Here are 78 books that Out of Time fans have personally recommended if you like
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I have been writing about imprisonment and other penal matters for several decades. Besides teaching, research, and publications, my career has involved the inspection of prisons in the US, UK, and Europe for several governments and for litigation across a range of issues. These are dark places, without a doubt, but seeing the lives that are lived within the walls by staff and prisoners alike has always captured and stimulated my interest and reinforced my belief in the enormous durability and adaptability of the human spirit. I have tried to communicate this in my writing and speaking.
James Blake’s book takes us from jail to long-term state imprisonment. In custody for thirteen years over a two-decade period, Blake sent perceptive, frank, witty, and sometimes heartbreaking letters out to friends, chronicling his experiences and reflections.
I have been writing about imprisonment and other penal matters for several decades. Besides teaching, research, and publications, my career has involved the inspection of prisons in the US, UK, and Europe for several governments and for litigation across a range of issues. These are dark places, without a doubt, but seeing the lives that are lived within the walls by staff and prisoners alike has always captured and stimulated my interest and reinforced my belief in the enormous durability and adaptability of the human spirit. I have tried to communicate this in my writing and speaking.
Victor Serge was too revolutionary for Bolshevik Russia and fled to France in the early part of the twentieth century. His lightly fictionalized account of French penitentiary life will not fail to make an impression–a pitiless and largely dispassionate picture of what was intended to be one of Europe’s most relentless penal experiences.
Startlingly human and unflinchingly honest, this thinly veiled fictionalized firsthand account of talented political writer Victor Serge’s time in prison is an important addition to the canon of prison writing as well as an unfiltered view of humanity in the early 20th century. Rejecting the opportunity to present political propaganda, Serge’s portrayal of imprisonment is instead an insightful and emotionally wrought tale of repression. The depraving brutality that Serge experienced behind bars is at once a mirror of a society at war and a deeply personal question of purpose. Originally published in 1930 and translated from the French by Richard…
I have been writing about imprisonment and other penal matters for several decades. Besides teaching, research, and publications, my career has involved the inspection of prisons in the US, UK, and Europe for several governments and for litigation across a range of issues. These are dark places, without a doubt, but seeing the lives that are lived within the walls by staff and prisoners alike has always captured and stimulated my interest and reinforced my belief in the enormous durability and adaptability of the human spirit. I have tried to communicate this in my writing and speaking.
Bar fights are among the more banal of crimes, but when murder results the criminal law justly responds with severity.
Under the pseudonym of "Zeno" the author (Gerald La Marque) gives an account of almost a decade in English prisons as an "ordinary" lifer. There is no self-pity, instead an acknowledgement of the justness of his punishment and a custodial life lived with stoical acceptance.
I have been writing about imprisonment and other penal matters for several decades. Besides teaching, research, and publications, my career has involved the inspection of prisons in the US, UK, and Europe for several governments and for litigation across a range of issues. These are dark places, without a doubt, but seeing the lives that are lived within the walls by staff and prisoners alike has always captured and stimulated my interest and reinforced my belief in the enormous durability and adaptability of the human spirit. I have tried to communicate this in my writing and speaking.
Academic books about imprisonment proliferate and some have the irritating characteristic of running before the latest intellectual breezes. This book by Norval Morris is an unquestionable stand-alone and is an honest and engaging read.
Morris was one of a small number of authors in this field who had much practical experience of penal management, who shied away from easy answers, and who always wrote engagingly and with humane values. His output was as considerable as it was distinguished.
It remains relevant and, oddly for such a topic, uplifting.
When I drafted the pieces which eventually comprised Melancholic Parables, I had no plan. Only upon arranging them into a collection did I discover that, surprisingly, they shared emotional moods and thematic elements. In other words, I had stumbled into a linked collection. Writing a single big story is no small feat, as is writing small stories which each intrigue and delight in their own right—but to create and arrange multiple small stories so that they aggregate into a big story, one greater than the sum of its parts (in ways sometimes counterintuitive, sometimes virtuosic) is a special storytelling skill which I think these five authors’ work exemplifies.
I haven’t read a better book in a long time than YZ Chin’s collection of linked stories.
At the centre of a panoply of characters and ways of thinking, we find Isabella Sin, a woman who might be taken as a personification of Malaysia, a troubled young nation searching for an identity as it struggles against its own history.
Not unlike what is required of her country, what is ultimately required of Isabella is to “become who she was.” YZ Chin’s voice offers the sort of nuance and depth that I feel characterises the best in literary fiction.
“A welcome read in American contemporary literature. Though I Get Home is an intimate and complex look into Malaysian culture and politics, and a reminder of the importance of art in the struggle for social justice.” ―Ana Castillo, author of So Far from God and prize judge
In these stories, characters navigate fate via deft sleights of hand: A grandfather gambles on the monsoon rains; a consort finds herself a new assignment; a religious man struggles to keep his demons at bay. Central to the book is Isabella Sin, a small-town girl―and frustrated writer―transformed into a prisoner of conscience in…
I am a presidential historian with a particular focus on their deaths, public mourning, and the places we commemorate them. My interest in what I like to think of as “the final chapter of each president’s amazing story” grew out of frustration with traditional biographies that end abruptly when the president dies, and I believe my books pick up where others leave off. More than a moribund topic, I find the presidential deaths and public reaction to be both fascinating and critical to understanding their humanity and place in history at the time of their passing and how each of their legacies evolved over time.
April 1865 was one of the most consequential months in American history. After the fall of Richmond and Lee’s surrender to effectively end the Civil War, Abraham Lincoln was tragically assassinated while Jefferson Davis attempted to escape to keep the war effort alive.
