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The In-Between World of Vikram Lall

M.G. Vassanji · back to the book

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24 books with the same feel

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House of Glass

Pramoedya Ananta Toer · 365 pages

ColonialismPolitical CorruptionCultural IdentityCharacter-Driven
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The Poisonwood Bible

Barbara Kingsolver · 596 pages

The Poisonwood Bible is a story told by the wife and four daughters of Nathan Price, a fierce, evangelical Baptist who takes his family and mission to the Belgian Congo in 1959. They carry with them everything they believe they will need from home, but soon find that all of it -- from garden seeds to Scripture -- is calamitously transformed on African soil. What follows is a suspenseful epic of on

ColonialismPolitical CorruptionCultural IdentityLiterary Fiction
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The Mimic Men

V.S. Naipaul · 275 pages

"A profound novel of cultural displacement, The Mimic Men masterfully evokes a colonial man's experience in a postcolonial world. Born of Indian heritage and raised on a British-dependent Caribbean island, Ralph Singh has retired to suburban London, writing his memoirs as a means to impose order on a chaotic existence. His memories lead him to recognize the paradox of his childhood during which he

ColonialismCultural IdentityLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Half of a Yellow Sun

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie · 448 pages

> With effortless grace, celebrated author Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie illuminates a seminal moment in modern African history: Biafra's impassioned struggle to establish an independent republic in southeastern Nigeria during the late 1960s. We experience this tumultuous decade alongside five unforgettable characters: Ugwu, a thirteen-year-old houseboy who works for Odenigbo, a university professor fu

ColonialismCultural IdentityPolitical CorruptionLiterary Fiction
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No Longer at Ease

Chinua Achebe · 169 pages

When Obi Okonkwo, grandson of Okonkwo, the main character in *Things Fall Apart* returns to Nigeria from England in the 1950s, his foreign education separates him from his African roots. *No Longer at Ease,* the third and concluding novel in Chinua Achebe’s *The African Trilogy*, depicts the uncertainties that beset the nation of Nigeria, as independence from colonial rule loomed near. In Obi Okon

ColonialismPolitical CorruptionCultural IdentityLiterary Fiction
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Equator

Miguel Sousa Tavares · 374 pages

It is Lisbon in the year 1905 and our hero, Luis, a 37-year-old bachelor and owner of a small shipping business, is revelling in the luxury of Lisbon's high society.

ColonialismPolitical CorruptionCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Midnight's Children

Salman Rushdie · 548 pages

ColonialismPolitical CorruptionCultural IdentityLiterary Fiction
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The Sympathizer

Viet Thanh Nguyen · 384 pages

Follows a Viet Cong agent as he spies on a South Vietnamese army general and his compatriots as they start a new life in 1975 Los Angeles.

Cultural IdentityColonialismLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Caleb's Crossing

Geraldine Brooks · 369 pages

Growing up in the tiny settlement of Great Harbor amid a small band of pioneers and Puritans, Bethia Mayfield yearns for an education that is closed to her due to her gender. As soon as she can, she slips away to explore the island's glistening beaches and observes its native Wampanoag inhabitants. At twelve, she encounters Caleb, the young son of a chieftain, and the two forge a secret friendship

ColonialismCultural IdentityLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Waiting for the Barbarians

J.M. Coetzee · 165 pages

For decades the Magistrate has run the affairs of a tiny frontier settlement, ignoring the impending war between the barbarians and the Empire, whose servant he is. But when the interrogation experts arrive, he is jolted into sympathy for the victims, and into a quixotic act of rebellion which lands him in prison.

ColonialismPolitical CorruptionCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Babel: Or the Necessity of Violence: An Arcane History of the Oxford Translators' Revolution

R F Kuang · 560 pages

From award-winning author R. F. Kuang comes Babel, a thematic response to The Secret History and a tonal retort to Jonathan Strange & Mr. Norrell that grapples with student revolutions, colonial resistance, and the use of language and translation as the dominating tool of the British empire. Traduttore, traditore: An act of translation is always an act of betrayal. 1828. Robin Swift, orphane

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The Meursault Investigation

Kamel Daoud · 143 pages

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The Mission Song

John le Carre · 352 pages

Wanneer een Afrikaanse tolk bij een geheim topoverleg ontdekt dat men een invasie van het noodlijdende Congo plant, probeert hij dat wereldkundig te maken.

