100 books like Passionate Nomad

Just as I turned to Trevor Noah’s memoir for answers about apartheid while in South Africa, I devoured this book while in China to more deeply understand how the country was shaped by Communism.

The author’s personal history is frightening and raw—at times hard to read—but it is important to understand a few layers deeper than what the news can offer or, in my case, what tourists get served on visits to China. It’s a wrenching story that has stayed with me for years. 

Award-winning novelist Molteno takes us on a mesmerising journey of discovery, tracing the origins of her fictional worlds. From the mountains of Tajikistan to remote parts of Africa, in small English towns or huge Indian literary festivals, she engages with people she meets and is inspired by them. Through these vignettes she threads reflections on the creative process—why we write, and what fiction does for us. Through Marion’s clear and involving writing, we encounter not one but several truly remarkable women, as she weaves the emergence of her writing life into her own much-travelled and absorbing story.

Helen Marquard’s search for a piano teacher led her to Hedwig Stein who had fled Berlin in 1933 with her Russian Jewish husband, both concert pianists, to start again from nothing. A large, vivid woman, Hedwig freely shared her ideas on music, art, philosophy, literature. Later, Marquard discovered Hedwig had written a diary, and determined to bring us this story that would otherwise have been lost, enabling Hedwig and her husband to take their rightful place in the roll-call of émigrés who have contributed so much to UK cultural life. Hedwig put her husband’s career and her children first, yet she never gave up on her own career, which continued its own quiet flourishing after her husband’s sudden death. 

Christabel Bielenberg was Anglo-Irish, her husband was a German lawyer, and they were close friends of Adam von Trott and other German oppositionists. Christabel was in Germany throughout the war, and her book gives an absorbing account of daily life in the Third Reich.

It was a dangerous world. How do you stop your child from telling the Nazi gardener that his mother listens to the radio with her ear pressed against the set? What do you do when a friend says something imprudent? How do you react when a homeless Jewish couple asks for shelter? When your husband is in prison, what do you say to the Gestapo officer in charge of his case?

I was thoroughly drawn in.  Christabel felt like someone I could have been friends with. 

In 1932, Peter Fleming – literary editor of The Times and elder brother of James Bond creator Ian – set off on an expedition to find the explorer Colonel Percy Fawcett who went missing in the Brazilian jungle a few years earlier while searching for the fabled Lost City of Z. The expedition itself was a fiasco, poorly planned, ill-equipped and with the party members falling out bitterly, then racing each other back to civilisation to try to be the first to get their version of events before the public eye. At times it reads like some darkly comic fiction from the pen of Evelyn Waugh. The tale is entertainingly told, with wit and flair by Fleming whose account is generally regarded as the authoritative version of events. If you enjoy this one try also Fleming’s News From Tartar: A Journey From Peking to Kashmir (1936) If you want to… show more.

This is the classic introduction to Franklin’s 1845 expedition. On Beechey Island, Owen Beattie conducted autopsies on the bodies of the first three sailors to die. John Geiger tells the story so clearly that he opens the door to interpretations at odds with his own.

At the northern tip of King William Island, believing he had no option, Franklin turned southwest into “the continuously replenished pack-ice.” He sailed into a lethal trap, one “made all the more cruel with the realization that the route along the eastern coast of the island regularly clears during the summer.” Here, I realized that Geiger was referencing the strait John Rae discovered in 1854, which, fifty years later, Roald Amundsen would vindicate as the final link in the first navigable Northwest Passage. 

Including this book is a bit of a cheat, since it’s not actually about space. But the spirit of Ernest Shackleton and the Endurance crew’s journey to the Antarctic has permeated space exploration – the Shackleton crater at the lunar south pole is an intriguing potential landing site for future astronauts. While no one in “Shackleton” leaves the planet, the story this book tells about humanity’s passion for exploration, the risks of the unknown, and about endurance in the face of adversity is well worth reading for those passionate about our outward odyssey.

South is a truly epic account of endurance and survival in the Antarctic. It describes how Shackleton and his crew stayed alive after their ship was crushed in pack ice, and how he and a handful of men crossed the wild Southern Ocean in mid-winter in a 20-foot sailing boat to bring help to those left behind. Not only did they have to cope with hurricanes and mountainous seas in freezing temperatures, but they also had to make an accurate landfall on a small island more than 800 miles away.

Even then their troubles weren't over, as they had to climb a range of high, unexplored mountains to reach help on the other side. As a sailor myself I'm awe-struck by Shackleton's voyage, and the extraordinary navigational feats it involved. If I ever think I'm having a bad day, I remember the terrible hardships that he and his men faced… show more.

This is another story that has been parodied out of any semblance of the magnificently foolish endeavor that ended up becoming almost noble. While today the idea would be risible, this book contextualizes the time and culture that created a national hero of the Reverend Livingstone, a clergyman traveling to “darkest Africa” to spread the Good Word to the savages and why finding him became a Western obsession. The insights into the day-to-day life and difficulties of the many and varied characters, tribes, and nations are balanced nicely against the struggles of the main characters to find their way through Africa and life itself.

For me, this book was an adventure. I felt as if I was on an expedition to Virginia with Harriot teaching me astronomy and navigation. There I was, infatuated with rainbows and imagining myself scrutinizing scientific wonders of elliptical planetary motion, atomic theory of matter, and how cannonballs could be stacked to fill space. I found myself with Harriot back in 1591 searching for a sphere-packing formula, an old problem questioning the most stable way to stack cannonballs on ships. Thomas Harriot is a fast-moving biography packed with the world- and mind-changing curiosities.