Fans pick 100 books like The Long Coming of the Fire

By Aco Sopov, Rawley Grau (translator), Christina Kramer (translator)

Here are 100 books that The Long Coming of the Fire fans have personally recommended if you like The Long Coming of the Fire. Shepherd is a community of 12,000+ authors and super readers sharing their favorite books with the world.

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Book cover of Everything I Don't Know

Sibelan Forrester Author Of Breathing Technique

From my list on poetry from Eastern Europe in translation.

Why am I passionate about this?

My first foreign language was French, so beautiful, but when I began studying Slavic languages I was drawn deeply into their rich vocabulary and marvelous word formation, which makes it possible to do all sorts of things with poetry. (Not to mention the richness of Estonian, which I have so far studied only a little bit.) I write and translate poetry myself, and I hugely admire the translators who bring poems into muscular or enchanting versions in English, whose prosody and word order are so very different. Eastern European poetry has had booms in the Anglophone world (Vasko Popa’s crow!), but it’s never too soon to mention some new wonderful examples in translation.

Sibelan's book list on poetry from Eastern Europe in translation

Sibelan Forrester Why did Sibelan love this book?

Jerzy Ficowski (1924-2006) is a poet who has been less well known in the United States, even though Poland had one of the greatest poetic traditions of the 20th century.

He resisted both Nazi oppression and communist censorship, celebrated Roma culture, and often wrote of the Jewish victims of the Holocaust. His own poetry is full of striking and unexpected images and characters, and this collaborative translation by two talented poets brings his voice right into the room. I especially love his ode to the stove burner: who would have thought?

By Jerzy Ficowski, Jennifer Grotz (translator), Piotr Sommer (translator)

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Everything I Don't Know as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

"These surprising, clear, and appealing poems are to be enjoyed again and again, marking Ficowski as a poet readers won't want to miss."--Publishers Weekly (starred review)

"What good luck to finally have in English the writings of the brilliant Jerzy Ficowski, the poet who lived at least seventeen lives, fighting in the Warsaw Uprising, and later traveling for years with the Roma people through the roads of Poland, opposing his government, and watching the authorities ban his poems, a poet who translated from Spanish and Romanian and Yiddish and Roma, but most of all from the tongue of silence ……


Book cover of Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine

Sibelan Forrester Author Of Breathing Technique

From my list on poetry from Eastern Europe in translation.

Why am I passionate about this?

My first foreign language was French, so beautiful, but when I began studying Slavic languages I was drawn deeply into their rich vocabulary and marvelous word formation, which makes it possible to do all sorts of things with poetry. (Not to mention the richness of Estonian, which I have so far studied only a little bit.) I write and translate poetry myself, and I hugely admire the translators who bring poems into muscular or enchanting versions in English, whose prosody and word order are so very different. Eastern European poetry has had booms in the Anglophone world (Vasko Popa’s crow!), but it’s never too soon to mention some new wonderful examples in translation.

Sibelan's book list on poetry from Eastern Europe in translation

Sibelan Forrester Why did Sibelan love this book?

Published in 2017, Words for War offers work by sixteen Ukrainian poets reacting to the earlier stage of the war there, translated by a number of poets and specialists.

Why is it important to get this kind of testimony to readers? The answer came in 2022—and the very various poems by writers young and old, women and men, in-country and émigrés, funny and tragic, give the reader both the vitamins of knowledge about the country and its people and the pleasures of beautiful, thought-provoking poetry about something you know is truly important.

By Oksana Maksymchuk (editor), Max Rosochinsky (editor),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Words for War as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

The armed conflict in the east of Ukraine brought about an emergence of a distinctive trend in contemporary Ukrainian poetry: the poetry of war. Directly and indirectly, the poems collected in this volume engage with the events and experiences of war, reflecting on the themes of alienation, loss, dislocation, and disability; as well as justice, heroism, courage, resilience, generosity, and forgiveness. In addressing these themes, the poems also raise questions about art, politics, citizenship, and moral responsibility. The anthology brings together some of the most compelling poetic voices from different regions of Ukraine. Young and old, female and male, somber…


Book cover of Days of Grace: Selected Poems

Sibelan Forrester Author Of Breathing Technique

From my list on poetry from Eastern Europe in translation.

Why am I passionate about this?

My first foreign language was French, so beautiful, but when I began studying Slavic languages I was drawn deeply into their rich vocabulary and marvelous word formation, which makes it possible to do all sorts of things with poetry. (Not to mention the richness of Estonian, which I have so far studied only a little bit.) I write and translate poetry myself, and I hugely admire the translators who bring poems into muscular or enchanting versions in English, whose prosody and word order are so very different. Eastern European poetry has had booms in the Anglophone world (Vasko Popa’s crow!), but it’s never too soon to mention some new wonderful examples in translation.

