100 books like The Great Escape

An amazing imaginative blend of nonfiction and reportage, The Postcard sets a mystery in motion.

In 2003, with the rest of the Christmas holiday mail, a postcard arrives at the Paris home of Annie Berest. The card is blank but for the names of her maternal great-grandparents and their two children – all killed at Auschwitz. 

Fifteen years later, Annie and her chain-smoking mother embark on a journey: discovering the fates of the Rabinovitch family who flee the Russian revolution for Latvia, Palestine, and Paris. Annie and her mother discover secrets that shatter the present; mother and daughter question the past and accept a new reality in their own distinct ways. 

I loved both the mystery revealed and the unshakable resolve of these women, who spent years finding the truth.

Being Palestinian is a collection of essays by Palestinians reflecting on their identity and experiences living outside of their homeland.

I’ve chosen it here because few works are so effective in conveying both the commonalities and the diversity of the Palestinian refugee experience. The contributors range from Ivy League professors to activists campaigning for justice in the Middle East today; they include figures who grew up in refugee camps and those raised in some of the wealthiest cities in the world.

In many ways Being Palestinian is the perfect introduction to learning more about the subject, because it is accessible and highly personal without being simplistic. 

I studied with Jane Kamensky while I was working on a MA in American History. Little did I know that she had a wicked historical character hidden inside. Learning that inspired me to write good history inside a realistic and sexy historical plot. This is a story of hidden identity and unexpected love. 

The characters are a portrait artist and his apprentice. The apprentice appears to be a young man, as only young men would take such a position in 18th-century Boston, and the artist is surprised at his yearning for him. 

Cristina Garcia has become the definitive chronicler of both Cuba and Cuban exiles. King of Cuba tells the story of two men: El Comandante (also called the despot, the tyrant, or El Líder—clearly this is Fidel) and a Miami exile, Goyo Herrera, who is as old and infirm as Castro himself. Garcia’s portrait of the desperation and ignominies these two old guys suffer, and of their hopeless attempts to cleave to past glories, transcends Cuban history and brings us two men I found cantankerous and self-inflating, but irresistible.

I love the movie and musical adaptations of Anastasia, so it’s no wonder I love this magical family saga from Nadine Brandes. Brandes effortlessly weaves magic into the tale we thought we knew about Anastasia Romanov. And yes, there is both magic and romance.

With the leader of the Bolshevik army after her, Anastasia “Nastya” Romanov is given a mission to smuggle an ancient spell that might be her family’s only salvation into exile in Siberia. Nastya has barely dabbled in magic, but her only chances of saving herself and her family are to release the spell and deal with the consequences, or to enlist help from Zash, the handsome Bolshevik soldier who seems to be different. This story does contain violence, but overall is another read I both love and could recommend to anyone.

I wish I’d read this book before visiting Lebanese friends there.

The story of a man who returns to his native Lebanon years after the civil war, it portrays the complexity of their society through the impact the war had on a group of university friends.

It gives a wonderfully accurate feel of the sights, sounds, and tastes of the country, and an astute description of the psyche of the Lebanese people from the point of view of a returnee.

If you only ever read one Palestinian memoirist, it should be Fawaz Turki.

He published three book-length memoirs, all excellent, but this is his most comprehensive autobiography and as such the must-read of all his works. It covers his early years in Haifa, his family’s displacement to Lebanon in 1948, and his subsequent adolescence in Burj al-Barajneh refugee camp; as well as his later studies and career in the US.

Exile’s Return is organized around his first return visit to Palestine in the 1990s, where he comes face-to-face with the realities of the Israeli occupation and continuing Palestinian dispossession. There are now many brilliant memoirs and autobiographies by Palestinian refugees, but Turki remains the memoirist par excellence in this genre. 

This book narrowly focuses on one of the most famous moments that putatively determined the course of Russian and world history in the 20th century—Lenin’s journey from exile in Zurich, through enemy territory, to Petrograd in April 1917. The journey acquired infamy because it was facilitated by the German Army and government.

Leaving to one side consideration of counterfactuals or “what-ifs,” I loved Merridale’s book because it manages to capture so many worlds—the world of Russian revolutionary politics and exile, of espionage during WWI, and the early weeks of the Revolution of 1917—all while maintaining a focus on the human level of a train journey.

The Roman poet Ovid was one of the most popular writers of his day, but the defining tragedy of his life – his lifelong exile from Rome at the very height of his powers – remains as mysterious today as it was in his own time. In The Love-Artist, Jane Alison provides that tragedy with a back story, when Ovid, on holiday on the shores of the Black Sea, meets and is enchanted by the witch-like Xenia and persuades her to return with him to Rome, with dire consequences. But it’s the book’s dream-like atmosphere – the sense that we are seeing the world through the eyes of a great poet with one foot in the ambitious world of empire and the other in an unstable netherworld of imagination and mythology – that will remain with the reader.

It’s a short book with 5 essays on displacement, loss, and ways to find a sense of belonging. The stories are personal; perhaps because of that, they touch on something that I think many of us carry in our hearts–a need to reflect on what it means to lose and rebuild a home.

The essays evoke many different themes–the power of movement and starting anew, but also a sense of alienation that even the voluntary wanderers may never lose. We carry the cultures that shaped us within us; as Eva Hoffman, one of the authors, says, “We are nothing more than the encoded memory of our heritage.” And feeling, even if a blessing, sometimes deepens our sense of alienation.

For many of the authors, it’s the language and writing that make sense of the discomfort and find a ‘home.’ It’s a small but beautifully written book and one that inspires… show more.