I was riveted by the dual history of the American and Confederate presidents, as Swanson’s storytelling matches the drama, tension, and uncertainty of the moment.
On the morning of April 2, 1865, Jefferson Davis, president of the Confederacy, received the telegram from General Robert E. Lee. There is no more time - the Yankees are coming. That evening, shortly before midnight, Davis boarded a train from Richmond and fled the capital. But in two weeks time, John Wilkes Booth would assassinate the president, and the nation was convinced that Davis was the mastermind of the crime. No longer merely a traitor, Davis became a murderer, a wanted man with a one-hundred-thousand-dollar bounty on his head. Over the course of several weeks, Union cavalry led an…
I am a French writer of Spanish origin. My two grandfathers shared history with Spain’s darkest hours. My maternal grandfather was born in Barcelona and he was a teenager at the time of the war; just like Salvayre’s parents, he had to flee Spain as the bombs were hitting his city. My paternal grandfather, who was in his twenties at the time of the civil war, decided to fight for the “International Brigades” to defend Spain’s freedom. It is to honour their memory and one of the millions of men and women who suffered from those almost four decades of dictatorship that I wrote Blood Song, a historical thriller, the third installment in the Roy and Castell series.
This is the only book in my selection that can just be found in Spanish language. But it’s a fantastic book as Juana Doña wrote a novel about the eighteen years she spent as a political prisoner in the Franco jails. From the night and the fog is a testimony about the resistance that women organised from their prison cells, the fight they led with incredible spirit and resilience despite the inhuman conditions they were living in, mots of them having lost so many loved ones in the war. The horrifying truth shines in a painful but necessary way.
As a writer and journalist in Iran, I knew many activists and journalists who spent time in solitary confinement. I noticed that this part of their prison experience was the hardest one for them to put to words, even those keen on sharing their experiences have a much easier time talking about the interrogation room but remain strangely reticent about the solitary cell. When I set out to write a novel about a bus driver who ends up in jail, I decided to dedicate several chapters of the book to his time in solitary confinement. That research sent me down the rabbit hole of interviewing former prisoners and reading widely about the solitary experience.
Those interested in the never-ending drama of US-Iranian relations since 1979 probably remember the affair of the mountain climbers. Three Americans, hiking the mountains in Iraqi Kurdistan, mistakenly crossed the border into Iran. They were taken to Evin prison in Tehran, where they were imprisoned for two years, a good part of which they spent in solitary confinement as Iran and the US used them as pawns in their complicated dance of diplomacy. After their release, the hikers wrote a memoir together. This is one of the best accounts of solitary confinement in Evin available in English.
Hikers held captive in Tehran tell their story in “a moving memoir by three individuals who found the strength to survive” (San Jose Mercury News).
During the summer of 2009, Shane Bauer, Joshua Fattal, and Sarah Shourd were hiking in the mountains of Iraqi Kurdistan when they unknowingly crossed into Iran and were captured by border patrol. Wrongly accused of espionage, the three Americans ultimately found themselves in Tehran’s infamous Evin Prison, where activists and protesters from the Green Movement were still being confined and tortured. Cut off from the world and trapped in a legal black hole, the three…
I am a Scottish writer who enjoys travelling and meeting people of different cultures and beliefs. I have always been a fan of adventure stories, particularly those with a strange or supernatural bent. My travels to The Ivory Coast and North Africa, hearing accounts of various witch stories, and encountering strange events and practices firsthand inspired me to write The Witch’s List Trilogy: the first two books published and the third in progress.
This is an interesting and moving account by Nigerian writer, Ken Saro-Wiwa, which describes his non-violent struggle against big petroleum companies and the military dictatorship who were involved in human rights and environmental abuses of the Ogoni people. He describes his detention and the events leading up to it in harrowing detail and gives lucid convincing arguments against his accusers. A truly inspirational message, especially given that much of it was written in secret in prison, and knowing that he was unjustly tried and executed in 1995, shortly after the book’s publication.
I have been a student of the history of ideas, with a particular interest in political thought, for over forty years. I have read countless books, both ancient and modern, and in several languages, that explore themes related to public life. I am a dedicated citizen of a contemporary liberal democracy, but today, I live in fear of a growing backlash against liberal democracy. The risk of democratic backsliding in the contemporary US is real as citizens become more disillusioned with politics. In other liberal democracies, some party leaders are adopting populist rhetoric to enhance their electoral appeal, but in doing so, they are undermining some of the established norms of public life.
Ben Jelloun was a political prisoner in Morocco for several years and was imprisoned in a dark cell in the ground in unimaginably horrific conditions. This book demonstrates politics gone wrong and the extent of the brutality that can be ravaged on other human beings in a system lacking justice or any sense of human rights and dignity.
Despite the intensely inhumane conditions of imprisonment, Ben Jelloun carries us along his journey and offers his readers an inspiring account of endurance and courage.
This book needs to be read by people in an era of democratic backsliding because it helps to demonstrate some of the things that are at stake when electorates become tempted by authoritarian leaders.
An immediate and critically acclaimed bestseller in France and winner of the 2004 International IMPAC Dublin Literary Award, This Blinding Absence of Light is the latest work by Tahar Ben Jelloun, the first North African winner of the Prix Goncourt and winner of the 1994 Prix Mahgreb. Ben Jelloun crafts a horrific real-life narrative into fiction to tell the appalling story of the desert concentration camps in which King Hassan II of Morocco held his political enemies under the most harrowing conditions. Not until September 1991, under international pressure, was Hassan's regime forced to open these desert hellholes. A handful…
