Books like That Smell and Notes from Prison by Robyn Creswell

Between the World and Me is a memoir‑essay in letter form, where Ta‑Nehisi Coates addresses his teenage son about the history, violence, and ongoing reality of being Black in America.

A groundbreaking memoir that blends personal narrative with rigorous theory, charting Maggie Nelson’s queer romance, pregnancy, and the politics of love and family.

In post‑Arab Spring Egypt, citizens queue endlessly for a gate that never opens, as a centralized authority denies basic rights and treats dissent as bureaucratic fiction.

A General Theory of Love explains how deep, silent connections between our nervous systems shape our emotions, relationships, health, and even social behavior.

In a Middle Eastern state echoing Syria, the twentieth anniversary of a tyrant’s rule shakes the nation. Fathi Chin, fleeing the regime’s roar, visits his mother, defends a victim of police brutality, only to have his identity seized and be ordered to report to a police station before nightfall.

Bodour, a distinguished literary critic and university professor, carries with her a dark secret. As a young university student, she fell in love with a political activist and gave birth to an illegitimate daughter, Zeina, whom she abandoned on the streets of Cairo. Zeina grows up to become one of Egypt's most beloved entertainers, despite being deprived of a name and a home. In contrast, Bodour remains trapped in a loveless marriage, pining for her daughter. In an attempt to find solace she turns to literature, writing a fictionalised account of her life. But then the novel goes missing. Bodour is forced on a journey of self discovery, reliving and reshaping her past and her future. Will Bodour ever discover who stole the novel? Is there any hope of her being reunited with Zeina?

Lydia Ivanova embarks from 1929 China to Soviet Moscow to uncover the fate of her father, a political prisoner, leaving behind love and childhood ties to chase truth amid Stalinist danger.

Elie Wiesel chronicles the harrowing realities of his childhood in Nazi concentration camps, and how witnessing the loss of family and friends transformed his faith.

The peasants of Paradise County have been living a hardscrabble existence virtually unchanged for hundreds of years, until a 1987 glut on the garlic market forces them to watch the crop that is their lifeblood wilt, rot, and blacken in the fields - leading them to storm the seat of corrupt Communist officialdom in an apocalyptic riot. Against this epic backdrop unfold three intricately intertwined tales of love, loyalty, and retribution: between man and woman, father and child, friend and friend. Railing against the chaos and destruction is the blind, almost Homeric bard, the street singer Zhang Kou, whose insistent raised voice is the conscience of his beloved land - and whose fate will mirror the country's. Bawdy, mystical, and brawling, The Garlic Ballads portrays a landscape at once strange and utterly compelling, a people whose fierce passions overflow the rigid confines of their traditions. With this novel, China's most courageous and eloquent writer powerfully confirms his place in world literature.