Topic
Africa
7 reading guides and book lists curated by the Editors Reads team.
7 posts
Where to Start with Beryl Markham: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Beryl Markham — how to approach West with the Night, her essential memoir of Africa and aviation. A complete reading guide.
Best Books About Colonialism and Empire: Essential Reading
The best books about colonialism and empire — from Heart of Darkness and Things Fall Apart to A Passage to India and Half of a Yellow Sun. Essential postcolonial reading.
Best Postcolonial Literature: Essential Reading on Empire and Its Aftermath
The best postcolonial literature — from Things Fall Apart and Heart of Darkness to A Passage to India and The Quiet American. Empire, colonialism, and their aftermath.
Where to Start with Doris Lessing: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Doris Lessing — whether to begin with The Golden Notebook, The Grass Is Singing, or Martha Quest. A complete reading guide to the Nobel laureate.
Where to Start with Paul Theroux: A Reading Guide
Where to start with Paul Theroux — whether to begin with The Great Railway Bazaar or Dark Star Safari. A complete reading guide to the foremost American travel writer.
Books Like West with the Night: Aviation and Adventure Memoirs
Beryl Markham's West with the Night — which Hemingway called the best thing he had read in years — combines aviation adventure, colonial Kenya, and prose of astonishing authority. These books share its qualities: the extraordinary life rendered in extraordinary prose.
Books Like The Poisonwood Bible: Africa, Colonialism, and the American Family Abroad
Barbara Kingsolver's Baptist missionary who takes his family to the Belgian Congo in 1959 — and the five female voices who tell what happens to them there — is the defining American novel about colonialism. These books share its multiple perspectives on a family under pressure, and its political seriousness about what the West does to the world it tries to save.
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