Books like Afterlives
In a small town on the East African coast early in the twentieth century, Ilyas, taken from his parents as a boy by the German colonial troops, comes home, and Hamza, a young man who enlisted in the same army, goes off to the First World War.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Afterlives
Paradise
Yusuf, a twelve-year-old boy in East Africa early in the twentieth century, is handed over by his father to the merchant Aziz to pay a debt, and travels with his caravans into the interior.
The Shadow King
In 1935, as Mussolini's army invades Ethiopia, Hirut, an orphaned servant girl, joins the women who fight, and helps disguise a peasant as the emperor Haile Selassie.
Desertion
In 1899 an Englishman, Martin Pearce, stumbles out of the desert into a small town on the East African coast, is nursed back to health by a shopkeeper's family, and falls in love with the shopkeeper's sister.
Weep Not, Child
Njoroge, a boy in colonial Kenya, is the first in his family to go to school, and dreams of education as the Mau Mau rising tears his family apart.
Half of a Yellow Sun
In 1960s Nigeria, Ugwu, a village boy, becomes houseboy to Odenigbo, a radical lecturer in Nsukka whose lover Olanna is the daughter of a rich Lagos family, and the Biafran war is coming.
One of Ours
Claude Wheeler, a restless Nebraska farm boy who feels he was meant for something larger, finds it when America enters the First World War.
Regeneration
In 1917 the poet Siegfried Sassoon, a decorated officer who has publicly refused to go on fighting, is sent to Craiglockhart War Hospital in Edinburgh to be treated by the psychiatrist W. H. R. Rivers.
This Earth of Mankind
Minke, a brilliant young Javanese student at a Dutch school in colonial Surabaya in the 1890s, falls for Annelies, daughter of Nyai Ontosoroh, the formidable concubine of a Dutch planter.
At Night All Blood Is Black
A Senegalese soldier in a French trench in WWI descends into a private madness after his childhood friend dies in his arms.
Dragon Seed
Ling Tan, a farmer in a village outside Nanking, and his family see the Japanese army arrive in 1937 and have to decide how to live, and resist, under occupation.
Birdsong
In 1910 Stephen Wraysford, a young Englishman sent to Amiens to learn the textile trade, falls in love with the unhappy wife of his host; six years later he is an officer in the trenches a few miles away.
And Where Were You, Adam?
Linked episodes of the German retreat from Romania and Hungary in 1944, following a soldier, Feinhals, among men who no longer believe in anything.