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This Earth, This Body, by Arlene Iris Distler

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This new collection of poems embodies a way of being in this world. Bursting with generosity of spirit, Distler’s poems call us to appreciate even the smallest of joys and to have courage in dark times. (Full disclosure: The author is a friend and colleague of mine). She reminds us of “Rain . . . beating jazz on my roof” and of the “imperfect fruit” of an old apple tree near where a loved one’s ashes are scattered.

Distler does not shy away from the big questions, starting with a brilliant poem entitled “Remember dying.” Upon the untimely death of her husband, Distler must find a way to comprehend that eternal mystery.

We are not this flesh we call ourselves . . .
this seeming solid self only the sounding bell.

Yet the world’s beauty is ours
to bear, and the austere does not call.

Her poems call to all our senses and all our philosophies, urging us to grasp life and to let it go.

She explores the uses of memory. There are poems about a childhood charm bracelet, an old yearbook, and a grandmother, only now seeing that the elderly woman may have been lost in “the long ago passage/between old world and new.” In one poem Distler revisits the early home shared with her husband, “where the seeds of my children were sown/among clover and high grass.” With powerful imagery she reveals what remains:

there’s only a burnt and bruised shell
yellow jackets in the cellar hole
chimney the only thing standing.
And the sky, as usual
brooding and hallowed.

The New England landscape is here, with its stone walls, blueberries, and pond peepers. In her hands, the natural world with its splendor and cruelty yields startling insights such as this when an owl “haughty as ice” seems to speak:

. . . Remember your nest
that spot you tend with bits of wood,
tufts of straw, feathers
you pluck from your breast.

There are sacrifices we make and stands we take. We experience love and loss, and—if we’re lucky—learn to see with new eyes. This collection brings together the moments of human experience in poems that surprise us on every page.

Whose poetry are you reading these days?

Circle of Quiet, by Madeleine L’Engle

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Memoirs come in many different forms. Some tell a chronological story, while others center around a theme. Some experiment with different structures. First published in 1972, this first in a series of memoirs by the author of A Wrinkle in Time and other beloved stories is more of a meditation, inviting us to explore with her, follow her thoughts, and see where they take us.

In the process, L’Engle gives us the kaleidoscope of her life at 51: spouse, parent, writer, teacher, choir director, member of communities large and small.

Many of her reflections are about writing in general, and specifically writing for children. She’s forthright about her years of rejections and how she felt about them. Invited to teach, she maintains that writing cannot be taught, but you can teach particular tools. Of course, she learns as much as she teaches, classroom discussions leading to new ideas.

She also defends children’s literature: its enduring appeal, its benefits for children and adults, and its literary quality.

L’Engle notes that “the concentration of a small child at play is analogous to the concentration of the artist of any discipline.” In those moments, we are not conscious of ourselves, not self-conscious. She goes on to say: “Detachment and involvement: The artist must have both. The link between them is compassion.”

At one point she says that “An author is responsible for his characters in much the same way that a parent is for his children, or a teacher for his students.” I think she means a moral responsibility, but it is still a concept that I’ve been turning over in my mind.

She speaks of her family’s years in New York City, and even more the years at Crosswicks, their rambling summer home in a small Connecticut town where at times four generations of her family live under one roof. There is much about community, and the peculiar interrelationship of people in such a small village, such as being suspicious of newcomers but still turning out to help them when they are in need.

Her portrait of the U.S. in the 1960s—the time period of this memoir—sometimes distracted me, sending my mind off into my own memories of those years. Hearing how someone the age of my parents viewed the happenings of that turbulent time sent me back to my own memories, turning them into new patterns.

She doesn’t shy away from the big subjects, such as faith, marriage, family, what might constitute a meaningful life. Still, it is her thoughts on writing that most resonate for me.

I am often, in my writing, great leaps ahead of where I am in my thinking, and my thinking has to work its way slowly up to what the “superconscious” has already shown me in a story or poem. Facing this does help to eradicate do-it-yourself hubris from an artist’s attitude towards his painting or music or writing. My characters pull me, push me, take me further than I want to go, fling open doors to rooms I don’t want to enter, throw me out into interstellar space, and all this long before my mind is ready for it.

