Five Books Guaranteed to Expand Your Understanding of the World 2021

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo

At 192 pages, this small novel packs a punch, delivering incisive salvos on the subject of gender discrimination in South Korea. Embedding statistics and commentary in a traditional prose structure, Cho Nam-Joo exposes her country’s mistreatment of women and girls through the eyes of the eponymous protagonist as she manoeuvres a maze of casual and malevolent sexism, beginning at girlhood through her early thirties, when she suffers a mental breakdown.

As a child, Jiyoung, she quickly learns her lowly place in society from family coaching and admonishments, barely recognising that the naked, special attention her parents and grandmother shower on her younger brother for being a boy constitutes gender discrimination. In middle school, she realises that different rules apply to teenage boys and girls, that protesting sexist policies invites backlash, a reality that colours her professional life and marriage to a well-meaning but insensitive man.

While Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 undeniably focuses on Korean society, the protagonist’s experiences as a woman navigating a sexist world resonate universally.

King Leopold’s Ghost: A Story of Greed, Terror and Heroism in Africa by Adam Hochschild

Dark, poignant and ever engaging, Adam Hochschild’s accessible and beautifully detailed history book delves into Belgium’s King Leopold II’s quest for self-aggrandisement and the schemes hatched to attain the area now known as Congo to satisfy that very purpose. Between 1885 and 1908, Belgium’s king perpetrated a holocaust that saw roughly 10 million Africans lose their lives to disease, forced labour, torture and military raids, a grotesque feat accomplished through agents exploiting the land on his behalf, first for ivories, and then during Europe’s industrial revolution, for rubber.

Aside from detailing Leopold’s machinations and fanciful life in Europe, King Leopold’s Ghost covers the lives of brave Africans, foreign journalists, activists and missionaries who fought to end his reign of terror over the Congo Free State, the territory the king administered as his personal fiefdom.

Most striking about Hochschild’s rendition of this brutal yet inspiring chapter of human history is his unflinching portrayal of the not-so-shiny facets of the heroes’ lives, showcasing their hypocrisy, distorted views of Africans as “noble savages,” and white saviour beliefs, just as he does the complicity of past and present African rulers in pillaging the Congo and its people.

Dominicana by Angie Cruz

Forbidden romance, marginalisation, domestic abuse, new beginnings and its attendant challenges take centre stage in Angie Cruz’s coming-of-age novel about Dominican transplants living in 1960s New York. Fifteen year-old Ana marries Juan, a much older man living in New York and regarded by her family as their path out of poverty. But soon after they leave the Dominican Republic for America, she finds life in the new city suffocating and painfully lonely due to language barrier and her abusive husband’s jealousy. Prohibited from leaving the house without him, she befriends the pigeons that occasionally perch on her balcony while cursing her husband’s girlfriend, whose belongings she finds in the apartment shortly after her arrival.

When civil unrest breaks out in the Dominican Republic, prompting Juan’s trip back home, he entrusts his now pregnant wife to his laidback, freewheeling younger brother, César. With him, Ana feels alive again, they explore the city and embark on a new business. But when their warm, easy-going friendship trespasses into verboten territory, potentially threatening their lives and her family’s pathway to America, Ana must choose between happiness and loyalty to her family.

With easy, lyrical prose and light humour, Cruz brings truth, empathy and compassion to the immigration experience in America.

The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett

Identical twins, Stella and Desiree, light enough to pass for white in America's segregated Deep South, live in a small, provincial town, whose black residents strive to keep its founder’s aim of maintaining the community's light-skin tone and one-foot high social standing among white Americans. When economic circumstances preclude the teenage girls from attending school, they work as cleaners for a white family, until one day, brimming with dreams, Stella convinces Desiree to elope with her to neighbouring New Orleans. Before long, though, Stella’s restive spirit wants more from life, driving her to abruptly abandon her twin in a bid to disguise her new identity as a white woman. Many years later, their lives, once inseparable, entwine in ways neither expect.

Rich and evocative, precise and piercing, Bennett’s prose paints an immersive story about identity, what it means to be enslaved by it, and whether we have a right to reinterpret it to free ourselves from the walls of society’s restrictions and expectations.

The Hundred Year Old Man Who Climbed Out the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson

If you think hundred-year-olds can’t have fun, then you’re in for a wild ride in Jonas Jonasson’s farce of a novel centred on a political illiterate forever embroiled in political situations that turn into year-long adventures. The story opens in a small Swedish town, where a bored Allan Karlsson climbs out of his window at the Old People’s Home on his birthday and boards a bus with a criminal’s suitcase he managed to nab while they used the toilet. His disappearing acts set off two search parties, one driven by concern, the other by revenge.

Allan’s past, eventful life as a bomb expert unfolds as the plot progresses, detailing his involvement in a myriad historical moments like the Spanish Revolution and encounters with public figures like Stalin and Roosevelt, marking his incongruity with the saner, slower world of his present dwelling. But a centenarian on an adventure needs friends, and with luck and serendipity, Allan finds just enough of them–and an elephant to boot–to outrun the police and gangsters hot on his trail.

Fast-paced, comical and thrillingly improbable, Jonasson explores political and religious ideologies with a breezy, conversational style while succeeding to entertain the restless, daring kid in all of us.

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