A reading list for people who move countries

One of the pleasures of living abroad is discovering how little you understood about the place you came from. Distance makes certain things clearer. It also makes you sentimental about things you were perfectly happy to complain about when you lived there.

Books help with both. Some explain the country you have arrived in. Others give shape to the stranger parts of the experience: being comfortable somewhere without quite belonging, building a life in another language, or returning home to find that everyone has carried on without consulting you.

Having lived in London, Shenzhen, Shanghai, Bangkok, and extended periods elsewhere, I've often found myself drawn to books about place, change and what people choose to hold on to. Alongside those, I’ve included a few on money, a subject that tends to accompany you across borders, however enthusiastically you try to leave everything else behind, and on China, well, because everyone should understand China.

Twelve books, in four piles.

On leaving and arriving

The Leopard, by Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa. One of my favourite novels. A Sicilian prince watches the world that gave his life its shape begin to disappear. There is political upheaval, certainly, but also the more intimate business of growing older, watching a family change, and recognising that the future will have little use for some of the things you value most. Nobody needs to emigrate to experience that kind of displacement. Sometimes the country changes around you. Read it for Sicily, for its melancholy, and for the extraordinary tenderness beneath its aristocratic hauteur.

Pachinko, by Min Jin Lee. Four generations of one Korean family in Japan, across most of the twentieth century. Here, moving countries has consequences that persist long after the journey itself: in work, marriage, opportunity, and the identities children inherit before they can choose anything for themselves. It gives the list some necessary perspective. The freedom to describe yourself as an “expat” is itself a considerable privilege; other people spend generations being treated as foreigners in the only country they know.

Ignorance, by Milan Kundera. Two Czech émigrés return to their homeland after years abroad and discover that coming back is more complicated than leaving. The people who stayed have their own understanding of the intervening years, with surprisingly little room for the lives built elsewhere. Kundera is particularly good on the gap between nostalgia and memory: you can spend years longing for somewhere without knowing whether you could live there again. A short novel about a question familiar to anyone who has been away long enough: when you say “home”, where do you mean? If you like this book, just read everything else he has written.

On staying still

The Remains of the Day, by Kazuo Ishiguro. An English butler, has devoted himself to service, dignity and the belief that his employer deserves his loyalty. During a journey through the countryside, the reader gradually sees what those commitments have cost him. Staying put has its own risks: habit can become an excuse, and loyalty can postpone questions that ought to have been asked years earlier. For anyone considering a move, it offers an uncomfortable companion question: what might you regret if you stay?

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. The book understands how deeply a temporary place can matter, even when you have no claim on it and know you will eventually leave. 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. Montaigne makes excellent company for anyone who spends time alone. 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.

On money

The House of Rothschild, by Niall Ferguson. Sir Niall was one of the best professors I ever had. The book is in two volumes, and worth both. It is a great 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. For internationally scattered families, there is plenty to recognise beneath the historical distance. Wealth across borders has always depended on people finding ways to cooperate.

The Psychology of Money, by Morgan Housel. Moving abroad exposes you to different assumptions about money surprisingly quickly. What counts as success? How much should you save? Is property essential? Housel’s book is useful because it takes people’s experiences seriously when explaining their financial behaviour. The person whose decisions look irrational to you may have lived through something you haven’t. That is worth remembering in investing, and fairly useful elsewhere.

Enough, by John C. Bogle. An appropriate book for anyone who has ever considered moving somewhere cheaper so they can work less, then continued working exactly as much after arriving. Bogle examines what constitutes enough in money, business and life—a question easily deferred while there is still more to earn. International mobility creates options, but choosing between them requires some idea of what you want your money to provide. Otherwise, you can spend years optimising a life you have barely stopped to consider.

On China

China gets its own section because it occupies a substantial part of my life, and because living there made me want to understand more than daily experience alone could explain. These three offer different ways into the country: historical, familial and economic.

The Search for Modern China, by Jonathan Spence. The long view, stretching from the late Ming into modern China, 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 past goes back much further than that). 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. Political history becomes immediate through its effects on affection, ambition, loyalty and survival. Alongside Spence’s wider account, it helps explain why apparently abstract questions about the past can remain intensely personal. It is also a reminder of how much history may sit behind the things people choose not to discuss. It reads differently once you have met the grandchildren.

The New China Playbook, by Keyu Jin. Living in China means encountering things that make little sense through the assumptions you arrived with. This book is great introduction to the relationship between the state, private enterprise and the people whose ambitions have helped transform the country. The account offers a useful challenge to the old habit of treating China as either a capitalist success story or a centrally controlled monolith. You need not agree with every conclusion to benefit from questioning the categories themselves.

Twelve books is not a library, and the piles are certainly not a system. But if you're on the move or far from "home", 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.