65 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.

Any of the books Salma Hage comes out with are absolutely amazing. She has the perfect approach to bringing authentic Lebanese food to the Western palate. This beautiful and massive cookbook is the encyclopedia of a Middle Eastern kitchen—it’s like my bible.

It’s been a reference for me throughout the years, like a stepping stone into Lebanese cookbooks. It was one of the first I ever picked up—512 pages with 500 recipes!

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.

What I love in Hiller’s writing is the no-glory honesty of growing up in settings of omniscient violence where the last wish of the protagonists is to be heroic. They are vulnerable young men trying to get by, to do the right thing, to find calm.

This book and its sister book, Shake Off, are some of the finest works of fiction set during political conflict and war that I have read. Hiller’s gracious enough as to refrain from indulging in the gratuitous or the showy, but these are finely crafted thrillers. They are both equally gripping, taking the reader through worlds rarely seen by English language readers.

Take the bleakest setting you can imagine–such as a Palestinian refugee camp in Lebanon –quadruple the population, encircle it, populate it with militias, then turn yourself into an absurdist or a surrealist to describe it. This seems to be the task that Maarouf has set himself with this collection of short stories, which are as funny and surprising as they are somber and sobering.

He is a poet and a comedian. The poet in him stops, dwells, absorbs, and is porous to the unfolding loss around him before the comedian kicks in with his will to survive. A quirky, uncanny collection.