A reading list for people who move countries

People who move countries read differently. They read on planes and in waiting rooms and in the strange, airless hour after a long flight when the body is in one time zone and the mind in another. They read to feel at home somewhere, and they read to understand the place they have just left, which is often clearer from a distance. Over the years I have been asked for recommendations often enough that it seemed easier to write them down.

Twelve books, in four piles. None of them is about how to invest. Several of them are about why people do.

On leaving and arriving

The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. One of my top five favourite novels of all time. A masterful meditation on time, loss, love, an old world ending and a new one commencing. A Sicilian prince watches his world end, with great style, and understands exactly what is happening to his family's position while being unable to do anything about it. If you want to know what inheritance feels like from the inside of the generation that loses it, this is the book. The famous line about everything needing to change so that everything can stay the same is quoted by people who have not read it, and means almost the opposite of what they think.

Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee. Four generations of one Korean family in Japan, across most of the twentieth century. It is the most honest novel I know about what capital, and the lack of it, does to a family that does not fully belong anywhere. It is also very good on the quiet accounting that immigrants do constantly and never mention.

A Gentleman in Moscow, by Amor Towles. A count is confined to a hotel for decades and builds a life of real dignity inside it. I give it to clients who have moved somewhere they did not choose, for a posting or a marriage or a passport, and who need reminding that a small territory can hold a large life.

On money

The House of Rothschild, by Niall Ferguson. Niall was one of my professors at the LSE, and whilst I disagree more of what he says than I care to agree with, he has one of the smartest minds I have ever encountered, and arguably one of the most renowned historians of our time. The book is in two volumes, and worth both. It is the best account of what a family network across borders actually looked like in practice: the letters, the couriers, the arguments between brothers in five cities, the slow discovery that governance mattered more than genius. Skip nothing.

Lords of Finance, by Liaquat Ahamed. Four central bankers between the wars, and the decisions that produced the Depression. I reread it whenever someone tells me a currency arrangement is permanent. Nothing is permanent; it is simply older than the person saying so.

The Great Crash 1929, by John Kenneth Galbraith. Short, dry, and funnier than a book about a catastrophe has any right to be. It should be reissued every decade with the dates changed and nothing else, because nothing else would need to be.

On China

The Search for Modern China, by Jonathan Spence. The long view, from the late Ming to the late twentieth century, written by someone who understood that you cannot explain the country's present without the last four hundred years of its past (even though China's path goes back much further than four hundred years). It's a large book and it repays being read slowly, which is the only way to read anything about China that is worth reading.

Wild Swans, by Jung Chang. Three generations of women through the century that remade the country. Everyone has read it; not everyone has read it since living there. It reads differently once you have met the grandchildren.

Age of Ambition, by Evan Osnos. The decade I arrived in, seen clearly by someone who was paying attention to the right people. It captures a mood that has since passed, which is exactly why it is worth having on the shelf.

On staying still

The Summer Book, by Tove Jansson. A grandmother and a small girl on an island in the Gulf of Finland, and almost nothing happens, perfectly. It is the book I take to Bangkok when the city has been too much. It lasts a weekend and lingers for a month.

A Month in the Country, by J. L. Carr. A man restores a medieval wall painting in a Yorkshire church in the summer of 1920 and is, for one season, entirely where he is. It is a hundred pages long and I have never met anyone who regretted them.

And Montaigne's Essays, in whichever translation you can live with. He retired to a tower at thirty-eight to think, and spent the rest of his life discovering that he was not very good at it, and the record of the attempt is the most companionable book in any language. Read it in pieces, out of order, over years. That is how it was written.

Twelve books is not a library, and the piles are not a system. But if you have just arrived somewhere, or are about to leave, one from each will do more for the next six months than any number of articles about the cost of living there. The cost of living is in the first pile, anyway. It always was.