It’s Week 3 of Nonfiction November, hosted by Liz @ at Adventures in reading, running and working from home. The topic is Book Pairings.

This week, pair up a nonfiction book with a fiction title. Maybe it’s a historical novel and the real history in a nonfiction version, or a memoir and a novel, or a fiction book you’ve read and you would like recommendations for background reading. Or (because I’m doing this) two books on two different areas have chimed and have a link. You can be as creative as you like!

This one’s a bit of a challenge for me because I’ve read hardly any fiction at all in the last couple of years. But after a bit of head scratching, I’ve come up with this pair. (Links point to my reviews.)

Autocracy, Inc.

Anne Applebaum, a staff writer at The Atlantic, says our image of autocratic dictators as cartoon villains who exercise total control over their people is outdated. In Autocracy, Inc. she reveals how autocracies are run by sophisticated military, financial, and information networks that support each other without having any common ideology except holding on to power. They collaborate like corporations in a loose, shifting alliance that Applebaum calls, “Autocracy, Inc.”

Autocracy, Inc. operates with impunity. It evades Western sanctions. It launders money through complicit Western financial institutions. And its relentless propaganda undermines and discredits democracy all over the world. No wonder the autocrats think they’re winning.

This book has become even more relevant with the election of Donald Trump to a second term as US President. I’m worried his administration will do nothing to curtail the operations of Autocracy, Inc. in America, and, worse yet, that it will accelerate autocratic trends already evident in the US. For more on this last bit, I recommend Anne Applebaum’s podcast Autocracy in America.

Exit West

Exit West, by Mohsin Hamid, explores what would happen if people could move anywhere in the world without national borders getting in their way. What if people could leave behind violence and oppression without anyone stopping them? The novel begins in an unnamed city in an unnamed country that is gradually getting torn apart by violence. Nadia and Saeed, the two main characters, escape through a mysterious black door that transports them instantly to another country. They are just two out of millions who move through these black doors that have begun to appear all over the world. It’s a mass migration of people leaving behind violence and terror and also family and familiarity, a flow of humanity unstoppable and utterly unimpeded by distance or borders.

Exit West show us people who sever all ties with their homeland when they migrate and others who remain emotionally tethered to their original homes by memories, sentiment or nostalgia. Some don’t move at all but feel as if they’ve migrated because everything around them has changed so much that home doesn’t feel like home anymore. 

Yet almost everyone in the story, from Nadia and Saeed to the police and the “native” populations of the host countries somehow manage, with difficulty and with some exceptions, to restrain their worst passions. Slowly, tentatively, and with a lot of hard work they settle in and start to reorder their world. It’s fiction but so very pertinent and in the end left me feeling hopeful.

Thanks for reading.