The title comes from her need to retreat sometimes to her “circle of quiet,” a particular place at Crosswicks. We all need such a place, one where we can be our true selves. If you want a rest from the trauma Olympics of many memoirs on the market, try these reflections from a writer whose work you may know very well.

Do you have a “circle of quiet,” a place that is peculiarly your own?

Pattern of Lies, by Charles Todd

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Bess Crawford, a nursing sister on the frontlines in France near the end of the Great War, returns on leave to England to find a different kind of war being waged. Stuck in Canterbury when the London train is cancelled and all the hotels full, she runs into a former patient, Maj. Mark Ashton, who invites her to stay with him and his parents at their home in nearby Cranbourne.

What she finds is that the tiny village has turned against the Ashtons, particularly John’s father Philip. The Ashton Powder Mill, once the largest employer around and a place where workers were treated particularly well, had blown up two years previously, an explosion followed by a devastating fire, killing over a hundred men.

The Army investigated, fearing sabotage, but declared it an unfortunate accident. Due to the war, the need for gunpowder was overwhelming, and the mill had been commandeered by the Army. Despite Philip’s warnings, the new masters had the mill working flat out to meet the demand, with extra shifts and new workers brought in.

Now the villagers have become convinced that Philip Ashton is responsible for the disaster. Bess is shocked by the retaliatory actions they have taken: tearing down walls, releasing animals, spitting at anyone associated with the Ashtons, even setting fire to their house.

Given the suddenness of the accusation and its wide spread, Bess comes to believe that someone is behind the rumors, someone angry with Philip Ashton or the Ashton family. Unfortunately, the only witness to the fire is a local man now serving at the front in France who refuses to request leave to come back and make a statement.

There is almost nothing more terrifying to me than this kind of hysteria. We see it today with the firehose of misinformation. We have seen it before: Lillian Hellman described it chillingly in The Children’s Hour and Arthur Miller in The Crucible. It is almost impossible to defend oneself as rumors spread.

This mystery, seventh in the Bess Crawford series, though the first one I’ve read, is absorbing. There are plenty of twists and turns, and plenty of clues. Best of all, we get Bess’s impressions of England and France during wartime. Her duties vary from working at the front itself, escorting patients to hospital in the backlines in an ambulance under fire, and caring for patients as they are shipped back to England.

The latter gives her plenty of opportunity to visit the Ashtons, as she must pass through Canterbury, and pursue her own investigation while offering support to the family. The other characters are memorable due to the nuance with which they are rendered. I especially liked that the authors (Charles Todd is the pseudonym for mother and son Caroline and Charles Todd) avoids the standard romantic subplot.

The time period increased my enjoyment of this book. I’ve long been fascinated by the Great War, aka WWI, which changed everything for the Western world. Empires ended, colonies gained freedom, global power shifted, and the irresponsible slaughter not only decimated populations and economies but destroyed the ideal that it was glorious to die for your country. As Wilfred Owen put it: If you could have experienced what he did in the trenches

My friend, you would not tell with such high zest
To children ardent for some desperate glory,
The old Lie: Dulce et decorum est
Pro patria mori.

Do you read historical fiction? Do you have a favorite time period?

Shrines of Gaiety, by Kate Atkinson

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The story opens with the infamous Nellie Coker, owner of a string of nightclubs in 1926 London, being released from Holloway Prison at dawn. Many of the toffs and high-ranking politicians who revel at her clubs and who conspired with her in evading police scrutiny are present, a bit bedraggled by their long night dancing and drinking, to celebrate Nellie’s release, along with “the usual riffraff and rubberneckers.”

Nellie immediately has to buckle down and defend her empire from several threats.

Meanwhile Detective Chief Inspector John Frobisher, on loan to Bow Street to “root out corruption,” is one of those threats, though he is hampered by the distrust of his new colleagues, the distraction of a string of drownings of young girls, and his own ineffectual nature. He is unhappily married to a mentally ill woman; he’s not really sure why he married her except that he prevented her from jumping off a bridge.