ColonialismCultural IdentityCharacter-DrivenFirst Person Narrator
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The Last King of Scotland

Giles Foden · 320 pages

Political CorruptionColonialismLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao

Junot Diaz · 352 pages

Things have never been easy for Oscar. A ghetto nerd living with his Dominican family in New Jersey, he's sweet but disastrously overweight. He dreams of becoming the next J. R. R. Tolkien and he keeps falling hopelessly in love. Poor Oscar may never get what he wants, thanks to the Fuku - the curse that has haunted his family for generations. With dazzling energy and insight Díaz immerses us

Political CorruptionCultural IdentityColonialismLiterary Fiction
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The Storyteller

Mario Vargas Llosa

ColonialismCultural IdentityLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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The Great Indian Novel

Shashi Tharoor · 423 pages

Writing in English, Shasi Tharoor has produced a stunning novel that is at once ambitious, daring, boldly satirical, and outrageously funny. The two structural pillars of his astonishing work are the national epic, the *Mahabharata,* and the Indian struggle in this century for independence from Great Britain.

ColonialismPolitical CorruptionLiterary FictionHistorical Fiction
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Homegoing

Yaa Gyasi · 320 pages

Two half sisters, Effia and Esi, unknown to each other, are born into two different tribal villages in 18th century Ghana. Effia will be married off to an English colonial, and will live in comfort in the sprawling, palatial rooms of Cape Coast Castle, raising half-caste children who will be sent abroad to be educated in England before returning to the Gold Coast to serve as administrators of the

ColonialismCultural IdentityLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Dreams of Joy

Lisa See · 354 pages

A continuation of "Shanghai Girls" finds a devastated Joy fleeing to China to search for her real father while her mother, Pearl, desperately pursues her, a dual quest marked by their encounters with the nation's intolerant Communist culture.

Political CorruptionCultural IdentityCharacter-DrivenFirst Person Narrator
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The Last Life

Claire Messud · 376 pages

A novel about French colonists in Algeria and their difficult adjustment to France after Algerian independence. It is narrated by a girl whose grandfather buys a hotel on the Riviera and forgetting he is no longer in the colonies goes to jail for shooting at rowdy teenagers by a pool.

ColonialismCultural IdentityLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven
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Wide Sargasso Sea

Jean Rhys · 189 pages

Jean Rhys's reputation was made upon publication of this passionate and heartbreaking novel, in which she brings into the light one of citsion's most mysterious characters: the madwoman in the attic from Charlotte Bronte's "Jane Eyre". A sensual and protected young woman, the narrator grows up in the lush, natural world of the Caribbean. She is sold into marriage to the cold-hearted and prideful R

ColonialismCultural IdentityLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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The Plot Against America

Philip Roth · 400 pages

When the renowned aviation hero and rabid isolationist Charles A. Lindbergh defeated Franklin Roosevelt by a landslide in the 1940 presidential election, fear invaded every Jewish household in America. Not only had Lindbergh, in a nationwide radio address, publicly blamed the Jews for selfishly pushing America toward a pointless war with Nazi Germany, but upon taking office as the thirty-third pre

Political CorruptionCultural IdentityCharacter-DrivenLiterary Fiction
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Season of Migration to the North

Tayeb Salih · 169 pages

"When a young man returns to his village in the Sudan after many years studying in Europe, he finds that among the familiar faces there is now a stranger -- the enigmatic Mustafa Sa'eed. As the two become friends, Mustafa tells the younger man the disturbing story of his own life in London after the First World War. Lionized by society and desired by women as an exotic novelty, Mustafa was driven

ColonialismCultural IdentityLiterary FictionFirst Person Narrator
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Pachinko

Min Jin Lee · 560 pages

In the early 1900s, teenaged Sunja, the adored daughter of a crippled fisherman, falls for a wealthy stranger at the seashore near her home in Korea. He promises her the world, but when she discovers she is pregnant--and that her lover is married--she refuses to be bought. Instead, she accepts an offer of marriage from a gentle, sickly minister passing through on his way to Japan. But her decision

ColonialismCultural IdentityLiterary FictionCharacter-Driven

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