Books like S by Slavenka Drakulić

Eckhart Tolle guides readers toward a pain‑free existence by teaching how to recognize and release mental patterns that cause suffering, encouraging living fully in the present moment.

Middlesex follows a Greek-American family's multigenerational saga, charting the life of its intersex protagonist as they navigate gender identity and the search for belonging.

Americanah follows Ifemelu, a Nigerian student who moves to the United States for university, exploring her life and love across continents while reflecting on identity, immigration, and cultural belonging.

The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks follows the story of Henrietta Lacks, a poor black tobacco farmer whose cancer cells were taken in 1951 without her consent and later became the first immortal human cell line, HeLa, driving major scientific breakthroughs while raising questions of ethics, race, and medical exploitation.

Neurosurgeon Paul Kalanithi’s poignant memoir chronicles his battle with stage IV metastatic lung cancer and his reflections on life, medicine, and mortality.

Alan Watts examines the paradox of human insecurity, arguing that the pursuit of stability breeds anxiety. Drawing on philosophy, religion, and psychology, he invites Western readers to reconsider their relationship with time, pain, and the world.

A historical fiction recounting the 480 BC Battle of Thermopylae, where 300 Spartans faced the Persian army led by King Xerxes, exploring the themes of courage, honor, and the enduring human spirit.

A story of war, love, and unexpected connections in Chechnya, exploring the shared past of a doctor, a child, and a hospital.

A spirited young traveler arrives at Emperor Akbar’s court with a tale of a mysterious, enchantress woman whose story travels to Florence, juxtaposing the hedonistic Mughal capital with the sensual High Renaissance city.

Andrew Solomon’s acclaimed nonfiction journey into depression blends personal narrative, case studies, and scientific inquiry to illuminate the illness’s complexities, treatments, and cultural impact worldwide.

Two women—a Filipino translator and an American filmmaker—travel across Duterte’s Philippines, each crafting a script that reexamines the 1901 Balangiga massacre, exploring how history and identity collide through their divergent narratives.

A woman in the Civil War deserts her farm life to enlist as a Union soldier, facing battle, betrayal, and the struggle to return home.

In the follow-up to her previous book "Gulag," the author, a journalist delivers a history of how Communism took over Eastern Europe after World War II and transformed in frightening fashion the individuals who came under its sway. At the end of World War II, the Soviet Union, to its surprise and delight, found itself in control of a huge swath of territory in Eastern Europe. Josef Stalin and his secret police set out to convert a dozen radically different countries to Communism, a completely new political and moral system. In this book, the author describes how the Communist regimes of Eastern Europe were created and what daily life was like once they were complete. She draws on newly opened East European archives, interviews, and personal accounts translated for the first time to portray in detail the dilemmas faced by millions of individuals trying to adjust to a way of life that challenged their every belief and took away everything they had accumulated. Today the Soviet Bloc is a lost civilization, one whose cruelty, paranoia, bizarre morality, and strange aesthetics is captured in the pages of this book.

Set amid the 1640s English witch trials, former conspirator Alice returns to her brother’s house to uncover family secrets and the dark truth behind Matthew Hopkins’ hunts.

An albino woman, Memory, writes her recollected truth while awaiting execution in Zimbabwe’s Chikurubi maximum‑security prison, questioning the nature of her conviction for the murder of her adopted father.

Through a lone scientist, a quarantined young woman, and a narrow‑wheeled girl, Dennis Bock traces the ripple of war to the moment the atomic bomb lights the sky over Hiroshima, interrogating lives on the brink of change.

"During the Soviet era, millions of Soviet citizens were denounced, arrested, and imprisoned on fabricated charges of conducting "anti-state" activities. Till My Tale Is Told recounts the testimonies of women whose family lives and careers were brutally disrupted by the nightmare of false accusation, torture, humiliation, hunger, and unspeakable deprivation. The women in this book were fortunate: unlike many others, they survived."--BOOK JACKET. "Published in Moscow in 1989 and now translated into English for the first time, the narratives collected in this volume were written illegally and for many years hidden away from public view. Although in 1956 political prisoners began to be officially rehabilitated, their writings were repressed as "slandering the Soviet system." What emerges from these moving testimonies is not only the brutality these women endured but also the extraordinary tenderness, kindness, and humanity they maintained in unimaginably barbarous conditions."--BOOK JACKET.

Joel Fuhrman, MD, shares a science‑based strategy that allows readers to maintain a healthy weight without the cycle of dieting.