100 books like What Is the What

I’ve never encountered such a duplicitous and complicated character as the Captain. Having to survive life in Vietnam before and during America’s entry into the war, and after as an immigrant in America, I kept thinking I understood why the character behaved the way he did. His actions made sense. Then I’d get what I thought was a glimpse at his heart and intentions and know I had him all wrong, only to turn the page and see a completely different facet of him again.

Over and over his past and present and desires for the future kept morphing him. The stunning thing about this story is I totally understood why he would be this complex as each section doled out enough clues how someone like him could be so strange and malleable and twisted up in the most odd and fascinating ways. 

I think more than anything, I loved the way she described everything. Her language is as if her words were first sent to her heart and then to her soul before they came onto the page. The warmth and the power are overwhelming in her style. It is obvious she loved grandly Africa and its denizens, and as a reader, I couldn’t help but feel the same.  

I love heroines in exotic places and situations, especially if it is much of their own makings or seemingly destiny. This book is a memoir of a tomboy girl in East Africa, so even though it is all true, it feels epic.  

I could really relate to Beryl as a girl with her animals. (Growing up, I loved and collected animals from nature, too.)  Beryl grew up with a zebra for a pet, horses for friends, and, of course, the most loyal dog.… show more.

This memoir of Alexandra Fuller’s childhood is a hilarious take on her family’s experience of farming in Zimbabwe, Malawi, and Zambia in the 1970s and 1980s. It is a refreshing reminder of what it was like to live and grow up as a member of the white minority intent on remaining in power during a fast-changing, violent, and deeply unstable period in the history of southern Africa. It is a wonderful portrayal of some of the traumas of growing up with a witty, mad, and heavy-drinking mother who had to endure the unspeakable tragedy of losing a child, a chain-smoking father who farmed by day and fought terrorists by night, and a glamorous older sister. It is a book that keeps you laughing or crying the whole way through.

My mother read this book to me over the course of several weekday afternoons. I was nine, maybe ten. The book’s protagonist, David, is a boy who escapes from a concentration camp somewhere in Eastern Europe and walks to Denmark in search of his mother. Lying next to my own mother, on her bed, listening to her voice, cocooned by her love, I identified so very powerfully with this unrooted, solitary, questing boy. It stirred me more than anything else I read as a child. There is something in a refugee’s tale that is so primal, so hard to shake off. There but by the grace of God go I, I thought, every time my mother opened the book to read some more.

This book, the story of a Syrian refugee beekeeper, speaks volumes about what I believe in: the resiliency of human beings and the power of the mind.

The beekeeper’s journey reminds me of why I love working with people as a psychologist after 30+ years. I witnessed many times that hopes and dreams can carry people through the most difficult, dire situations. The title of the book also attracted me.

Being an amateur beekeeper, I have some understanding of beekeeper mentality. One has to be observant, patient, and persistent in order to befriend bees. This includes a willingness to learn, follow instinct, and trust what life can bring. These characteristics are reflected in the protagonist of this book.

His emotional journey is about surrendering to the unknown, working with what is in front of him, and trusting what the universe will bring him in the end. Warmth, kindness, and torments… show more.

When it comes to family sagas turned myth, it’s hard to top Calliope Stephanides tracing the passage of the hermaphroditic gene—transforming Callie into Cal—through three generations of the Greek-American Stephanides family.

An epic origin story that moves from Asia Minor to Detroit, Michigan, complete with incest and a nuanced exploration of gender identity. It also has one of my all-time favorite novel openings ever. “Sing now, O Muse, of the recessive mutation on my fifth chromosome!”

This is among the most exquisitely rendered memoirs I have ever read. It recounts Aciman’s boyhood in the cosmopolitan world of Alexandria, Egypt, in the 1950s, just before the ethnic nationalism of Egypt’s leader, Gamal Abdal Nassar, swept this world away. Every sentence exudes tender nostalgia for a vanished milieu. It is, profoundly, an exile’s book, mourning and celebrating a life that has been lost.

Geeldoon is a Somali refugee who told the story of his extraordinary odyssey to Europe to an oral historian. It is a tale rendered without artifice, without an eye for style or craft. The sheer calamity of his experience spills from his mouth. You can tell from the tone of the narrative how urgent, how necessary it was for him to bear witness to his journey, perhaps if only to prove to himself that it really happened.

I knew nothing about this book’s author but was immediately hooked by the engaging voice of the young protagonist. I would have followed her anywhere. She led me out of Nigeria, on the run from warlords who burned her village, to a refugee detention center in the UK. Then on the loose, an undocumented young Nigerian woman searching for the one man in London who could vouch for her. What she does find is the man’s widow. And I found a story I couldn’t stop reading. Only later did I learn that the author is a man. And that he’d written the book to shine a light on the cruelty done to Nigerians in the name of oil rights, and the mistreatment of refugees in UK detention centers. Well done, Chris.

I had the distinct pleasure of meeting Richard Crasta when he lived in New York, and his novel was a welcome surprise at a time when I needed it. Not all fictional immigrant journeys about hope are harrowing life-and-death tales. Some are funny, like Crasta’s coming-of-age American-dream novel. It’s been called the Indian Portnoy’s Complaint. I get that some might have a problem with that. But I felt for Vijay Prabhu, our young protagonist. He yearns to be a writer and sleep with American women—a dream that American TV and movies have promised him, a dream that’s taboo in his native Mangalore and in his Catholic family, where writing is not an acceptable profession for a man and sex is definitely not discussed. Witty and honest and devastatingly human.