Books like 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.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Desertion
Heat and Dust
A young Englishwoman travels to India to find out what happened to her grandfather's first wife, Olivia, who in 1923 left her husband for an Indian prince.
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.
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.
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.
Homegoing
Two half-sisters born in eighteenth-century Ghana never meet: Effia marries a British slaver and lives in comfort at Cape Coast Castle, while Esi is imprisoned in its dungeons and shipped to America, and the novel follows their descendants, one chapter each, to the present.
The Old Drift
In 1904 at the Old Drift, a settlement on the Zambezi near Victoria Falls, an Englishman's blunder sets three families, African, European and Indian, on paths that will cross over the next century in Zambia and into its near future.
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.
Desert
Two stories braided together: the Blue Men of the Sahara driven north by French colonial troops in 1909 and 1910, and Lalla, a girl descended from them, growing up decades later in a shantytown on the Moroccan coast.
Segu
In the late eighteenth century, the family of Dousika Traore, a nobleman of the Bambara kingdom of Segu in what is now Mali, is scattered by Islam, the slave trade and colonialism.
The Lover
A fifteen-year-old French girl begins a passionate affair with a Chinese man in 1930s Saigon.
Half a Lifelong Romance
Shen Shijun, a young engineer in 1930s Shanghai, falls for Gu Manzhen, a colleague, and over the years their love is pulled apart by family and circumstance.
A Grain of Wheat
In a Kenyan village in the days before independence in 1963, the villagers want to honour Mugo, a quiet man they believe was a hero of the Mau Mau struggle.