100 books like The Hospital

I once worked on a film shoot at the infamous Friern Barnet Asylum in London, an imposing building that boasts the longest corridor in Europe at over a third of a mile long. It was my job to lock up after filming was over each night, and to do so, I had to walk the long corridor with just a flashlight for company… and the ghosts rumoured to haunt the building! I have never forgotten the feeling of dread and despair in that place, and my heart went out to the patients who were isolated in the creepy basement wards. Barbara Taylor gives an inside perspective on this fearsome institution in her book, which is both an achingly honest account of mental illness and addiction, and a critique of community care.

I read this book during my school days, which we are often told are the best of our lives. I enjoyed school, overall, but did encounter more than my fair share of bullies and vindictive teachers. Reading in the school library became my favourite escape, and I devoured this book in one lengthy sitting. I was fascinated and appalled in equal measure by secret society The Vandals, who made the kids at my school look like rank amateurs! After reading this book, the reader is left shell-shocked and wondering if it’s better to comply or to ‘disturb the universe’ as Cormier provocatively puts it.

This book stayed with me long after I made it my Summer read that year during a blisteringly hot July. It details a darkly destructive love affair between Stella, the wife of a man running an asylum, and Edgar, a murderer who is incarcerated there. McGrath’s vivid descriptions of the asylum and its grounds reframe the gothic tradition through an unflinching, contemporary lens. The doomed obsession of the novel’s star cross’d lovers reminds us that our own hearts can become institutionalised if we do not balance passion with compromise.

A man called “Pepper,” who may or may not suffer from mental illness, ends up in a locked mental ward in Queens, New York, where the entire novel takes place.

A beast, who the patients believe is the devil, comes out at night, assaulting and sometimes killing patients. Patient deaths are chalked up to suicide. The engaging, quirky characters—drugged to the gills while warehoused and essentially untreated in a public hospital—share the defining feature of being low-income and unprotected from both the supernatural and human forces that would destroy them. They must take matters into their own hands to protect themselves.

I appreciated the theme of how marginalization and isolation presented as much terror here as the supernatural. Yet, the hope and humor of the characters also kept me engaged and frequently smiling.

Alma Heckman’s The Sultan’s Communists uses the life stories of five prominent Moroccan Jewish communists to paint a complex picture of Jewish identity in twentieth-century Morocco. By documenting their struggles, Heckman details the often surprising ways in which Moroccan Jews negotiated their political environment and mediated between Moroccan patriotism, French colonialism, radical politics, Arab and Jewish identity, and Zionism. She also describes the ways in which the Moroccan sultan reimagined his relationship with the country’s Jews and the surprising history of how and why he ultimately came to embrace Jewish communists, who, to begin with, had been the subject of severe repression, including imprisonment and exile. 

A fascinating book about women’s roles in shaping cultural identity in Morocco and within Berber culture, including details on the weaving of textiles, clothing, dance, marriage ceremonies, an alphabet only the women pass on to future generations, and more. Many of these details were important to me in my historical research, but are worth reading by anyone interested in the role of women around the world.  

This book haunts me in a way that almost no other published work does. It’s like one of those movies we all have on a secret list – that we adore but can’t bear to ever watch again (like the Killing Fields or Fight Club). A memoir of almost unparalleled beauty and horror, it tells the true-life tale of the daughter of General Oufkir, who was put to death for attempted regicide. Malika and her five siblings were imprisoned for fifteen years in a penal colony, from where they mounted a daring escape.

The Berber village of Tadrar clings to the steep slopes of the High Atlas. Lives are hard.

Women, men and children labor to bring precious water to homes, fields, and byres, to coax barley from narrow terraces, keep houses warm, feed families, tend the sick, and support the mosque and school. Most younger people go to the city for work, at least for a while, sending money home to help their families. 

So how do families and individuals view their options, their place in the village and in the world?

Vivid interviews and observations stud Crawford’s affectionate and perceptive account of how people in Tadrar decide to become involved in the larger world economy, and their views on what it does for them and to them. 

Estebenico is believed to be the first Black man to be brought to the Americas. In Lalami’s telling, the small party he is with becomes separated and lost, resulting in a years-long journey through unknown lands. Against a vividly detailed backdrop of the early Americas Lalami patiently lays out how Estebanico's willingness to acquire new skills in language and medicine begins to shift the dynamic of his relationship with the master who he had been brought to serve. 

This book is about a young mother who takes her two daughters to Marrakech, Morocco in the 1960s so she can study Sufism, which, although not technically a “cult” does seem rather cult-like when described from the point of view of a five-year-old child who is watching her mother do strange ritual spinning to try to annihilate her ego.

You might remember the 1998 movie adaptation of this book starring Kate Winslet, but I think the book is better because of its dreamy, almost other-worldly descriptions of street life in Marrakech. This gem of a book is steeped in childlike wonder and longing and it will be over far too soon.