Fans pick 100 books like Under Two Flags

An exuberant serial novel by Regency sporting journalist Egan, illustrated by a young George Cruikshank (Dickens’ future artist). In it, three friends (based on the author, Cruikshank, and his younger brother Robert), document their ‘rambles and sprees through the metropolis’. It is a tale of dandies on safari written entirely in ‘flash’ slang, the language of the 19th-century underworld. The book was a publishing sensation, inspiring Dickens’ Pickwick Papers. I was introduced to this by my dear friend the late Professor Roger Sales many years ago, and it has been inspiring me ever since as a novelist and cultural historian. Egan’s style is bawdy and irreverent, until his voice was silenced by Victorian propriety a generation later. Can also be read as early social investigation.  

This is the first of the ‘Newgate novels’ or ‘criminal romances’ that essentially heralded the start of modern crime fiction. After the death of Walter Scott and before the rise of Dickens, Lytton, like his contemporary W.H. Ainsworth, was the bestselling English novelist of his day; a position both men continued to share with Dickens until the late-1840s. Paul Clifford is a redemptive tale of a fictional Georgian highwayman, full of adventure and intrigue, underpinned by a social message about the link between poverty and crime. Imprisoned for an offence he didn’t commit, the hero emerges apprenticed in crime and ready to use these skills to survive. Paul Clifford is now only remembered, if it is remembered at all, for its opening line, ‘It was a dark and stormy night…’

Published in 1834, this one amplifies Ann Radcliffe's Gothic-ness to eleven. I loved the story because it's fun, wild, gloomy, rogue, and riveting, like a gripping telenovela. 

The plot is all about inheritance, family drama, illegitimate sons, and revenge. It features villains, gypsies, apparitions, corpses, evil priests, murders, curses, and the famous highwayman Dick Turpin and his mare Black Bess. It recounts Turpin's midnight ride through the English countryside as he flees capture, and like it, the entire novel is a wild ride. 

Though a bit antiquated and with "songs" aplenty—which Ainsworth himself lamented had been lost in British literature and tried to resurrect—its gloomy and despairing story captivated me. The book begins at night inside a mausoleum, where the sexton Peter Bradley tells his grandson Luke his family history.

Right off the bat, we have a desecration and a rotting hand; how much more Gothic can this story be?

British author George W. M. Reynolds had no qualms about stealing Sue’s idea and title and writing his own book called The Mysteries of London (1844-1846). I love this novel for its sensationalism, which caused it to be the ultimate Victorian bestseller, even outselling Dickens.

The novel brings together criminals, women forced into prostitution, murderers, crossdressers, and royalty. At the heart of it is the story of the Markham brothers, one good, one evil. We follow their paths as they interact with all the other people in London and become embroiled in conspiracies. One of them even ends up marrying royalty and ruling a small European country. Reynolds’ bold writing style and mastery of multiple plots makes this 2,500-page novel highly readable and shocking even today.

This was ‘the book’ that ultimately led to my joining the Legion to attain the 2nd Foreign Parachute Regiment (2e régiment étranger de parachutistes). 

I had the distinct honour to interview Mr. Simon Murray, and discuss his meaningful book. Mr. Murray's compelling first-hand account of his time with the REP during the Franco-Algerian war (1960s) is the example of what a Legionnaire represents. Mr. Simon Murray, CBE is a British Hong Kong-based businessman, adventurer, and author.

Not a book that covers the legion directly but the war in Algeria is a big part of the Legions history, and notably the Legion’s 2e régiment étranger de parachutistes. The Algerian War lasted from 1954 to 1962. It came close to provoking a civil war on French soil. For those interested in the Putsch, then get into this book. More than a million Muslim Algerians died in the conflict and many European settlers were driven into exile. Above all, the war was marked by the unholy marriage of revolutionary terror, and repressive torture. 

This is a powerful memoir. First published in French in 2016, one year after Mokhtar Mokhtefi’s death, it is an eyewitness account of twentieth-century Algeria, tracing his political journey from a poor village south of Algiers, through to the French secondary education, one of the few Muslims to do so, and his eventual engagement in the FLN in 1957. Graphically portraying the anger and disaffection that drives Algerians to rebel against French rule, the book is equally unsparing about the divisions and authoritarianism which riddle the National Liberation Front and shape post-independence Algeria. Beautifully translated by his widow, the writer and anti-imperialist activist Elaine Mokhtefi. 

Fanon’s analysis of how Black people in colonized Africa and in the United States were one oppressed people was part of my political education. This book was formative to my politics, which are rooted in Fanon’s combination of Marxism and resistance to racial oppression.

Reading Fanon allowed me to accept my culture and who I was as a Black person. I started reflecting on assimilation and how we changed our hair and skin to look more acceptable to white people. He was also my friend Nate’s favorite author.

After Nate got out of prison, he became an attorney and director of prisoner legal services at the San Francisco Sheriff’s Department. There’s a memorial to him there still, in the jail lobby, and Fanon’s book is in there.

For decades, Holocaust denial was widespread in Arab countries. That’s beginning to change, and Sansal’s harrowing novel – inspired in part by a Nazi officer who escaped to Algeria and became a hero in the war for independence – aids in writing that history back into consciousness. We gain extraordinary intimacy with two brothers as they contend in different ways with the challenges of North African immigrant life in France, the massacre by the Algerian military that claims the lives of their parents, and the discovery of their father’s horrific past. Sansal was attacked for comparing Islamist fundamentalism to the Holocaust and for visiting Israel, but I think it’s clear his intent is to condemn any ideology based on an unyielding and violent intolerance of difference.   

My partner recommended this book, only recently translated into English, about a Parisian gallery worker, Naïma, who unravels her family's tangled history between rural Algeria and France. In this book, Zeniter explores the complex aftershocks of colonization and how they affect and inform subsequent generations of migrants.

Naïma’s family story in France begins when her grandfather, Ali, flees North Africa after the Algerian war for independence. Coming from a mountain village, Ali finds the decrepit French apartment blocks bewildering and unwelcoming. The final section of Zeniter’s book is devoted to Naïma’s return to Algeria, where she attempts to weave together the past and future of her family and her identity.