With characteristic humor, Atkinson vividly depicts the London club scene of the time. The aftermath of the Great War is everywhere in this story, from wartime reminiscences of the doorman to the difference between men who had gone to war and those who had not. Even the reckless abandon of 1920s London is blamed on a reaction to the war.

The criminal elements are mostly played for laughs. This bumbling cast of villains reinforces Hannah Arendt’s idea of the banality of evil. Writers don’t come off much better. Frobisher’s articles requested by John Bull are never published because they are not sensational enough. Ramsey Coker wants to be a best-selling author, but is too lazy to actually write.

Atkinson has done her research on this period. However, this novel illustrates the danger of too much research. I found it an unsatisfying story of uninteresting characters.

It also illustrates the danger of using real people and their lives for a story. Real people the author only knows from reading about them don’t necessarily make for interesting characters. There’s too little detail, nothing that makes them stand out. Frobisher, “influenced” by real-life Superintendent Robert Fabian and Nellie Coker, based on the real “queen of Soho’s clubland” Kate Meyrick, never quite come to life in this story.

Nellie’s obnoxious brood seem like empty caricatures put in place for plot purposes. The two 14-year-old girls who run away to London are stock characters. There’s a prostitute with a heart of gold, two policemen on the take, a strict battleax running a hotel for women, and so on.

Only the third protagonist, fictional Gwendolen Kelling, a former librarian who has come to London in search of the two lost girls, steps off the page, displaying real emotion and unexpected competencies. A nurse during the war, she is more than equal to London’s recklessness.

The other danger of using real lives is that they rarely fit into the kind of narrative arc readers expect. Here, plot threads are abandoned without being resolved; story questions are not answered; important events are random happenings rather than growing organically out of the characters and the plot. True, a couple of threads and questions are dispatched, but too much is left unresolved for there to be a satisfactory ending.

I had to wonder why I should care about these characters and their lives when the author seemed to care so little that she would just abruptly abandon them.

Just like real life, you might say. True. And it is somewhat interesting as an experiment. Atkinson is not alone among authors questioning whether standard story structures adequately represent our lives in this world. I appreciate her willingness to tinker with the balance between reality and story. Still, it was too insubstantial a story to satisfy me.

Have you read an historical novel that includes real people as characters? What did you think of it?

A Spy Among Friends, by Ben Macintyre

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I thought I knew a lot about Kim Philby, the infamous Third Man of Cold War-era Britain. In 1951, Guy Burgess and Donald Maclean, two of Philby’s friends from university, were exposed as Russian spies, but were tipped off in time to escape to the USSR. At the time, and for years afterward, there were rumors of a third spy, a mole in England’s security service.

Macintyre’s astonishing account of Philby’s life, how he operated as a spy, and especially how he continued to escape detection until 1963, shows me how much more there is to the story. With penetrating insight, voluminous research, and access to newly opened files, Macintyre has fashioned an absorbing nonfictional narrative that helps us understand the man himself and the milieu in which he operated.

The title refers to E. M. Forster’s famous statement: “If I had to choose between betraying my country and betraying my friend, I hope I should have the guts to betray my country.” Forster spoke for a certain segment of English society. A generation later, it is the key to Philby’s choices: He gave his first loyalty to his true friends, the four schoolmates who, together with him, became known as the Cambridge spies.

Many people believed themselves to be Philby’s friends; however, extracts from his writings show what he really thought of them, even as he pretended to value them. Philby beguiled everyone he met.

The word most consistently used to describe Kim Philby was ‘charm,’ that intoxicating, beguiling, and occasionally lethal English quality. Philby could inspire and convey affection with such ease that few ever noticed they were being charmed. Male and female, old and young, rich and poor, Kim enveloped them all. He looked out at the world with alert, gentle blue eyes from under an unruly forelock. His manners were exceptional: he was always the first to offer you a drink, to ask after your sick mother and remember your children’s names. He loved to laugh, and he loved to drink – and to listen, with deep sincerity and rapt curiosity.

