The Raj Quartet by Paul Scott (Everyman's Library, $67.50). This stunning tetralogy of novels is set in 1940s India. It focuses on a small group of people —mostly British, but some Indian — caught up in World War II, the independence movement, and then the tragic, violent partition of the subcontinent into India and Pakistan. Few writers display such deep human and political awareness.
A Time of Gifts by Patrick Leigh Fermor (NYRB Classics, $17). When he was 18, in 1933, Leigh Fermor began a trek from Holland to Istanbul — on foot. Thanks to lost notes and a world-class case of writer's block, he didn't even begin writing up the experience until decades later, and he hadn't quite finished when he died. This is the first volume of three. All are an amazing combination of an 18-year-old's zest for new places, people, and experiences with a mature author's language and wisdom.
Billy Lynn's Long Halftime Walk by Ben Fountain (Ecco, $15). Virtually this entire 2012 novel — a dazzling X-ray vision into our nation's dreams and illusions — takes place at a Dallas Cowboys football game during a halftime extravaganza that we see through the eyes of a horny, traumatized Iraq War veteran.
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Homage to Catalonia by George Orwell (Houghton Mifflin Harcourt, $15). In this memoir of his time fighting in the Spanish Civil War, Orwell first fully found his voice: crystal clear, vivid, evocative, and ruthlessly honest in a way that managed to enrage readers on the left and the right.
Trust Me by John Updike (Random House, $16). I could pick almost any book of Updike's short stories, but I chose this one because it has my favorite, "Leaf Season," about a family's excursion to Vermont. I reread it almost every year. It's like a perfect piece of music you can listen to again and again.
The Gypsies by Jan Yoors (Waveland, $27). In the early 1930s, when he was a 12-year-old boy in Belgium, Yoors ran away to join a traveling band of Roma — Gypsies — in horse-drawn wagons. He lived with them for eight years, all over Europe. Need I say more?
— Adam Hochschild is a co-founder of Mother Jones and an accomplished historical writer. His latest book, Spain in Our Hearts, revisits the Americans who fought in the Spanish Civil War.
