True to Life

From Vietnam to Pakistan, writers have long turned to fiction to make sense of the news, often yielding uncanny portraits of real-life war, revolution, and cultural change. Here, Foreign Policy offers a sampler of novels that could have been straight out of the newspapers -- and sometimes even made them.

BY MARGARET SLATTERY | JAN/FEB 2012

Kim
Rudyard Kipling, 1901

In what is often considered his best novel, the Bombay-born Kipling unfolds the "panorama of India," as a New York Times review said at the time, exposing the forces of Hinduism and imperialism in the British-ruled subcontinent.

 

 

 

The Good Earth
Pearl S. Buck, 1931

For its depiction of a rural family in pre-communist China, this book won a Pulitzer, became a bestseller, and helped make Buck, who grew up in the village of Zhenjiang, the first American woman to win a Nobel Prize in literature. Some argue the novel later helped Americans empathize with their Chinese allies during World War II.

 

 

 

The Quiet American
Graham Greene, 1955

This novel's protagonist -- a British war correspondent in French Indochina, as Greene himself was -- clashes with an American official over a Vietnamese woman, in a narrative that presciently characterized the American presence in Vietnam. Greene, an acerbic critic of U.S. policy, was later tracked by the American government for 40 years.

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Margaret Slattery is assistant managing editor of Foreign Policy.