How do you define “summer reading”? For Alexandra Sharp, writer of FP’s World Brief newsletter, a thrilling novel reminiscent of the TV show Succession fits the bill. For Cameron Abadi, co-host of the Ones and Tooze podcast, it’s a philosophical inquiry-cum-memoir into the concept of freedom. And for columnist Howard W. French, it looks like a comprehensive—but lively—economic history of the 20th century.
How do you define “summer reading”? For Alexandra Sharp, writer of FP’s World Brief newsletter, a thrilling novel reminiscent of the TV show Succession fits the bill. For Cameron Abadi, co-host of the Ones and Tooze podcast, it’s a philosophical inquiry-cum-memoir into the concept of freedom. And for columnist Howard W. French, it looks like a comprehensive—but lively—economic history of the 20th century.
Below, you’ll find recommendations of all stripes from FP’s columnists and reporters for your next page-turner this summer.
Cloud Cuckoo Land: A Novel
Anthony Doerr (Scribner, 640 pp., $30, September 2021)
One of my favorite books that I’ve read this year is Anthony Doerr’s 2021 novel, Cloud Cuckoo Land, a gorgeously written and imaginative work of fiction that spans almost six centuries and is reminiscent of David Mitchell’s ambitious epic, Cloud Atlas. Doerr transports you from ancient Constantinople to Idaho to a futuristic interstellar ship, weaving together five seemingly independent storylines that are, ultimately, tied together by a reverence for books and the power of storytelling.
My one word of caution is that this is not a quick read; at 640 pages, Cloud Cuckoo Land is the kind of book that is best relished on a plush couch with hours of reading time. But it is, in my view, absolutely worth diving into.
—Christina Lu, FP’s reporter covering energy and the environment
Slouching Towards Utopia: An Economic History of the Twentieth Century
J. Bradford DeLong (Basic Books, 624 pp., $35, September 2022)
I’ve been reading a lot about economics lately, from Zachary D. Carter’s terrific The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes to Branko Milanovic’s eye-opening Global Inequality: A New Approach for the Age of Globalization. These books pair very well with J. Bradford DeLong’s Slouching Towards Utopia. All of them share an impressive depth of knowledge of economics with the ability to render complex ideas in an approachable way for non-specialists. And they accomplish this, moreover, without dumbing things down in the least.
As someone who writes often about Africa, DeLong’s book impressed me for the way it clearly brings home the difficulties that countries face in seeking prosperity. One is tempted in light of his arguments to call them all but insuperable. As DeLong, an economic historian, makes clear, no countries have joined the club of rich nations in the postwar era save for European beneficiaries of the U.S. Marshall Plan, a small number of U.S. clients and allies in East Asia, and a handful of states that are enormously well endowed in oil and gas. In addition, DeLong’s writing is always crisp and lively.
—Howard W. French, FP columnist
Age of Vice: A Novel
Deepti Kapoor (Riverhead Books, 560 pp., $30, January 2023)
Fans of Succession, look no further than Deepti Kapoor’s dark, twisted saga Age of Vice. Instead of a ruthless media conglomerate, though, meet the Wadia family: a wealthy business empire steeped in corruption, drugs, politics, and—of course—murder. Set in modern New Delhi with flashbacks across India, Kapoor’s 2023 novel follows playboy heir Sunny, who must learn what true ruthlessness entails; his devoted servant Ajay, riddled with anger and guilt; and the inquisitive reporter Neda, forever enraptured by a world she never quite fits into.
Age of Vice begins with a devastating car crash—five dead and a servant behind the wheel—before spiraling into a storm of betrayal, loss, and passion. Lavish mansions mix with crowded slums, and children sold into labor find themselves trapped in the dazzling lights of exotic nightclubs. A thrilling read, Age of Vice reveals the warped underbelly of wealth and power.
—Alexandra Sharp, FP’s World Brief writer
Free: A Child and a Country at the End of History
Lea Ypi (W.W. Norton & Company, 288 pp., $27.95, January 2022)
There are plenty of novels that have philosophical themes, just as there are many works of philosophy with novelistic qualities. Political theorist Lea Ypi’s Free nevertheless seems to strike a new balance between these modes of humanism—namely, by giving equal weight to each. The result feels like an entirely new literary form.
Ypi’s philosophical inquiry into the concept of freedom is embedded in her biographical experience of growing up in Albania, first under communism and then the capitalist democracy that followed. The ubiquitous cliches of political life—under both systems—are thus undone in dual fashion: both by the analytical precision of the present-day philosopher and the inquisitive innocence of the child at the story’s center.
