True to Life

Kim
Rudyard Kipling, 1901

In what is often considered his best novel, the Bombay-born Kipling unfolds the “panorama of India,” as a New York Times review said at the time, exposing the forces of Hinduism and imperialism in the British-ruled subcontinent.

The Good Earth
Pearl S. Buck, 1931

For its depiction of a rural family in pre-communist China, this book won a Pulitzer, became a bestseller, and helped make Buck, who grew up in the village of Zhenjiang, the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in literature. Some argue the novel later helped Americans empathize with their Chinese allies during World War II.

The Quiet American
Graham Greene, 1955

This novel’s protagonist — a British war correspondent in French Indochina, as Greene himself was — clashes with an American official over a Vietnamese woman, in a narrative that presciently characterized the American presence in Vietnam. Greene, an acerbic critic of U.S. policy, was later tracked by the American government for 40 years.

The Things They Carried

Tim O’Brien, 1990

This series of linked stories about a U.S. platoon in Vietnam draws from the author’s own experiences as an infantryman, revealing a narrative that a Boston Globe review called “so searing and immediate you can almost hear the choppers in the background.”

The Yacoubian Building
Alaa Al Aswany, 2002

Aswany — a dentist and writer who helped give voice to protesters in Tahrir Square last year — won praise for this bestselling novel, a portrait of the cultural and political decay in Cairo that simmered to a boil in the recent revolution.

Pretty Birds
Scott Simon, 2005

After reporting on the Bosnian war for NPR, Simon debuted as a novelist with Pretty Birds — the tale of a half-Muslim 16-year-old girl in war-torn Sarajevo who trains to be a sniper as her family faces ethnic persecution.

What Is the What
Dave Eggers, 2006

This chronicle of a Lost Boy‘s journey from war-torn Sudan to Atlanta is based on the harrowing experiences of refugee Valentino Achak Deng, who told his story to Eggers, a journalist by training.

Terrorist
John Updike, 2006

The plot of Updike’s 22nd novel reads like any number of post-9/11 news stories, tracing an American-born Muslim teenager’s alienation from his life in New Jersey and his turn toward religious fundamentalism.