s leases are about to expire and the thought of an end to his Oriental idyll is more than Crane can bear.