—Cameron Abadi, co-host of FP’s Ones and Tooze podcast
Our Enemies Will Vanish: The Russian Invasion and Ukraine’s War of Independence
Yaroslav Trofimov (Penguin Press, 400 pp., $32, January 2024)
Two years after the fact is probably too soon to write a full-fledged history of the most transformative conflict on the European continent in decades. But if you’re a native Ukrainian and Russian speaker and the best sourced reporter in Ukraine, it might not matter.
Yaroslav Trofimov, the Wall Street Journal’s chief foreign-affairs correspondent, has been the dominant reporter on the ground during the most important foreign-policy earthquakes of the past half-decade, including Russia’s invasion of Ukraine. His latest book, Our Enemies Will Vanish, is part travelogue through the front lines in Ukraine, part fly on the wall in Ukrainian President Volodymyr Zelensky’s inner sanctum. Whatever you want to call it, it is absolutely the best in class of the recent crop of reported books chronicling the first two years of Russia’s war.
—Jack Detsch, FP’s Pentagon and national security reporter
Brotherhood
Mohamed Mbougar Sarr, trans. Alexia Trigo (Europa Editions, 208 pp., $17, July 2021, paperback)
Three years after winning France’s prestigious Prix Goncourt, Senegalese novelist Mohamed Mbougar Sarr has been getting a lot of deserved accolades in the international press since his magical-realist literary mystery, The Most Secret Memory of Men, was translated into English last year. While his latest book is well worth reading, it’s Sarr’s first novel, translated by Alexia Trigo as Brotherhood, that deserves more attention—especially from the Foreign Policy crowd.
Written when Sarr was just 24 years old, Brotherhood is a short, intense character study of a family and a community torn apart by the fundamentalist conquest of their city. The novel is set in a town in the not-so-fictionalized country of Sumal, modeled on cities such as Gao and Timbuktu in northern Mali—a region that had been open and multiethnic before jihadis took over and imposed sharia, or Islamic law; burned ancient manuscripts; and banned the playing of music in a country that has produced many world-famous musicians.
At just over 200 pages, Brotherhood is tightly plotted and riveting. The atmosphere is tense, the characters are few, and the prose is spare. This book is not for the faint of heart; the first page features a public execution. Yet Sarr offers a profound meditation on the psychology of fundamentalists and those who resist them alongside astute observations about the collective behavior of communities under the yoke of authoritarian rule—the sorts of lucid passages that would make many a jargon-laden political theorist envious.
Ten years after Brotherhood was first published in French, as jihadi groups spread throughout West Africa to countries once deemed safe from extremists and as military regimes stage coups and shore up their power across the region, Sarr’s imagined country seems more real than ever.
—Sasha Polakow-Suransky, FP deputy editor
The Origins of European Integration: The Pre-History of Today’s European Union, 1937-1951
Mathieu Segers (Cambridge University Press, 255 pp., $29.99, November 2023, paperback)
Everyone interested in postwar Europe should read The Origins of European Integration by Mathieu Segers, one of the finest Europe scholars in the Netherlands. Segers—who recently died, much too young—was a historian at Maastricht University. This book, his last, is an academic but readable account of the intellectual debates that shaped Europe after World War II.
It is often said that European integration was a response to the war. But as Segers recounts in fascinating detail, grandiose, competing plans for the future of Europe were already being floated in the 1920s and ’30s. The United States and Britain supported a trans-Atlantic International Trade Organisation, while diverse European groups proposed social, political, and economic reconciliation in small steps. Segers, impressed by so much intellectual imagination (“quite a contrast with today’s intellectual poverty”), calls it a “battle of the blueprints.” The European tendency to match “liberalism with socialism, enlightenment with romanticism” was at odds with the “‘Atlantic imagination’ of a ‘better world,’” he writes.
The small-steps approach prevailed. First, Adolf Hitler’s war and the collapse of the European order tempered everyone’s plans. Instead of abstract projects, Europeans prioritized reconstruction and peace. Second, the emergence of a common enemy—totalitarian communism—led European planners to stop competing and make compromises instead. The United States, concerned about the looming Cold War, decided to support this practical, hands-on approach. A good choice: This, ultimately, is what gave Europe peace and prosperity.
—Caroline de Gruyter, FP columnist
Fire & Blood
George R.R. Martin (Bantam, 736 pp., $35, November 2018)
I promise I’m not just trying to sneak dragons into Foreign Policy’s pages. A prequel to George R.R. Martin’s immensely popular A Game of Thrones series (within the universe of A Song of Ice and Fire), Fire & Blood chronicles the fictional Targaryen dynasty and is written more like a history book than a novel. It has also now been turned into a hit HBO TV show, House of the Dragon.
