Geoff Dyer's Top Book Recommendations

Want to know what books Geoff Dyer recommends? We've researched interviews, social media posts, podcasts, and articles to build a comprehensive list of Geoff Dyer's favorite book recommendations of all time. At Shortform, we know books. Our book guides are the best in the world. Learn why.

Black Lamb and Grey Falcon: A Journey through Yugoslavia

Rebecca West

4.4

Part travelogue, part history, part love letter on a thousand-page scale, Rebecca West's Black Lamb and Grey Falcon is a genre-bending masterwork written in elegant prose. But what makes it so unlikely to be confused with any other book of history, politics, or culture--with, in fact, any other book--is its unashamed depth of feeling: think The Decline and Fall of the Roman Empire crossed with Let

Recommended by Geoff Dyer.

Geoff Dyer

I guess it’s good that we’re starting with this, because it’s a seriously off-putting book. It’s close to 1,200 pages – a travelogue-history of Yugoslavia. [source]

The Beauty And The Sorrow

Peter Englund

4.3

In this masterly, highly original narrative history, Peter Englund takes a revelatory new approach to the history of World War I, magnifying its least examined, most stirring component: the experiences of the average man and woman—not only the tragedy and horror but also the absurdity and even, at times, the beauty.

The twenty people from whose journals and letters Englund draws are from Belgium, D

Recommended by Geoff Dyer.

Geoff Dyer

This is a very recent book – it came out towards the end of 2011. He has uncovered and found out about the lives of 20 different people from different parts of the world – some are combatants, one is a doctor, there’s this cast of characters – and he narrates the war chronologically through their experiences of particular days. This gives a real sense both of people being at the mercy of history – they’re not major actors in what’s going on – but they’re also completely shaping our view of what’s going on. I should say also that each person’s experiences are narrated with novelist-like techniques. The prose is very like that which we encounter in fiction. He also quotes a lot from their diaries. [source]

House of Exile: The Lives and Times of Heinrich Mann and Nelly Kroeger-Mann

Evelyn Juers

4.0

In 1933 the author and political activist Heinrich Mann and his partner, Nelly Kroeger, fled Nazi Germany, finding refuge first in the south of France and later, in great despair, in Los Angeles, where Nelly committed suicide in 1944 and Heinrich died in 1950. Born into a wealthy middle-class family in Lübeck, Heinrich was one of the leading representatives of Weimar culture. Nelly was twenty-seve

Recommended by Geoff Dyer.

Geoff Dyer

This book was a real revelation to me. As you say it is described as a collective biography – subtitled “War, Love and Literature, from Berlin to Los Angeles” – and I thought it was going to be what it says on the cover, a collective biography of these people. What I didn’t realise was it was going to be so novelistic. I just love the conceit of these German avant-garde composers all living quite near each other in Los Angeles. [source]

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A History of Bombing

Lindqvist, Sven

4.0

Continuously interesting, often fascinating.

Recommended by Geoff Dyer.

Geoff Dyer

This was published in 2002. The first book of Linqvist’s that I read was Exterminate All the Brutes, his great study of the genocidal impulse that he feels underlies the colonial project. [source]

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Imperium

Ryszard Kapuscinski

4.4

The Polish journalist whose The Soccer War and The Emperor are counted as classics of contemporary reportage now bears witness in Imperium to the disintegration of the Soviet Union. This magisterial book combines childhood memory with unblinking journalism, a radar for the truth with a keen appreciation of the absurd.

Imperium begins with Ryszard Kapuscinski's account of the Soviet occupation of hi

Recommended by Geoff Dyer.

Geoff Dyer

I think he’s really great. We’re talking about authors’ humanity – the capacity for empathy, this kind of stuff. With Kapuściński it seems to me you get all that, but it’s combined with politics and reportage telling you what’s going on in different places. Now, of course there are question marks about Kapuściński – about the reconcilability or not of the obligation to tell the truth and report the facts and the temptation to embroider, embellish and invent in the name of more literary ambitions. [source]