Sibelan's book list on poetry from Eastern Europe in translation

Sibelan Forrester Why did Sibelan love this book?

Doris Kareva (born 1958) is an outstanding poet from the small but powerful Estonian literary community.

Like any outstanding poet, she often does things that work in the original language, but these translations by Irish poet Miriam McIlfatrick-Ksenofontov really capture the music, the beats of short lines that accumulate into vivid and rhythmic pictures.

(Plus, how cool is it to have a translator named Ksenofontov? I envy both author and translator, and it turns out that Kareva also translates her translator’s poetry into Estonian.)

By Doris Kareva, Miriam McIlfatrick-Ksenofontov (translator),

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Days of Grace as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Doris Kareva is one of Estonia's leading poets, admired especially for poems that balance precision and control with passion and bravado. Her achievement, according to Estonian Literature, is in writing poems which are both `plentiful and fragile like a crystal...balancing on the line between the human soul and the universe, between sound and silence'. Days of Grace spans over forty years of her poetic output, showing how the sustained depth and clarity of her poetry lies in her ability to create ambiguity and suggest harmony at the same time, with a multiplicity of meanings generating the opposite of clarity: a…


Book cover of A Crash Course in Molotov Cocktails

Sibelan Forrester Author Of Breathing Technique

From my list on poetry from Eastern Europe in translation.

Why am I passionate about this?

My first foreign language was French, so beautiful, but when I began studying Slavic languages I was drawn deeply into their rich vocabulary and marvelous word formation, which makes it possible to do all sorts of things with poetry. (Not to mention the richness of Estonian, which I have so far studied only a little bit.) I write and translate poetry myself, and I hugely admire the translators who bring poems into muscular or enchanting versions in English, whose prosody and word order are so very different. Eastern European poetry has had booms in the Anglophone world (Vasko Popa’s crow!), but it’s never too soon to mention some new wonderful examples in translation.

Sibelan's book list on poetry from Eastern Europe in translation

Sibelan Forrester Why did Sibelan love this book?

Halyna Kruk (born in 1974) has a few poems in the volume Words for War; this is the first book of her work in English, and it has already won a prize for Best Book in poetry translation.

Kruk’s poetry feels very contemporary in style, nicely rendered by her translators, who leapt into action when the war began and immediately reached for Kruk’s work. As the title tells you, it addresses this difficult and tragic moment, but it also reaches beyond the moment to address universal human questions in genuine poetry, not ever mere reportage.

Book cover of Rates of Exchange

Vesna Goldsworthy Author Of Iron Curtain: A Love Story

From my list on English women and men in Eastern Europe.

Why am I passionate about this?

I moved to Britain from Belgrade, then the capital of Yugoslavia, in 1986. Still in my early twenties, I was a published poet in Serbian, but I didn’t dream I would eventually become a novelist in English. I devoured any English book that dealt with East-West encounters. I must have read several hundred as I researched my first book, Inventing Ruritania, a cultural study of the “Wild East”. I returned to them when I wrote Iron Curtain, a novel about a “Red Princess” from an unnamed East European country who marries an impecunious English poet. I sometimes thought of it as Ruritania writes back.

Vesna's book list on English women and men in Eastern Europe

Vesna Goldsworthy Why did Vesna love this book?

I can think of few novels as funny as this one.

Rates of Exchange depicts a hapless British academic, Angus Petworth, on his first journey behind Iron Curtain and into the imaginary land of Slaka, a country that combines elements of a number of East European communist states but is perhaps most like a combination of Romania and Bulgaria, with a touch of former Yugoslavia.

The riotous Cold War comedy begins as Petworth boards the flight (“Welcome here please on Comflug 155, destiny Slaka”) and it continues to the last line, as Petworth is feted, followed, seduced, and left thoroughly confused.

It is as funny about the British as it is about the East Europeans, and his language games are infectious. I end up speaking “Slakan” English every time I reread the novel.

By Malcolm Bradbury,

Why should I read it?

2 authors picked Rates of Exchange as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Slaka! Land of lake and forest, of beetroot and tractor. Slaka! Land whose borders are sometimes here, often further north, and sometimes not at all!

Dr Petworth is on a cultural exchange to the small (and fictional) Eastern European country of Slaka. Pallid and middle-aged, Dr Petworth might appear stuffy, but during his short stay he manages to embroil himself in the thorny thickets of sexual intrigue and love, while still finding time to see the major sites.

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 1983, Rates of Exchange took Bradbury's satirical gifts to a new level.


Book cover of Inventing Eastern Europe: The Map of Civilization on the Mind of the Enlightenment

Tomek Jankowski Author Of Eastern Europe! Everything You Need to Know About the History (and More) of a Region that Shaped Our World and Still Does

From my list on understanding your Eastern European Grandma.

Why am I passionate about this?

