The most recommended exile books

This story starts in Spain’s Civil War but immigrates to Chile. I have two reasons to be attracted to this book. First I grew up in South America and so am drawn to this setting, but second I had a writing mentor who was a small boy during the Franco regime. (I published his story in my blog.)

An exodus of thousands of Spaniards escaped into France and Cristian Zozaya was separated from his parents for years until they were able to immigrate to South America. His story echoes the beginning of Allende’s, except hers is about adult refugees in a marriage of convenience. The protagonists face trials in Chile with yet another dictatorship, but the ending is pleasing.

I wish I’d read this book before visiting Lebanese friends there.

The story of a man who returns to his native Lebanon years after the civil war, it portrays the complexity of their society through the impact the war had on a group of university friends.

It gives a wonderfully accurate feel of the sights, sounds, and tastes of the country, and an astute description of the psyche of the Lebanese people from the point of view of a returnee.

Patenaude focuses just on the Mexican period, from January 1937 to August 1940, of Trotsky’s exile, although the previous stages of his exile — Kazakhstan in 1928, then Turkey for four years, France for another three, followed by interment in Norway — are dealt with in a series of flashbacks. In fact, the whole book is written as if Trotsky in Coyoacán were recalling his past, from his prosperous farmer’s boyhood to his underground militancy, his Civil War military brilliance, and his blundering incompetence as a Bolshevik power-broker. The danger that Patenaude flirts with is to let Trotsky’s charisma and undoubted genius charm him into overlooking his subject’s monstrous indifference to the suffering and deaths of others, sometimes even of those close to him, as well as his overweening conceit.

By dealing with the last phase of the tragedy, nemesis, Trotsky is seen to pay in fear, resignation, failure, and… show more.

Being Palestinian is a collection of essays by Palestinians reflecting on their identity and experiences living outside of their homeland.

I’ve chosen it here because few works are so effective in conveying both the commonalities and the diversity of the Palestinian refugee experience. The contributors range from Ivy League professors to activists campaigning for justice in the Middle East today; they include figures who grew up in refugee camps and those raised in some of the wealthiest cities in the world.

In many ways Being Palestinian is the perfect introduction to learning more about the subject, because it is accessible and highly personal without being simplistic. 

Tanya Harmer is a noted diplomatic historian who focuses on the left-wing presidency of Salvador Allende in Chile during the early 1970s. Allende, as most people know, was violently overthrown in a CIA-backed coup d’etat in 1973. That event ushered in 15 years of brutal dictatorship and transformed Chile’s experiment with democratic socialism into the first example of neoliberalism in Latin America and the world. Harmer’s biography of Allende’s youngest daughter, Beatriz, is a brilliant, intimate portrait of a young activist torn between loyalty to her Socialist (and non-violent) father and the appeal of Cuba’s revolutionary fervor, with its emphasis on violent insurrection against the old order. It is a tragedy, much like the 1960s itself.

I have been wanting to read more books in translation because I speak and read Spanish as well as English (and I’m fascinated by language and the various meanings it can convey), but I truly would not have expected a Holocaust novel to be as captivating and almost breathless a reading experience as this was.

The mystery element was legitimately suspenseful, the relationships among family members sincere and enduring, and the portrayal of complex characters and their moral decisions and failings nuanced and thought-provoking.

When I realized (halfway through!) that the novel is based on a thoroughly researched story of the author’s own family’s story, I knew it would stay with me for a long time.

One of the most original books I have ever read, and as such impossible to classify by genre—a dizzying mix of memoir, history, and travel writing. As the separate stories of four apparently unrelated individuals unfold, Sebald exposes a common theme: the loss of identity through trauma and displacement. The stories are devastating and yet there is something hopeful in Sebald’s melancholic and vivid writing, the powerful case he makes for these stories being heard.

Irish men and women in the United States launched a movement to liberate their homeland from British rule.

David Brundage’s Irish Nationalists in America, the first history of this movement as a whole, ranges across the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, covering the full range of ideological positions—from peaceful constitutional change to an Irish republic achieved through violent means—and exploring how Irish-American nationalism intersected with movements for labor reform, racial equality, and women’s rights in the United States.

A skilled social and political historian, Brundage tells a vivid story about how ordinary immigrants built an extraordinary movement.

Cristina Garcia has become the definitive chronicler of both Cuba and Cuban exiles. King of Cuba tells the story of two men: El Comandante (also called the despot, the tyrant, or El Líder—clearly this is Fidel) and a Miami exile, Goyo Herrera, who is as old and infirm as Castro himself. Garcia’s portrait of the desperation and ignominies these two old guys suffer, and of their hopeless attempts to cleave to past glories, transcends Cuban history and brings us two men I found cantankerous and self-inflating, but irresistible.

This book made me a traveling companion of Lenin. Together with him we go on an incredible journey: from Switzerland across Europe via Finland to Petrograd. This journey changed the world, because it brought Lenin back to Russia, Russia the October coup, and the century of a Soviet regime. Merridale depicts the unique moment of the dawn of a new age as banally and grotesquely as if she had really been there. The best part: just before he left, Lenin called the American embassy because he would have preferred to be transported by the Americans rather than the Germans. But it was Easter Sunday and no one could be reached at the embassy, and so the story took its course....