A landmark work of late 20th century fiction, Kingsolver’s sprawling novel transports us to Belgian-colonized Congo in 1959. A family of American missionaries sets up camp, and we follow the stream-of-thought narrations of father, mother, and their four daughters. Their process of adapting to uncompromising nature is evoked with Kingsolver’s haunting, brilliant prose. Unforgettable, intense, and set pieces so epic they’re almost biblical.
The first of Mahfouz’s three Cairo Trilogy books, the milieu of “Palace Walk” is Egypt’s principal city in the two years leading to the 1919 revolution. This is a portrait of a family set in rich detail to time and place: al-Sayyid Ahmad al-Jawad, the father, is a pious Muslim at home but exactly the opposite in public. His submissive but comforting wife Amina, and his five children all have their own issues, emotional trajectories, and imminent conflicts. The reader both suffocates and ululates as the conflicts heighten and diminish, as we sit in the house feeling generational differences, and venture outside to see the country changing rapidly. It’s a remarkable novel published in 1956, yet only available in English after Mahfouz won the Nobel Prize in 1988. We recommend the entire trilogy!
A stunning, angry post-colonial melodrama set in the empty expanse of the Southern Rhodesian (current-day Zimbabwe) countryside, Nobel-winner Lessing’s book was popular and controversial upon its 1950 release. Mary Turner is a violently unhappy wife of a British Rhodesian farmer who enters into a psycho-sexual relationship with their black servant, Moses. Her bitterness, racism, and desperation are a larger picture of relations between white colonizers and the indigenous population at the time. Lessing’s prose is so sharp, it nearly leaps out of the page at you, and Mary’s whirlwind plummet into insanity (a murder mystery to boot) is quite a literary experience.
A light, empathetic take on the colonizer’s experience in Africa, “Out Of Africa” chronicled Karen Blixen’s 20-plus years overseeing a financially-doomed coffee plantation in the Kenyan foothills. Blixen, a Danish baronness who settled in British East Africa (colonial name for Kenya) in 1913, used Isak Dinesen as her nom de plume. Her interactions with other liberal-mined Europeans (including Denys Finch Hatton, who became her lover), as well her developing friendships with some of the Kikuyu people who worked for her, are beautifully rendered in this wandering memoir. It was made into the Academy-award winning film of the same name in 1985.
One of today’s most renowned writers, Eggers is versatile with the creative memoir (“A Heartbreaking Work of Staggering Genius”) and the multicultural non-fiction novel (“Zeitoun”). In this story, Eggers collaborated with real-life Sudanese refugee Valentino Achak Deng, who becomes displaced during the brutal civil war and is forced to walk to Ethiopia. The book describes his trials with dysentery, crocodiles, and the continuous slaughtering of his family and fellow refugees. We follow the protagonist all the way to his shaky inclusion as a resident alien in Atlanta. It’s a mix of creative fiction with heartbreaking real-time accounts of one of the 20,000 Lost Boys of Sudan.
This towering classic is required in most college 101 lit courses. Narrator Marlow takes us on an obsessive journey up the Congo River to find Kurtz, an ivory merchant who has created his own madcap back-jungle colony of natives who worship him like a God. Racist relationships are dissected in this brooding, moody, unforgettable, cathartic read for bibliophiles and academics who love to analyze the heck out of books. A canonized book of such popular heights, it was the basis for Francis Coppola’s 1979 Vietnam War meditation, “Apocalypse Now.”
For the wanderer’s ambiguous soul, this is a must for the bookshelf. Bowles, an expatriate living in Tangier with his writer wife Jane, gives us Port and Kit, an unhappily married New York couple who attempt to fix their marriage on a trip to Morocco, accompanied by their strange friend Tunner. Not so much a straightforward, linear conveyance of story, this is a famously cloudy, saddening existential tale of the inability to fit into the world. Bowles takes us around Morocco as if in a dream: the cafés, the banging clanging marketplaces, the relationships with Moroccans, the loneliness and beauty of the Sahara — a visionary achievement!
A novel of Greek tragedy proportions, and perhaps the most pertinent must-read on this list, Achebe’s classic was the author’s ferocious response to “Heart of Darkness,” and a neo-colonial call for fellow writers of African birth to write outside the white colonizers’ eyes. He creates Okonkwo, a passionate and flawed protagonist who tries fiercely to rule his village despite obstacles from within the tribe and without — the arrival of white Christian missionaries who charm the villagers. It’s a sad and powerful classic.
Master of the fictional travelogue, Indian-born Naipaul transports the reader to a fictional East African country in the days after colonial independence. In another important depiction of the post-colonial land-and-trade grab by foreigners; Salim, an Indian Muslim, sets up a trade in a desolate riverside town. All the unpleasant and unfortunate characters he interacts with along the way draw a picture of an African country still largely taken advantage of after independence. It’s a bit bleak, but masterful, engrossing, and entirely atmospheric.
Hey, let’s not end on a downer. Let’s celebrate the life of this monumental figure and his literary achievements! Published in 1995, this book chronicles the first black South African president’s life: his upbringing in an apartheid state, his 27 years of imprisonment, his burgeoning desires to help free South Africa from apartheid, his advocacy of non-violent protest and his subsequent presidency. This un-putdownable gem gives you entrance into his world. Do yourself a favor and let this man’s words into your life for a bit. Go get this book!