I was born into a family with an Eastern European heritage, and lived and studied in the region for some years – including during the period of the collapse of the communist regimes. I am comfortable in Polish and Hungarian, and more vaguely functional in Russian and German – with Bulgarian a distant last. My undergraduate degree in history included an Eastern European specialization (including a paper co-administered between American and Hungarian institutions), and my graduate degree in economics included a focus on emerging economies. In my “day job” as a business analyst, I deal frequently with the business landscape in the region. I am married to a Pole, and have family in Poland.    

Tomek's book list on understanding your Eastern European Grandma

Tomek Jankowski Why did Tomek love this book?

Again, this may be a bit dense reading but Wolff tackles the very notion of “Eastern Europe.”

The Enlightenment was a philosophical movement that began in the mid-17th century and lasted until about 1800, and it focused on remaking politics. Enlightenment thinkers believed in change and progress, that Europeans were not doomed to suffer under the tyranny of feudal kings.

Wolff explores how these Enlightenment thinkers celebrated an Age of Progress in Western Europe – but were less impressed with the Eastern half. For thinkers like Voltaire, “Eastern Europe” came to mean backward, under-developed, superstitious, and violent Europe.

These thinkers began using this term, “Eastern Europe” in the 1770s to mean “the Other Europe,” like an embarrassing, unwanted sibling. Wolff describes how these attitudes shaped Western policies towards Eastern Europe. 

By Larry Wolff,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Inventing Eastern Europe as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This is a wide-ranging intellectual history of how, in the 18th century, Europe came to be conceived as divided into "Western Europe" and "Eastern Europe". The author argues that this conceptual reorientation from the previously accepted "Northern" and "Southern" was a work of cultural construction and intellectual artifice created by the philosophes of the Enlightenment. He shows how the philosophers viewed the continent from the perspective of Paris and deliberately cultivated an idea of the backwardness of "Eastern Europe" the more readily to affirm the importance of "Western Europe".


Book cover of The Balkan Trilogy

Vesna Goldsworthy Author Of Iron Curtain: A Love Story

From my list on English women and men in Eastern Europe.

Why am I passionate about this?

I moved to Britain from Belgrade, then the capital of Yugoslavia, in 1986. Still in my early twenties, I was a published poet in Serbian, but I didn’t dream I would eventually become a novelist in English. I devoured any English book that dealt with East-West encounters. I must have read several hundred as I researched my first book, Inventing Ruritania, a cultural study of the “Wild East”. I returned to them when I wrote Iron Curtain, a novel about a “Red Princess” from an unnamed East European country who marries an impecunious English poet. I sometimes thought of it as Ruritania writes back.

Vesna's book list on English women and men in Eastern Europe

Vesna Goldsworthy Why did Vesna love this book?

Having not one but three books as my second choice may look like cheating, but the novels which comprise Manning’s unforgettable Balkan TrilogyThe Great Fortune and The Spoilt City, set in Bucharest, Romania; and Friends and Heroes, set in Athens – are now usually published under one cover.

The first two volumes paint the story of Guy and Harriet Pringle, newly married English expats in the Romanian capital on the eve of the Second World War, who then escape to Athens as the Germans advance across the Balkans.

I use the verb “paint” deliberately. Manning was a painter in her youth, and few writers can paint the word-picture of a foreigner in a strange city as well as she does.

I fell in love with Bucharest after reading it, and I travelled there for the first time in the immediate aftermath of the Revolution in 1989, while there…

By Olivia Manning,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Balkan Trilogy as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

'Her gallery of personages is huge, her scene painting superb, her pathos controlled, her humour quiet and civilised' Anthony Burgess

'So glittering is the overall parade - and so entertaining the surface - that the trilogy remains excitingly vivid; it amuses, it diverts and it informs, and to do these things so elegantly is no small achievement' Sunday Times

'A fantastically tart and readable account of life in eastern Europe at the start of the war' Sarah Waters

The Balkan Trilogy is the story of a marriage and of a war, a vast, teeming, and complex masterpiece in which Olivia…


Book cover of Microcosm: A Portrait of a Central European City

Tomek Jankowski Author Of Eastern Europe! Everything You Need to Know About the History (and More) of a Region that Shaped Our World and Still Does

From my list on understanding your Eastern European Grandma.

Why am I passionate about this?

I was born into a family with an Eastern European heritage, and lived and studied in the region for some years – including during the period of the collapse of the communist regimes. I am comfortable in Polish and Hungarian, and more vaguely functional in Russian and German – with Bulgarian a distant last. My undergraduate degree in history included an Eastern European specialization (including a paper co-administered between American and Hungarian institutions), and my graduate degree in economics included a focus on emerging economies. In my “day job” as a business analyst, I deal frequently with the business landscape in the region. I am married to a Pole, and have family in Poland.    

