From Poets Returning From Exile to Artsy Emigrés Figuring Things Out – Five Books to Read Right Now

I find August to be a weird time, especially in Italy where I am writing from. Things grinding to a halt, time stretching out, heat enveloping it all, all the while a droning anxiety creeping in… Perhaps for this reason, quite a few books on this list have to do with alienation – the feeling of being at odds with one’s own life.

Be as it may, they are all excellent in their very different ways. So let’s dive in.

THE ANTHROPOLOGISTS, Ayşegül Savaş  

Scribner UK, pp. 192

As someone who has left his country chasing some vague dream of self-actualisation, I am well aware of the mixture of expectation and angst that comes with trying to find your own path with no clear models to follow.

The Anthropologists, the third novel by Turkish author Ayşegül Savaş, follows Asya and Manu, a couple of emigrés in an unnamed foreign city, as they go about the business of buying a house and try to figure out what kind of people they would like to be.

Told in short vignettes and a quirky, deadpan idiom, it is a beautiful and subtle account of the anxieties and joys of entering the uncharted territory of adulthood as well as the importance of finding beauty and respite in the everyday.

RARE SINGLES, Ben Myers

Bloomsbury Circus, pp. 224

Set in Scarborough during a Northern Soul “weekender”, this tells the story of forgotten Chicago soul singer Earlon “Bucky” Bronco. Fifty years after his last performance, he receives the unlikely invitation to perform a gig in the Yorkshire coastal town, and while there, strikes an offbeat friendship with Dinah, a supermarket worker who similarly tries to forget about her marriage and good-for-nothing son through her love for gold old times and soul music.

Though partial to the sirens of nostalgia, I am really not into music-themed narratives. I know Myers’ previous books, however, so I was curious to read this, which shares with them a sense of place and Northern sensibility and not much else. Some people will find it a bit saccharine, but it brought me back to when, as a teenager, I would lap up the Coen Brothers’ and Jim Jarmusch’s filmographies.

I SAW RAMALLAH, Mourid Barghouti

Daunt Books, pp. 264

Hailed by Edward Said as “one of the finest existential accounts of Palestinian displacement that we now have”, I Saw Ramallah by Mourid Barghouti is an autobiographical account of the poet’s return to his hometown after a 30-year exile.

Barghouti was in Cairo pursuing a degree in English literature when the Six-Day war broke out and as a result was barred from reentering what became the West Bank. It was not until the Oslo Accord that he was allowed to come back to the place where he grew up.

I Saw Ramallah then chronicles in minute detail the whirlwind of complicated, contrasting emotions that such a journey entails, as well as the sense of loss and wasted opportunity that comes with realising that the landscape and way of life of one’s youth has been eradicated by forceable occupation and illegal settlements.

ON JAMES BALDWIN, Colm Toíbín

Brandeis University Press, pp. 168

A freewheeling, erudite account of James Baldwin, this is Colm Toíbín’s account of the life and works of the writer who, alongside with Toni Morrison, is considered the best African American author of the second half of the 20th century.

It is a highly idiosyncratic and personal account of Baldwin’s oeuvre which manages to place it in the context of postwar America as well as putting it in conversation with other eminent writers, past and coeval. I love these kinds of books in which one writer sustainedly engages with the work of another and, although I realise it might not be for everyone, I would highly recommend it as a primer to anyone interested in Baldwin and wanting to know more about his trajectory.

MAMMOTH, Eva Baltasar

& Other Stories, pp. 144

A young queer woman at odds with the urban, modern milieu she lives in and obsessed with the idea of pregnancy trades her life as precarious university researcher for a secluded life in a dilapidated house in the Catalan woods. 

It might sound like a bucolic return to nature, a Catalan 21st century riff on Henry Thoreau’s classic Walden: Life in The Woods. In reality, Mammoth – the last in a loose trilogy which includes the previous Permafrost (2018) and Boulder (2020) – might be Baltasar’s wildest, most brutal novel of the three. 

It’s just under 150 pages, but it packs quite a punch and willingly breaks one or two taboos, so be advised. 



Bartolomeo Sala is a writer and reader based in London. His writing has appeared in Frieze, Vittles, and The Brooklyn Rail. Header image courtesy of Daunt Books.