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Emma Larkin's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Emma Larkin recommends on their reading list? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Emma Larkin's favorite book recommendations of all time.

1

Burma Chronicles

A timely and incisive portrait of a country on the tipping point

After developing his acclaimed style of firsthand reporting with his bestselling graphic novels Pyongyang: A Journey in North Korea and Shenzhen: A Travelogue from China, Guy Delisle is back with The Burma Chronicles. In this country notorious for its use of concealment and isolation as social control—where scissors-wielding censors monitor the papers, the de facto leader of the opposition has been under decade-long house arrest, insurgent-controlled regions are effectively cut off from the...
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Recommended by Emma Larkin, and 1 others.

Emma LarkinThis is a graphic novel written by Guy Delisle who was a househusband – his wife was working for Médecins Sans Frontiers in Burma. He went to live there with her and this book is all about his observations of everyday life. It has an ex-pat kind of bent to it and focuses mainly on life in Rangoon. He has lovely details in there about the mundane happenings of Rangoon life. For example, he talks... (Source)

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2
Winner of the 2002 Kiriyama Prize in Nonfiction

The astonishing story of a young man's upbringing in a remote tribal village in Burma and his journey from his strife-torn country to the tranquil quads of Cambridge. In lyrical prose, Pascal Khoo Thwe describes his childhood as a member of the Padaung hill tribe, where ancestor worship and communion with spirits blended with the tribe's recent conversion to Christianity. In the 1930s, Pascal's grandfather captured an Italian Jesuit, mistaking him for a giant or a wild beast; the Jesuit in turn converted the tribe. (The Padaung are...
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Bertil LintnerPascal took part in the 1988 uprising and then escaped to Thailand and from there made it to the UK. He went to Cambridge where he read English literature; he learned to write very well in English and came out with this fantastic book. (Source)

Emma LarkinI recommend it as an all-encompassing experience of Burma on so many levels. (Source)

Sue ArnoldI’m not sure Pascal Koo Thwe is very happy or fulfilled because I feel that if you’re Burmese and you want to do something you should be there somehow. (Source)

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3

Outrage

Recommended by Emma Larkin, and 1 others.

Emma LarkinThis is an important book because it documents a really major event in Burmese history and there are very few books that have done this in any depth. This was 1988 when there was a nationwide uprising during which the government killed about 3,000 protesters. So it was this huge event but there is no public record of it inside the country. And Bertil, a Swedish journalist based in Thailand, went... (Source)

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4

No Time for Dreams

Living in Burma Under Military Rule

Compelling images of cinnamon-robed monks confronting the guns and clubs of Burma's military junta outraged the world in September 2007. Then communications links were cut, and curfews, interrogations, midnight raids, beatings, and arrests crushed the remnants of defiance. Tragically, it had all happened before. No Time for Dreams narrates a remarkable woman's search over four decades for independence and purpose as repression spreads throughout her country, once known as the Golden Land. Inspired by the legacy of her father, Ba Tin's struggle against British colonialism beginning in the... more
Recommended by Emma Larkin, and 1 others.

Emma LarkinYes, absolutely, and that is why I have chosen a book like this because it is so unusual to have Burmese voices from inside Burma writing about their experiences of living there. Sometimes we hear voices from along the border or we hear dissident voices from outside Burma but it is very unusual to hear from people who have experienced what it is like to grow up inside the country. (Source)

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5

Quartered Safe Out Here

George MacDonald Fraser—beloved for his series of Flashman historical novels—offers an action-packed memoir of his experiences in Burma during World War II. Fraser was only 19 when he arrived there in the war’s final year, and he offers a first-hand glimpse at the camaraderie, danger, and satisfactions of service. A substantial Epilogue, occasioned by the 50th anniversary of VJ-Day in 1995, adds poignancy to a volume that eminent military historian John Keegan described as “one of the great personal memoirs of the Second World War.” less
Recommended by Emma Larkin, and 1 others.

Emma LarkinThe first line of the book is: ‘The first time I smelt Jap was in a deep dry riverbed in the Dry Belt, somewhere near Meiktila. I can no more describe the smell than I could describe a colour, but it was heavy and pungent and compounded of stale cooked rice and sweat and human waste and … Jap.’ And this takes you straight back to his time during the Second World War in Burma. To me it is really... (Source)

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