He was “the right sort,” a member of the tribe of Eton-educated, cricket-loving Englishmen who populated MI6—and other institutions—in class-conscious England. For such a person there was no need to inquire into their references, their past, or even their competence.

Part of what makes this book so fascinating is Macintyre’s portrayal of the competing cultures in the nascent security organisations of the time: MI6’s old-boy bonhomie, MI5’s mistrust of their rival’s upper-class blindness, the newly-formed CIA’s respect for their predecessor.

No one was more taken in than Nicholas Elliot, also of MI6. Over the thirty years that the two men worked and socialised together, Elliot never suspected that everything he shared with Philby went straight to the KGB. When the evidence finally mounted to a point in 1963 where MI6 could no longer deny the truth, they sent Elliot to debrief the man he had considered his best friend.

Using the transcript of that conversation, Macintyre fashions a stunning conclusion to this book, decoding the seemingly innocuous dialogue. A lengthy afterword by John le Carré includes his own memories of Elliot and the other players.

Subtitled Kim Philby and the Great Betrayal, this is a story that shows the human impact of these political intrigues. James Angleton, head of counter-intelligence for the CIA, also counted Philby as a friend. Macintyre’s description of the effect of Philby’s betrayal on Angleton stands in contrast to the Great Game, the name for the 19th century rivalry between Britain and Russia. Coincidentally, the term was popularised by Rudyard Kipling’s Kim, also the source of Harold Adrian Russell Philby’s nickname.

By immersing us in the moves and countermoves of individuals during the Cold War, Macintyre helps us see how it can come to seem like a game, and how it can become an addiction for men like Philby, Elliot, and Angleton. Then he shows us how the game plays out. Brilliant.

What nonfiction books have you read that are as absorbing as a novel?

The Pavilion in the Clouds, by Alexander McCall Smith

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This stand-alone novel takes place in 1938, already setting us apart from the characters because we know what is coming.

Bella Ferguson is eight and lives on the tea plantation in Ceylon, now Sri Lanka, owned by her father. She leads a charmed life: lessons with Miss White, servants to attend to her needs, a beautiful home in the clouds, where she doesn’t have to see the terrible working and living conditions of the plantation workers.

Henry and Virginia, her parents, embody the English empire, somewhat to Virginia’s discomfort. She wonders by what right they should own this land that historically belonged to the indigenous people of the island, and if indeed the British would one day be driven out.

We are uninvited guests, just as we are uninvited guests in every corner of the globe, and yet we take it upon ourselves to dictate how things should be done. That was the massive, almost unbelievable, conceit upon which the whole colonial enterprise was built, and yet nobody seemed to see.

Empire, colonialism: these are weighty subjects, but barely touched upon here.

Meanwhile, Bella has come to believe that there is something worrisome about her governess’s relationship with her father, a concern that she confides to her mother.

I’m a huge fan of Smith’s novels, especially the No. 1 Ladies’ Detective Agency series with Mma Precious Ramotswe, and the philosophical Isabel Dalhousie series, but this one—no. A trite situation: a woman suspects her husband of cheating. And the characters are boring: he is barely present, and she does nothing day after day. She had been teaching her daughter, reading her poetry, but now they have hired the English governess, so she has nothing to do but to wander about and occasionally lunch at the club. And imagine what might be going on.

Maybe I’d have been more interested if there’d been more about Ceylon besides the initial lovely but brief description of the tea plantation. Maybe if the characters hadn’t been so predictable. Maybe if several story threads had been satisfactorily tied up rather than left hanging.

Still, I appreciate Smith’s humor, his moral universe, his gentle philosophical ruminations. My favorite parts of the book center on Bella, with her dolls, Li Po and Po Chü-i, named after Chinese poets. She carries on conversations with them and attributes distinct personalities to them, while they advise her out of their great wisdom. I love the way they participate in scenes like any human character.

I may be the only person aside from Li Po who is skeptical of the ending. I don’t want to give anything away, but really! Well, perhaps I am too cynical. Time for another dose of Alexander McCall Smith’s world.

