As summer approaches, we wanted to share some of the novels that FP contributors and staff have raved about in recent years. They may not exactly be light beach reads, but these books offer a window into how moments in foreign policy and world history—World War I, the Sri Lankan civil war, Russian President Vladimir Putin’s regime—are passed into fiction.—Chloe Hadavas

Trysts With Sri Lanka’s Ghosts

In the Booker Prize-winning The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, the past haunts a country racked by unresolved death, V.V. Ganeshananthan writes.

In the Trenches With the Colonizer

The French Senegalese writer David Diop revises the modernist archetype with a protagonist long excluded from World War I literature: the African soldier on the front lines, Jessi Jezewska Stevens writes.

A Portrait of India on Fire

Megha Majumdar’s bestselling novel A Burning begins with a train in flames. But what really gets torched is the Indian Dream, FP’s Ravi Agrawal writes.

The Wizard of the Kremlin

A French novel offers a fascinating, fictionalized look at Vladimir Putin’s longtime spin doctor, FP’s Caroline de Gruyter writes.

In ‘The Committed,’ Revolution and Colonialism Turn Into Crime

Viet Thanh Nguyen’s sequel moves from the United States to France but stays revolutionary, Noah Berlatsky writes.