7 Striking Books That Prove ‘Great Literature’ is More Than the Classics

THE MAP OF SALT AND STARS is altogether realistic and fantastical, telling a coming-of-age story of a Syrian refugee utilizing elements of magical realism and alternating timelines. In the summer of 2011, Nour loses her father to cancer, and her family moves to Syria to be closer to her relatives. To cope with both loss and her changing reality, Nour tells herself her favorite story she and her dad shared: the story of Rawiya, a girl living in the twelfth century who disguised herself as a boy to become a mapmaker’s apprentice. When the war in Syria escalates and a shell hits Nour’s home, her family is forced to flee across the Middle East and North Africa to safety, utilizing the same route that Rawiya took on her travels.  

Written in 1987, BORDERLANDS/LA FRONTERA continues to be a seminal piece of Chicana literature and Anzaldúa’s most famous work. The crux of this book is Anzaldúa’s concept of the “borderland,” used to refer to the blurred border between the United States and Mexico and the mixing of cultures, as well as the invisible borders between genders, sexualities, and races.   The essays and poems that compose BORDERLANDS/LA FRONTERA are semi-autobiographical in nature, drawing on Anzaldúa’s experiences as a Chicana lesbian. Additionally, several passages are written in Spanish, disrupting the dominance of the English language in global literature. 

Gyasi’s first novel is a superbly researched multigenerational novel told from multiple perspectives. HOMEGOING starts in eighteenth-century Ghana, where two half-sisters are born in different villages. One sister marries an Englishman and lives out her life in comfort at Cape Coast Castle. The other is captured in a raid and imprisoned in the very same castle and sold into slavery. HOMEGOING then follows the parallel lives of their descendants, taking us to the Gold Coast, the plantations of Mississippi, and Jazz Age Harlem, and discusses themes such as colorism and belonging. A standout character for me was Yaw, a history teacher at a boys’ high school in Ghana, who teaches the boys that those who have power are the ones who get to write the story. 

In EXIT WEST, Hamid takes a unique approach to a global narrative with the introduction of magical doors that transport individuals to anywhere in the world. Exit West starts in an unnamed city on the edge of war, where protagonists Nadia and Saeed meet and fall in love. When the conflict escalates and Saeed’s mother is killed by stray gunfire, Nadia and Saeed begin hearing rumors about doors that whisk people far away, for a price. Desperate to escape, Nadia and Saeed pay a man for access to a door and are whisked away to a refugee camp on Mykonos. Through Nadia and Saeed’s movement from Mykonos to London to California, and the strain it puts on their relationship, EXIT WEST comments on the current refugee crisis at both the global and the individual level. 

“Let’s say that you are a sixty-nine-year-old Jamaican man called Stanford, or Stan for short, who once faked your own death.” So begins THESE GHOSTS ARE FAMILY, Card’s debut novel. The book starts out with Stanford Solomon, a man who faked his own death and stole the identity of his best friend. As Stanford reaches the end of his life, he is attended to by his home health aide, his firstborn daughter, Irene Paisley, whom he is meeting for the first time. From there, THESE GHOSTS ARE FAMILY takes us from colonial Jamaica to present-day Harlem, examining themes such as history, slavery, and migration through the actions of Stanford and the individuals that constitute the Paisley family. 

A Kenyan-born Somali poet, writer, artist, and activist currently based in London, Shire documents narratives of journey and trauma in this work. Her poetic range is on full display in TEACHING MY MOTHER HOW TO GIVE BIRTH, her debut pamphlet. While reading, what struck me most  was how Shire wove together the ideas of place and body. In “Conversations About Home,” she notes how the body reacts to immigration (“My body is burning with the shame of not belonging, my body is longing”), and in “Grandfather’s Hands,” Shire flips this idea, as she discusses the relationship between two lovers in geographic terms (“Your grandparents often found themselves in dark rooms, mapping out each other's bodies, claiming whole countries with their mouths”). 

ANIMAL’S PEOPLE, inspired by the 1984 Bhopal disaster, provides a multifaceted glance at corruption and transnationalism and the potential pitfalls of social justice efforts. The story is a translation of a series of recorded tapes from the teenaged Animal, named so because of his twisted spine that forces him to walk on all fours. His deformity is a result of a local factory’s gas leak, which spewed poison gas over his home city of Khaufpur. Through Animal’s candid, unapologetic storytelling, the reader is provided a glimpse into his life and the lives of Khaufpur’s residents, including Ma Franci, the elderly nun who raised him, and Nisha, the girlfriend of the local resistance leader. When Elli Barber, a young American doctor, opens up a free clinic for Khaufpur’s residents, she struggles to assuage their suspicions about her motives and must rely on Animal to convince them that she is not there to harm them.