Books like As if I am not there by Slavenka Drakulić

A young Jewish‑Italian girl in Bensonhurst, New York, navigates adolescence with her mother in summer 1978, dreaming of Manhattan while confronting the past and seeking hope in an adult‑viewed coming‑of‑age story.

During the Civil War, a young Missouri woman is accused of colluding with the enemy and must flee, while a Union Major falls for her and vows to help her escape to safety.

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.

A harrowing portrait of life amid the siege of Sarajevo where everyday survival becomes a moral crucible and the human spirit is tested by war’s relentless cruelty.

Noora, a seventeen‑year‑old mountain girl from the Arabian Peninsula, defies poverty and tradition in the 1950s, only to be drawn into an arranged marriage and a dangerous love that threatens her life.

Beverly Allen investigates the systemic use of rape as a weapon of genocide during the 1991‑1995 Yugoslav wars, drawing on survivor testimony and her own ethical reflections to argue for accountability.

In the midst of the 1992 Bosnian war, a refugee mother recounts the horrors she endured, including repeated rapes by Serbian soldiers, and the birth of an unnamed child—a stark portrait of war’s brutality and human resilience.

Alexandra Stiglmayer interviewed survivors of the war in Bosnia-Herzegovina in order to reveal, to a seemingly deaf world, the horrors of that ongoing war in the former Yugoslavia. The women - primarily of Muslim but also of Croatian and Serbian origin - have endured the atrocities of rape and the loss of loved ones. Their testimony, published in the 1993 German edition, is bare, direct, and its cumulative effect overwhelming. The first English edition contains Stiglmayer's updates to her own two essays, one detailing the historical context of the current conflict and the other presenting the core of the book - interviews with some twenty victims of rape as well as interviews with three Serbian perpetrators. Essays investigating mass rape and war from ethnopsychological, sociological, cultural, and medical perspectives are included. New essays by Catharine A. MacKinnon, Rhonda Copelon, and Susan Brownmiller address the crucial issues of recognizing the human rights of women and children. A foreword by Roy Gutman describes war crimes within the context of the UN Tribunal, and an afterword by Cynthia Enloe relates the mass rapes of this war to developments and reactions in the international women's movement. Accounts of torture, murder, mutilation, abduction, sexual enslavement, and systematic attempts to impregnate - all in the name of "ethnic cleansing" - make for the grimmest of reading. However brutal and appalling the information conveyed here, this book cannot and should not be ignored.

Aleksandar Hemon chronicles his journey from Sarajevo to Chicago, weaving personal memory, migration, and the life of a Bosnian family with humor, tenderness, and keen observation.