Fans pick 100 books like Children of Sugarcane

One of the best examples of “history from below” I’ve read.

It tells the well-known story of David Livingstone’s last journey–how after he died in tropical Africa, his servants marched his body across the continent to the port of Dar es Salaam, so that it could be shipped back to England and buried there with appropriate pomp and reverence. This forms the framework for an utterly original novel that presents this epic trek from the perspective of two of Livingstone’s slave servants: his feisty Muslim cook, Halima, who brings her gossipy sardonic perspective to the enterprise, and his devout and pompous body servant Joseph, a Christian determined to do right by his master.

This work sparkles with energy and humor, as well as presenting a fresh perspective on a well-trodden path.

I’m in awe of this author’s trilogy of award-winning novels about Zimbabwe’s colonial history. Haunting and hypnotic, they blend magical realism, epic history, and social satire. Although they form a series with some recurring characters, all are standalone reads.

Her first, The Theory of Flight, won South Africa’s biggest literary award. The second, recommended here, is a sustained act of grace in which the author climbs into the skin of an alpha white male Rhodesian, Emil Coetzee, whose ambitions lead to his running the doomed colony’s sinister secret police. It humanizes him without excusing him in an imaginative tour de force that asks a burning question: why do we sometimes choose evil?

If you love this book (you will), Ndlovu’s third novel, The Quality of Mercy, brings the series to a redemptive close.

For every dreaming rebel. This novel weaves together two tumultuous periods in history–the last decades of slavery and the start of grand apartheid–and the stories of two women bursting the seams of their existence.

In 1794, Katrijn van der Caab, a freed slave, finds herself on a farm where the master’s obsession with experimentation reflects a growing fixation with racial classification. In 1961, Sister Vergilius, a nun in rural South Africa, wants to escape the confines of her order even as the political and social strictures of the time hem her in still further.

This complex book demands commitment from the reader, but it is so beautifully written that phrases still linger in my mind. And the main characters were so compelling that I tracked down the author to ask her their fates!

This is the novel that brought South Africa’s Lauren Beukes international plaudits, and which was serialised for Apple TV. 

But she writes speculative fiction, and this has an especially zany hook–a time-travelling serial killer–so why is this a historical novel? Beukes did deep research into several key periods in US history, bringing the “shining girls” of those eras alive in ways that are breathtakingly imaginative and entertaining.

In particular, her accounts of the black women who worked in shipyards during World War 2–and the middle-class women who operated “underground railways” for abortion in the 1960s–are heartbreakingly relevant in current times. Beukes explicitly states that she wanted women–so often the passive corpses or suffering victims in crime fiction–and their histories to be front and center of this novel.

Sometimes fiction speaks truer than facts. This adventure set in India in the 1970s brings to life what it means to balance yogic ideas with a Western mindset. It's a mixture of hippie idealism, academic disillusionment, and searches for meaning as things fall apart. Beautifully written and wise, it evokes the common ground between yoga and Buddhism—particularly on causes of suffering and how to transcend it. 

This novel oscillates between pre-independent times in India and the present. It is about Gowri, Lucy, and James, the terrible sacrifices they make, and how they affect their families in the present. I love Renita D’Silva’s descriptions of Indian culture and food, and the powerful emotions her stories trigger in me. A Daughter’s Courage is my favorite book of hers. The sacrifices and dialogues wrenched my heart, the revelation of family secrets astonished me, and the skilled narrative bound me from start to finish. A masterpiece.

It takes a lot from a lot of different stakeholders for a democracy to thrive. It requires unbiased institutions that ensure a level playing field for all political parties and candidates, and one of the primary institutions that keep democracy alive is the media. A vote is only an informed decision when voters have accurate information to base their decision on. The responsibility of making this information accessible rests with a nation’s media. For this reason, it is also one of the first institutions that is targeted by any politician wanting to consolidate power. This book, written by one of India’s leading journalists details how media institutions can be transformed from sources of accurate information to drivers of fear, and how that damages democracy. 

A dark story about a corrupt man, An Obedient Father unfolds in a closely observed world. From page one: “It was morning. The sky was blue from edge to edge. I had just bathed and was on my balcony hanging a towel over the ledge. The May heat was so intense that as soon as I stepped out of the flat, worms of sweat appeared on my bald scalp.” The close sensory detail makes a dark story shockingly intimate.

There is no better book for understanding India’s family businesses in a broader social and political context than this sprawling, powerful novel. Preti Taneja retells and reworks Shakespeare’s King Lear as three sisters (and an illegitimate son) fight over the inheritance of a massive company that makes everything from textiles to cars (echoes of the Tatas, Birlas, and Ambanis, but also of the East India Company as the subcontinent’s original corporate sovereign). Taneja touches on all the big issues, including gender, caste, climate, and Kashmir, without ever being preachy. It is a long and sometimes challenging read, but always rewarding. I may be biased given the subject matter, but this is the century’s Great Indian Novel—a worthy successor to the likes of Midnight’s Children, A Suitable Boy, and Sacred Games. 

Published 80 years ago and based on the author’s experiences hunting man-eating tigers and leopards in northern India, I read this book repeatedly. Well and sensitively written, it is not a book of boasting, hunting, and bravado but a nuanced account of efforts to protect local people from the ravages of seriously dangerous wildlife.

Corbett, part of the British occupation machinery in India, projects a love of the people of northern India and the wildlife. He is deeply committed to both and laments the need to kill tigers but accepts that protecting ordinary people is the priority.

He provides a wealth of wildlife information and always explains how and why a tiger became a man-eater–often the result of a bad encounter with a porcupine, the breaking of canines in older tigers, or injuries received hunting or being hunted.