What is your favorite Alexander McCall Smith book?

Disappearing Earth, by Julia Phillips

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In the intense first chapter of this book, sisters Alyona and Sophia, ages 11 and 8, playing alone on a public beach in Petropavlovsk-Kamchatsky, a city on Russia’s Kamchatka peninsula, encounter a stranger and accept a ride home with him.

The world of this remote area of Siberia is brilliantly brought to life. We learn that it is a time of great change in Soviet Russia, leading characters to say things like:

“This could never have taken place in Soviet times.”

“You girls can’t imagine how safe it use to be. No foreigners. No outsiders. Opening the peninsula was the biggest mistake our authorities ever made”.

“Now we’re overrun with tourists, migraines. Natives. These criminals”.

Bounded by mountains and the sea, there is no way the kidnapper could have taken the girls off the peninsula without being caught, thus creating a locked-room mystery, as the author says in a Paris Review interview.

However, this is not your typical mystery that describes the investigation into the girls’ disappearance. Instead, it is a set of interlocking short stories—twelve, one for each month of a year—about various girls and women in the city and surrounding communities, some of whom knew the girls and some who did not. It is about how they are affected by what we know is a kidnapping, though the police are pressured to call it an accidental drowning to quell panic.

In this way we learn that an indigenous girl also went missing a few years earlier, but there was no investigation, no posters or campaigns such as for the two Caucasian girls. The police assumed the young teen ran away.

We also learn much about the pressures on indigenous and Caucasian women in this distant corner of Putin’s Russia. These pressures and the various kinds of violence affecting these women’s lives are recognisable to women in the author’s native U.S. and elsewhere. The author has studied Russia extensively, as shown by her brilliant evocation of this place and its people, and lived in Petropavlovsk for two years. Still, I can’t help wondering how natives of Kamchatka would describe their lives.

Some readers are thrown by the nontraditional structure of the book, with each chapter introducing new characters and seeming to stand alone. I loved it, though, recognising immediately the similarity to one of my favorite novels: Jon McGregor’s Reservoir 13, which also starts with a missing girl.

Reservoir 13, too, is not about solving the mystery of the disappearance, but rather describes the effect on the community. Each of 13 chapters details a year in the life of the village, with seasonal celebrations coming around, life going on or not, and the way the missing girl echoes down through the years. In McGregor’s book, the village is the main character, while Phillips centers each chapter on one woman. The advantage of McGregor’s structure is that we are not introduced to a new cast of characters with each chapter.

I listened to the audiobook of Disappearing Earth, and only later realised the print and ebook versions included a cast of characters and a map. I would have found both very helpful, as I had trouble remembering characters from previous chapters. Still, Phillips’s novel is a brilliant debut that introduced me to a part of the world I knew nothing about. More importantly, it immersed me in the lives of these women, their dreams, their constraints, and their strength.

Have you read a novel with a nontraditional structure? What did you think of it?

Sisters of Night and Fog, by Erika Robuck

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This absorbing historical novel follows two real women who became French Resistance fighters during World War II. Violette Szabo and Virginia d’Albert-Lake both have a history with France. Violette was born there of a French mother and English father and grew up in England to become a strong-willed Cockney. Virginia is an American who, like Violette, falls in love with and marries a Frenchman.

From the start, we are caught up in the rumors of war, brought to life through the eyes of these two women. With the stunning invasion of France, a pregnant Violette in London immediately starts campaigning to do some kind of war work, despite her father’s discouragement, a campaign that takes fire when her husband in killed in North Africa. Meanwhile, Virginia elects to remain in France with her beloved husband, invalided out early in the war.

Alternate chapters follow the two women as they find their way forward, Violette doing various kinds of war work before joining the Special Operations Executive (SOE), a secret UK intelligence agency, in the hopes of being sent to France, Virginia and her husband sheltering and helping downed pilots and escaped POWs.

Beautifully written, full of stunning scenes that we discover in the historical note at the end actually happened, this is one of those books that you simply cannot stop reading. It’s a fantastic addition to our understanding of what was happening beyond the battlefields during this showdown with fascism.

