Books like The World of Yesterday
Zweig's memoir of the lost cosmopolitan Europe of his youth, written in Brazilian exile and sent to his publisher on the day he and his wife took their lives.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of The World of Yesterday
The Tongue Set Free
Canetti remembers his childhood from 1905 to 1921, in a Sephardic Jewish family in Bulgaria, Manchester, Vienna and Zurich, and the mother who taught him German.
A Sorrow Beyond Dreams
Seven weeks after his mother killed herself, Handke wrote this compact account of her life to keep her from vanishing into the ordinary.
Speak, Memory
Nabokov remembers his St. Petersburg childhood and émigré youth, from butterfly summers on the family estate to Cambridge and Berlin, in prose built like a chess problem.
Istanbul: Memories and the City
Pamuk's memoir of growing up in Istanbul in the 1950s and 60s, of his family, and of the melancholy of the city, which Turks call hüzün.
A Tale of Love and Darkness
Amos Oz's memoir of growing up in Jerusalem in the 1940s and 50s, the only child of bookish European Jews, and of the loss of his mother when he was twelve.
Beware of Pity
A young Austro-Hungarian lieutenant's thoughtless kindness to a paralysed girl entangles him in an impossible engagement on the eve of the First World War.
The Years
A collective memoir of France from 1940 to 2006, told through one woman's photographs and memories and the songs, slogans and objects of each period, without ever saying I.
Reading Lolita in Tehran
Azar Nafisi, a literature professor forced out of her university in the Islamic Republic, gathers seven of her best women students at her house every Thursday to read forbidden Western novels.
Native Realm
Miłosz's autobiography of his education, from a childhood in Lithuania through the war in Warsaw to his defection, as a search for a European identity.
Peeling the Onion
Grass's memoir of his boyhood in Danzig, his war, including his service as a teenager in the Waffen-SS, and his years of becoming a writer.
The Dark Child
Camara Laye remembers growing up in Kouroussa in French Guinea, the son of a goldsmith with magical gifts, until he leaves for school in Conakry and then for Paris.
Abandoning a Cat
A short memoir of Murakami's father, a teacher drafted into the war in China, that starts from a childhood afternoon when the two of them left a cat at the beach and found it waiting at home.