56 books like Unfortunately, It Was Paradise

Sea of Poppies is the first of Amitav Ghosh’s Ibis Trilogy—an epic of global opium trade that features Zachary Reid, a mixed-race American whose story unfolds as it connects Baltimore to Bengal to Canton across the Atlantic and Indian Oceans.  

Filled with heartbreak and humor the trilogy invokes Herman Melville’s Moby Dick as Ghosh revives the primary sources of the Old China Trade and brings them into refreshing literary life. 

Ghosh’s novel complements another (very different) gem of historically based literary fiction featuring American involvement in opium smuggling and the ensuing First Opium War: Timothy Mo’s Insular Possession. 

This is the opposite of a popular read and not for the faint-hearted. Dufoix has followed, in a detailed way, the labyrinthian uses and meaning of the word diaspora since the third century BCE. Using sources from several languages, this is a major scholarly work, totaling 554 pages. For sheer diligence alone this is an unrivalled sourcebook in diaspora studies. At times, Dufoix’s reasoning is so intricate that it becomes almost Talmudic, but this is part of the charm. We can take pleasure in observing a dedicated researcher undertaking a quest from which he will not be deterred. 

The issue of when one can call a dispersal a ‘diaspora’ has been a long-running debate between those interesting in diasporas. Displaced peoples can return, fragment, or assimilate. What factors are in play that impel any one ethnic group to cohere, link to similar communities aboard and continue to connect, emotionally and in other ways, to their place of origin? This is a tough question to answer and Van Hear has a brave try in answering it. He has undertaken field research in Africa and Sri Lanka and his command of the sources and comparisons is impressive. Of course, there are many refugee flows that post-date this book, but it nonetheless stands as a first crack at addressing the issue of diasporic formation.

Poor Lebanon! Once known as the Paris of the Middle East for its fusion of modernity and tradition and sophisticated restaurant culture, it increasingly has been scarred by civil war, occupations, and tragedy, like the Beirut port explosion of 2018. Like some other countries, many more Lebanese live outside the country than inside it. They often bond around food and this book, by Salma Hage, is a classic. It contains 500 mouth-watering recipes and drips with nostalgia and the scents and flavours of home.

There is no better place to start learning about Palestine than with the stories of Ghassan Kanafani, a writer and militant activist who was assassinated by Mossad, the Israeli Secret Service, in 1972.

Kanafani combined activism with a powerful ability to recreate the Palestinian experience of displacement and forced migration. In one of his most moving and disturbing stories, Men in the Sun, Kanafani tells of three Palestinian migrant workers who travel from the refugee camps of Iraq to Kuwait in the hopes of finding work.

The story was made into a film called The Dupes by Egyptian director Tawfiq Saleh in 1973.

Raja Shehadeh is the author of many important books on Palestine.

He has a unique ability to interweave the personal into the political in his writing. That talent shines through in this recent book, a memoir about his relationship to his father, an influential attorney and defender of Palestinian rights who was murdered outside his home in Ramallah in 1985. In telling the story of this relationship, which was marked by mutual misunderstanding and unarticulated love, Shehadeh also tells a story about the history of the Palestine people.

He shows how the conflicts and displacements inflicted on Palestinians have torn apart millions of lives and destroyed the human connections that many of us take for granted.

Steven Salaita’s ordeal of being hired and then fired from a tenured position at the University of Illinois in Urbana-Champaign in 2014 was among the first and most consequential instances of the suppression of pro-Palestinian speech in the North American university system.

It marked the beginning of a wave of censorship that persists to this day, in which academics are placed under extreme pressure to avoid saying anything that might challenge the status quo on Israel and Palestine. In this book, Salaita tells the story of how university bureaucrats who succumbed to the demands of Israel advocates and withdrew a job offer that he had already accepted.

While telling of how he was caught in the crossfire of a battle for Palestinian liberation, Salaita offers powerful reflections on the meaning of academic freedom and the role of the university.

Mohammed El-Kurd is arguably the most militant voice in Palestinian literature since Ghassan Kanafani. Born in the East Jerusalem neighborhood of Sheikh Jarrah, even as a young boy, he began speaking out against the settlers who were occupying his home.

Rifqa is his debut poetry collection. Named for his grandmother, the poems in this work combine oral history with powerful political verse. Despite his youth, Kurd speaks as a poet who has already developed a strong literary voice. Having witnessed the brutality of occupation and lived to tell the story.

Since 2021, El-Kurd has been the Palestine correspondent for The Nation, and in this role has brought a Palestinian perspective to the media coverage that tends to silence Palestinian voices.

Gate of the Sun is one of the most acclaimed novels about the so-called “question of Palestine.”

Although fictional, it hews closely to real life; the author Elias Khoury, a Lebanese writer, was informed by the extensive time he spent talking to Palestinian refugees in various camps. The book is set in Shatila refugee camp in Lebanon and has an epic scope, weaving together different characters’ experiences of displacement and exile and spanning six decades from the 1930s to the 1990s.

Along the way, we engage with some of the most pivotal moments in recent Palestinian history: the original displacement of 1948 (known as the Nakba); the Arab defeat of 1967; the 1982 massacre in Sabra and Shatila camps. Epic in every sense.

Drawing on a wealth of untapped archival materials and the reports of generations of family members—mayors, judges, scholars, diplomats, and journalists—The Hundred Years' War on Palestine upends accepted interpretations of the conflict, which tend, at best, to describe a tragic clash between two peoples with claims to the same territory.

Instead, Khalidi traces a hundred years of colonial war on the Palestinians, waged first by the Zionist movement and then Israel but backed by Britain and the United States, the great powers of the age.

He highlights the key episodes in this colonial campaign, from the 1917 Balfour Declaration to the destruction of Palestine in 1948, from Israel’s 1982 invasion of Lebanon to the endless and futile peace process.

This is not a chronicle of victimization, nor does it whitewash the mistakes of Palestinian leaders or deny the emergence of national movements on both sides. In reevaluating the forces… show more.