You might think that I would have had enough of women Resistance fighters after reading nonfiction books about Virginia Hall, one of the first British spies in France where she organised Resistance units and provided critical intelligence to the Allies, and Marie-Madeleine Fourcade, who also ran a Resistance operation in France, supplying critical information to MI6, the UK’s Special Intelligence Service. I thought so too until I read reviews of this book by Robuck, whom I know slightly.

Why read yet another book about World War II? One: because this is a story of real people based on Roebuck’s extensive research. Two: because many people don’t realise the role that women played in the war effort, particularly in the Resistance. Three: because it is important to remember the actual horrors of Hitler’s fascist state and the weakness of those who supported and contributed to it. Remembering the heart-breaking realities of fascism is especially critical today when the radical right, funded by amoral one-percenters, are waving swastikas and trying to persuade people in this country to do away with democracy and embrace fascism in order to fulfill their white supremacist dreams and fantasies of a nation with no freedom of religion.

In her Author’s Note, Robuck tells us how Virginia and Violette’s stories came together, “showing the different ways that women, in particular, are called to serve, how each of us has a vocation, and we cannot have peace until we become who we are meant to be. Also, ultimately, they show us that none of us can operate alone. We are all called into a community of people working together for good.”

Virginia and Violette—their courage and integrity—are an inspiration for us all.

Have you read a history—fictionalised or nonfiction—that has inspired you?

Violeta, by Isabel Allende

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I haven’t read all of Allende’s novels, but I’ve read a few and enjoyed most of them, so I was glad when my book club chose her most recent (2022) novel. It is the story of a life, written as a letter from Violeta, now 100 years old, to Camilo, whose identity only becomes clear as we get fairly far into the book.

She begins with her birth in 1920, the year when the influenza pandemic which began in 1918 in the battlefields of the Great War finally finds its way to her unnamed South American country. Reaching the end of her life as the COVID pandemic takes hold provides a neat framework for a story whose characters try to determine their own fate, especially the strong-willed Violeta, but are often stymied by world events.

The beginning is full of warm humor, like the best Allende novels. Violeta is born after a raft of boy children—we never learn all their names and even their mother can never remember their ages. Her mother “loved her sons, in theory, but in practice she preferred to keep them at a comfortable distance” and “felt doomed to bear only sons, like a curse from the Devil.” So she doesn’t believe her sister when she says the baby is a girl.

Then there’s is the English governess imported to tame the spoiled little girl, who turns out to be anything but the matronly, old-fashioned woman they expected. Miss Taylor is Irish and only in her twenties, dressed in the latest English fashion and wearing makeup, who soon meets a local woman who recruits her to the Suffragette cause.

However, events move quickly—we do have 100 years to get through—and some things get dropped, such as the maternal grandmother who sits silently in the conservatory and is never mentioned again, though she has somehow disappeared a few pages later. There were incidents that I wanted to hear more about, but they are briefly narrated along with everything else.

I think the narration—pure exposition with almost nothing in the way of dramatic scenes—is the main reason the people in my book club began to lose interest in the book after the beginning. For me, an additional reason was that it all began to sound very familiar.

I’d recently read Allende’s memoir Paula, a letter written to her comatose daughter as Allende sat by Paula’s bedside. I thought it would be about Paula, but it is Allende’s life along with her memories of her parents and grandparents. It is also narrated and covering the same period, the same events as this book. Harder to read, though, because the paragraphs go on for pages, unbroken.

Similarly, Violeta was started in response to the death of Allende’s mother at the beginning of the COVID pandemic. The two had exchanged letters daily whenever they were apart throughout Allende’s life. The author has said in interviews that her characters start with a real person whom she then modifies to become the character for a story, adding a dollop of herself as good writers do. Having read the memoir, though, it seems to me that, while this book supposedly is based on her mother’s life, it is much more about Allende’s. Hence my feeling that I’d already read this book.

