100 books like Let's Tell This Story Properly

While doing research into Ruby’s backstory, I discovered this book. It reads like a novel but tells the stories of four real women who married American servicemen and left war-torn Britain for the more lavish lifestyle available to Americans in the 50s. But the arduous journey by sea, the intrusive and humiliating health examinations waiting on the other side, and the strangeness of a strange land provided challenges and difficulties. Each woman’s experience is different, but each is determined not to give up on their dream. An epilogue tells of how their marriages and lives worked out. Fascinating. 

In peerless prose, Winder proffers a simple thesis: that Britain is a nation of immigrants.

Despite our German royal family, and all those businesses created by Jews and Indians, we have long been a nation in denial about the immigrant blood flowing through our veins. To such a degree in the Windrush Scandal we have seen actual British citizens being threatened with deportation to countries they barely know.

This important book also challenges the dominant political narrative of my lifetime: that immigrants come here uninvited to take advantage of British hospitality.

If there was one book I could wish onto the National Curriculum, it would be this.

Jennifer Potter’s The Jamestown Brides: The Story of England’s Maids for Virginia is a fascinating account of 56 young English women who left their homes to join the struggling Jamestown Colony in 1621. Though Jamestown is one of the most well-researched historical settlements in the New World, this book offers important new insights into the first permanent English settlement in the Americas and into daily life for women in 17th-century England.

Natasha Pulley’s grounded historical novel marries detailed research of late-19th-century England and Japan with something stranger and more fantastical – but these elements together heighten the narrative. Clerk Thaniel Steepleton’s relationship with clockwork-maker Keita Mori centers the story – they change one another in ways that even fate can’t completely anticipate. There’s a lot of tenderness between them, and it captures the way that falling in love can feel like meeting someone again, instead of for the first time. Also, there’s a pet clockwork octopus. That’s vital. 

This memoir is one of the most compelling accounts of confronting trauma that I’ve ever read. In the case of the author, the traumas are multiple: fear of deportation due to her “illegal” status; years of sexual abuse by her paternal grandfather; and later in life, the discovery that she carries a gene that leaves her susceptible to breast and ovarian cancer. I was moved as I learned how Talusan found the words—both as a writer and as a daughter, a sister, an aunt, a romantic partner, and a citizen—to speak of these difficulties. Her writing about this journey is both spare and powerful, and it bears re-reading and deep reflection. Whenever I return to this book, I find inspiration.

Rosena Fung pairs the tough topics of mental health and anxiety with delightfully whimsical and colorful illustrations. Livy is trying to fit in at a new school while navigating the pressure she feels as a child of Chinese immigrants. Viola is Livy’s anxiety personified. I live with my own version of Viola, so I found the story especially relatable. As Livy learns to deal with Viola, we also learn some great tips on dealing with our own anxieties.

Early on David Levinsky, the immigrant Yeshiva boy, the budding intellectual, learns that America is the land of winners and losers, and if he is to be the former, he has to abandon his old self like the ear-locks he left on a barbershop floor in his first days in this new world. To be an alrightnik he must learn to dance the American dance. And dance he does, but his fabulous success as a garment manufacturer has left something unresolved in himself. His search for love at a Jewish resort in the Poconos is a chapter better than anything Philip Roth ever wrote.

This gem of narrative non-fiction tells the improbable story of an utterly impoverished immigrant woman who married into one of the wealthiest “establishment” families of New York City and became one of the nation’s most prominent radical activists in the early 1900s. The unlikely marriage of Rose Pastor and Graham Stokes made many national headlines -- and attracted attention from federal agents. Hochschild brings this odd couple to life in all their ups and downs, introduces us to their circle of famous fellow activists, and illuminates their fights for social justice, struggles that remain relevant to this day.

A non-fiction picture book that reads like poetry, this gorgeous book describes the author’s own journey from Mexico to the U.S. with her young son. The illustrations are as poetic as the language, which infuses English with Spanish words, simple words with more challenging ones, and words of pain with those of pride, resilience, and creativity. The book explores not only the refugee’s journey, but also, and most especially, the challenges and small victories of integrating and trying to make a new life in a new land. I also love the central role that books, words, and libraries play in paving the way toward this new life. Language is power, but it is also magic.

I reviewed this novel, and I really loved it. Many folks think they know what migrants experience from the news, but this novel tells the story with a different spin: an Egyptian Bedouin who tries to get to Italy via Libya.

Living in Libya is as absurd as it is dangerous. The narrator is a hassler, but you still feel sorry for him when he almost gets killed by a customer for using cheap spray paint in a body shop in Libya. Besides the body shop, he works as a bootlegger, cook, and a concrete-block maker before he makes a harrowing crossing on a flimsy boat across the Mediterranean.

Once in Italy, he gets a few jobs in construction but then falls into a gang of drug dealers. He is Egyptian but pretends to be an Iraqi named “Baffo.” One crazy thing happens after another until he needs to make… show more.