Tomek's book list on understanding your Eastern European Grandma

Tomek Jankowski Why did Tomek love this book?

In his exploration of East Prussia in its final stages, author Max Egremont noted, “This is a part of Europe where boundaries are vague, where names deceive.” (2011; Pg. 220)

It is true across all of Europe but more so in Eastern Europe that ethnic and cultural boundaries often overlap – though nationalists try to claim exclusive domain.

This is a book about one city, today known as Wrocław (in southwestern Poland) which has a rich Polish history – but whose background includes strong German (“Breslau”), Czech (“Vratislav”), Jewish (ברעסלוי /Bresloi), Romany, and even more layers. Often these cultures coexisted, and mixed.

This book is a wonderful introduction to the ethnic complexity of Eastern Europe, and how today’s political borders can give the false impression of simple, clear ethnic boundaries.   

By Norman Davies, Roger Moorhouse,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Microcosm as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

In May 1945, the city of Breslau was annihilated by the Soviet Red Army. At the beginning of February the Russians had laid seige to the city, an ordeal that was to last for nearly five months. Much of Breslau was destroyed, thousands of its inhabitants were killed. Breslau surrendered four days after Berlin and was thus the last Fortress of the Reich to fall and one of the very last areas in Germany to surrender. The story of Central Europe is anything but simple. As the region in between East and West Europe, it has always been endowed with…


Book cover of Iron Curtain: The Crushing of Eastern Europe, 1944-1956

Keith Lowe Author Of Savage Continent: Europe in the Aftermath of World War II

From my list on the aftermath of World War 2.

Why am I passionate about this?

Keith Lowe is the author of several works on postwar history. His international bestseller, Savage Continent, won the English PEN/Hessell Tiltman Prize and Italy’s Cherasco History Prize. His book on the long-term legacy of World War II, The Fear and the Freedom, was awarded China’s Beijing News Annual Recommendation and was shortlisted for the Historical Writers Association Non-Fiction Crown. His books have been translated into more than twenty languages.

Keith's book list on the aftermath of World War 2

Keith Lowe Why did Keith love this book?

People in the West tend to celebrate 1945 as a year of liberation; but, of course, in Eastern Europe, the defeat of Germany merely heralded the beginning of four more decades of repression. In this book, Anne Applebaum describes the Communist takeover of three European countries – East Germany, Poland, and Hungary. It’s a masterpiece both of research and of analysis. Communism, just like capitalism, had many faces: this book shows brilliantly just how varied repression can be. In 2013 it won the lucrative Cundill Prize, and deservedly so.

By Anne Applebaum,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked Iron Curtain as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

Chosen 16 times as a 'Book of the Year' - the top non-fiction pick of 2012

'The best work of modern history I have ever read' A. N. Wilson, Financial Times

At the end of the Second World War, the Soviet Union unexpectedly found itself in control of a huge swathe of territory in Eastern Europe. Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to a completely new political and moral system: Communism. Anne Applebaum's landmark history of this brutal time shows how societies were ruthlessly eviscerated by Communist regimes, how opposition was destroyed…


Book cover of The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550-1700: An Interpretation

Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski Author Of The Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, 1733-1795: Light and Flame

From my list on Central and Eastern European history.

Why am I passionate about this?

I’ve been fascinated by Central and Eastern Europe all of my adult life. Many cruises along the Danube and around the Baltic Sea have allowed me to see the stunning best of the region. Since the early 1990s, I’ve taught the history of the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, the Habsburg Monarchy, and the Russian Empire to a generation of students. Professor of Polish-Lithuanian History at University College London since 2013, my next challenge is to promote the history of Poland to allcomers via the Polish History Museum in Warsaw, the wonderful city which is my home.

Richard's book list on Central and Eastern European history

Richard Butterwick-Pawlikowski Why did Richard love this book?

Robert Evans’s masterpiece is the reader’s equivalent of scaling Himalayan peaksand marveling at the views. The author’s linguistic and intellectual range is breathtaking. Those who read this classic of learned prose carefully will be taken on an unforgettable journey right over and below the horizon of the Central European mind between the Renaissance and the Enlightenment. One of the greatest works of early modern intellectual history ever written.

By Robert John Weston Evans,

Why should I read it?

1 author picked The Making of the Habsburg Monarchy, 1550-1700 as one of their favorite books, and they share why you should read it.

What is this book about?

This book examines and accounts for the emergence of a powerful Habsburg state in central Europe during the 16th and 17th centuries. Charting the transformation of the Habsburg lands from a casual juxtaposition of territories into a major and reasonably stable commonwealth, Evans examines the social and economic changes brought about by the Counter-Reformation, the interaction between regions and central government, and the intellectual evolution from the Renaissance
to the Baroque.


Book cover of Everything I Don't Know
Book cover of Words for War: New Poems from Ukraine
Book cover of Days of Grace: Selected Poems

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