One thing I found interesting about it is that, instead of following a traditional (in Western literature) story structure of action in pursuit of a goal that rises to a climax, Allende employs an episodic structure. The most famous example of that kind of structure is Don Quixote, but the difference is that Cervantes’s novel has an overarching theme, where this one does not seem to have one. Nothing ties the episodes together except that they are all part of Violeta’s life. I may be missing something.

Each episode is narrated—told, not shown—sometimes engaging and sometimes not. One person read aloud part of a section dealing with a political event that, as she put it, sounded like something out of a political pamphlet. We also felt that the references to it being a letter to Camilo felt like they’d been dropped in here and there after the book was finished, rather than being an organic part of the story.

Some people didn’t finish the book; others did and enjoyed it but, as one person said, forgot it as soon as she turned the last page. We agreed, though, that based on our love of other books by Allende, we would be willing to read her work.

Do you have a favorite novel by Isabel Allende that you would recommend?

Paradise, by Abdulrazak Gurnah

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In one of my writing classes, we were discussing Isak Dineson’s memoir Out of Africa with its haunting opening: “I had a farm in Africa, at the foot of the Ngong Hills.” She goes on to describe the beauty of the landscape: “There was no fat on it and no luxuriance anywhere; it was Africa distilled up through six thousand feet.” She gives us the burnt colors like pottery, the spice-scented grass, and “the crooked bare old thorn-trees,” ending with “Everything that you saw made for greatness and freedom, and unequalled nobility.”

Since we were talking about setting and how to describe it through the perceptions of your main character, we speculated as to how someone from one of the tribes displaced by the colonial powers would describe the same setting.

In this second novel from Gurnah, who was born in Zanzibar—now part of Tanzania—and won the Nobel Prize, we find that important perspective so missing in Western literature. Yusuf, a rural Muslim boy who leaves his home at twelve, remembers:

. . . it was the season of drought, when every day was the same as the last. Unexpected flowers bloomed and died. Strange insects scuttled from under rocks and writhed to their deaths in the burning light. The sun made distant trees tremble in the air and made the houses shudder and heave for breath. Clouds of dust puffed up at every tramping footfall and a hard-edged stillness lay over the daylight hours.

Told he’s going on a visit with the man he’s been taught to call Uncle Asiz, a wealthy trader, Yusuf later learns he has been given in payment for his father’s debts and that Asiz is his seyyid or master, not his uncle. The boy is put to work in the store under Kahlil, an older Indian, also collateral for his father’s debt, who introduces him to the complex society of precolonial urban East Africa.

Yusuf’s story unfolds gradually. He begins volunteering to help the elderly gardener in Asiz’s gorgeous walled garden. When he’s 17, Asiz takes him on a trading trip to the interior, leaving him for years with one of his trading partners in a small village, before returning to take him even deeper in the hills. It becomes an epic journey into the heart of a country on the verge of change. They encounter disease, raging rivers, and hostile tribes, as well as a gorgeous waterfall that is said to be the gates of Paradise. Later Yusuf is brought back to town and the garden he loves, yet which becomes his undoing.

The seyyid could travel deep into strange lands in a cloud of perfume, armed only with a bag of trinkets and a sure knowledge of his superiority. The white man in the forest feared nothing as he sat under his flag, ringed by armed soldiers. But Yusuf had neither a flag or righteous knowledge with which to claim superior honour, and he thought he understood that the small world he knew was the only one available to him.

Although Yusuf is a slave, this is not structured like a traditional slave narrative which is about escaping to freedom. Instead, it is a coming-of-age story in which Yusuf seems to make the best of each new adventure. Terrified at times, he doesn’t rebel against being a slave. He doesn’t complain about his exile from each of the homes he’s found or try to escape, even as the dangers grow and the risks more terrifying. Then, as the walled garden turns into a place of danger, the rumored encroachment of the German colonizers becomes a reality.

It appears to be a retelling of the story of Joseph in the Koran, at least in part. Published in 1994 and shortlisted for the Booker prize, Paradise is set just before the World War I and provides an unforgettable portrait of precolonial East African society.

What book have you read set in East Africa?