But as someone steeped in geopolitics on a daily basis, I was struck by the many parallels to our contemporary and very real world—leaders weak and strong, constantly shifting alliances, the forceful annexation of territory presented as a rightful claim, and mutual assured destruction (which in the book, of course, is represented by dragons). It’s a good summer read for those looking for a literary escape—in a manner of speaking.
—Rishi Iyengar, FP’s reporter covering the intersection of geopolitics and technology
The Frontier Complex: Geopolitics and the Making of the India-China Border, 1846-1962
Kyle J. Gardner (Cambridge University Press, 302 pp., $41.99, January 2022, paperback)
In June 2020, a clash took place between Indian and Chinese troops in the Galwan Valley along the disputed Sino-Indian border. Twenty Indian soldiers were killed in the skirmish, as well as at least four of their Chinese counterparts. Despite periodic ongoing tensions, this was the first time that lives had been lost in a Sino-Indian Himalayan border clash since 1975.
For decades, journalists and academics have written extensively about the roots of the border dispute and the short but brutal 1962 Sino-Indian War. However, in recent years, a handful of scholars have turned to newly accessible archives to generate a more complex account of the sources of these tensions. The Frontier Complex by Kyle J. Gardner, a historian and nonresident senior fellow at the Atlantic Council’s South Asia Center, is an exemplary contribution to this genre. In his deftly researched book, Gardner demonstrates how colonial cartographic processes reflecting geopolitical interests helped shape the fraught Himalayan frontier. This colonial legacy, he shows, set the stage for an enduring rivalry between two Asian giants.
—Sumit Ganguly, FP columnist
Inked: Tattooed Soldiers and the Song Empire’s Penal-Military Complex
Elad Alyagon (Harvard University Asia Center, 276 pp., $49.95, March 2023)
Chinese military history is badly underwritten. Today, China has more than 2 million men under arms, most of them from a few poverty-stricken rural provinces; we have almost as little written about them as we do their predecessors of a millennium ago. That’s what makes scholar Elad Alyagon’s Inked such an exceptional book. In this account of the way state control was written onto the bodies of the Song dynasty’s soldiers, Alyagon unearths a hidden history of not just Chinese military power but of crime, punishment, and the borderlands.
—James Palmer, FP’s China Brief writer
Crossing the Line: A Year in the Land of Apartheid
William Finnegan (Persea, 434 pp., $15.59, October 2006, paperback)
I remember exactly where I was on Feb. 11, 1990, the day Nelson Mandela was released from prison after 27 years. I was glued to a television with my housemates at Vassar College. Yet while the struggle for freedom in South Africa was taking place during my late teens and early 20s, my interests in Africa were 4,000 miles to the north in Egypt, Algeria, Tunisia, Libya, and Morocco. Then, late last year, my wife and I picked South Africa for a family trip we had been talking about for a few years. In preparation, I handed my kids a couple of Nadine Gordimer novels that I’d read in college, my wife devoured the guidebooks, and I picked up Crossing the Line by William Finnegan, now a staff writer at the New Yorker.
Although it was first published in 1986, Crossing the Line remains relevant to understanding post-apartheid South Africa, where—in my brief experience—issues of identity, race, class, and religion are ever present if not always articulated. And, of course, although political apartheid may have ended three decades ago, economic apartheid lives on. Finnegan’s book, which is part coming-of-age story of a white American surfer dude teaching at a high school in a township outside Cape Town and part political commentary, was a joy to read and sparked my interest in South Africa’s history. Next up? Tom Lodge’s Mandela: A Critical Life.
—Steven A. Cook, FP columnist
The Women: A Novel
Kristin Hannah (St. Martin’s Press, 480 pp., $30, February 2024)
It’s hard to find a book with fresh insights on American experiences in the Vietnam War these days, but Kristin Hannah manages to do just that in The Women. Hannah, author of The Nightingale and The Four Winds, has mastered the art of the historical epic as told through the eyes of forgotten female protagonists, and her latest book is no exception.
In The Women, Hannah focuses on the woefully overlooked experiences of U.S. military nurses who risked life and limb to save U.S. troops in Vietnam, only to be marginalized when they returned home. The book follows Frances “Frankie” McGrath, who escapes her uppity high-society family in California to follow in her brother’s footsteps and go to Vietnam. It’s full of the tried-and-true tropes of any Vietnam War classic: the exploitation of patriotism and loss of American innocence, the cynicism and wrongheadedness of U.S. policy, the horrors of jungle warfare. But these are laced into a compelling—if occasionally soap-operatic—narrative about Frankie and other nurses’ wartime experiences.
—Robbie Gramer, FP’s diplomacy and national security reporter
Books are independently selected by FP editors. FP earns an affiliate commission on anything purchased through links to Amazon.com on this page.
