The most recommended books about social alienation

A beautiful and captivating novel about love written by a Palestinian writer, it is about a woman who falls for a man she accidentally exchanges letters with. After this introductory story, the book takes the readers through the webs of other characters' lives, heartbroken, forlorn, and desiring love.

It’s a book about alienation but written in such raw and beautiful language that it’s impossible to put it down.

I just love this book. Again, it’s set against such an evocative landscape – this time in Western Australia. It tells the story of a tentative love affair between a reckless poacher and the wife of a wealthy landowner – and the inevitable fall-out. There’s even a soundtrack to go with it – Winton’s a musician too.

The writing’s so pitch-perfect that I had to keep stopping to scribble phrases down. It’s that good. Why is it about survival? As well as Luther Fox, the poacher, struggling to get over the tragedy of his past, the last third of the book focuses on his walkabout up north to Coronation Island, where he deliberately shipwrecks himself. Cue the wilderness: scavenging, hunting, sheltering. True, haunting, survival in its rawest sense as he battles to redemption.

The late Elizabeth Wurtzel’s Prozac Nation is brilliantly constructed, intelligent, gritty, direct, even sardonic at times. She was a no-bullshit writer, a forerunner in the field of literary nonfiction, one of the first writers of her generation to tell the truth about mental illness and bulldoze the taboo of stigma related to this otherwise unpalatable topic.  

In this memoir, she takes us by the hand and pulls us tenderly at times, and forcefully at other times, into her intimate world of mental illness. Even as a little girl away at camp she struggles with depression and contemplations of life and death; she attempts suicide for the first time at camp. Later, as an award-winning Harvard student, we see her deteriorate further into madness, until at last she is prescribed Prozac, and things turn around. While the meds help her, she also had foresight into the dangers of pharmaceutical companies, and… show more.

I used to say there were certain characters I wanted to be when I grew up, but that isn’t exactly true. It’s more like I want to be the book as a whole: its wisdom, humor, intricacy, plot, its ability to transport me utterly, to inhabit my mind with new, lifelong friends (or enemies), and to teach me—not only a single lesson upon the first reading, but many different lessons through the years. Cordelia’s Honor (sometimes sold separately as Shards of Honor and Barrayar) is one of those books. It’s the first book of the mighty Vorkosigan Saga by Bujold, which I have read. But if I’d never read the rest, this book alone would still gleam in my mind as something necessary, generous, and strangely infinite. 

Caryl Phillips’s The Lost Child is a poignant novel that brings together a rewriting of Emily Brontë’s Wuthering Heights with a reimagining of Jean Rhys’s Wide Sargasso Sea, as well as a quick visit to the Brontë Parsonage in Haworth. In a bookended narrative, Philips gives us the backstory of how Heathcliff came to be in Liverpool before being taken to Wuthering Heights by Mr. Earnshaw. In the centre, however, is the story of Monica Johnson, a young woman living in Windrush Britain whose marriage to Julius, an African-Caribbean graduate with whom she has two children, causes a fracture with her family. An outcast like Heathcliff, The Lost Child examines Monica’s struggle to raise her sons in the north of England, showing her family’s experience with racism, trauma, and mental ill-health. Philips’s storytelling gets to the heart of what it means to be an outcast in society.

The Pact was one of those books that made me want to become a writer. Picoult captured a controversial topic amongst young lovers and friends, and she did it with compassion and heart. I felt in my bones…I need to write a book like that. And that’s what I strive to do: to make readers feel. To make them think. To leave them wondering: what would I do in a similar situation? And mostly, opening their eyes to all the different sides to a single story, and seeing themselves…and the growth that’s possible. The Pact tells a great story, but the complexities of our lives are the real takeaway. 

I loved this book because it was difficult to read. For me, the sign of a good book is one that makes the reader feel, truly feel the characters’ emotions in their own body.

Christina Lauren does a masterful job in this book. There were several moments when I wanted to turn away, to hide my eyes as the characters came to terms with things that had not been said years previous, but that had set them on paths that took them away from each other in the most brutal ways.

I also laughed and cringed with the familiar pains and experiences of adolescence and enjoyed how Lauren and let us live them through others, making the characters our friends on this crazy life path.

It takes courage to name your book that. Especially in the 90s before self-publishing became a thing. Which did not stop its renegade author from selling xeroxed copies of it in the streets.

Its titular protagonist, who is jobless and homeless after his girlfriend kicks him out, is based on the author himself. He struggles with feelings of inadequacy and a sense of purposelessness. He works odd jobs, writes an occasional poem, meets eccentric strangers, engages in substance abuse, and gets into sticky situations on account of his bad decisions.

While I don’t know about you, I can strongly relate to the character. The book's dark humor is also enough to make it one of my favorites.

Why did I love this book? Number one, I finished it!--with a lot of help from an online course offered through the Community of Writers in the High Sierras and led by author Peter Orner. I also listened to an audio version of the novel as I read it, which was tremendously helpful. There are no chapter headings in Ulysses and so many characters. The dialogue is not punctuated as such and is intermingled with the internal thoughts of not always identified narrators. There are Latin phrases. Every line contains some obscure literary, historical, or Irish reference.

Ulysses was published in 1922 by Sylvia Beach, the proprietor of the famous Paris bookstore Shakespeare and Company. The novel chronicles a day in the life of three characters in Dublin on June 16, 1904. It’s considered by many to be a masterpiece. It’s criticized by some as needing a stricter editor. It’s… show more.

It was a toss-up here between this book and The Scar, set in a different part of the same world. One of Miéville’s acknowledged influences is the wonderful Mervyn Peake, and like Peake, he’s never in a hurry to get a story underway.

I’d have probably tossed Perdido Street Station aside after 100-200 pages except for a friend’s fervent recommendation—and I’d have missed out big time if I had! Because the story as it develops is truly grand, truly epic. Like Peake, Miéville has a gift for raising action to a mythical status. I love, love, love a novel that builds up to a long, rolling, thunderous climax!