Being unhoused is a problem that most of us will never have to face, and yet around 1 in every 500 Americans was unhoused in January of 2023. With a tumultuous housing market and a lack of affordable housing, finding solutions is a growing concern.
Because many of us have never had to experience it, however, myths and misconceptions about being unhoused are rampant. Though most are fiction themselves, these 10 books will help you sort out fact from falsehood, and will change the way you look at being unhoused, and those who experience it.
Anything Is Good
From the celebrated author of Searching for Bobby Fischer, this “superbly written” book was hailed by actor Gabriel Byrne as “the best portrait of homelessness I’ve read since George Orwell’s Down and Out in London and Paris.”
Following the stories of two boys from the Bronx, one of them a precocious genius who finds himself unhoused in South Florida with no money and no shoes, Anything Is Good is a “deeply affecting dive into the lives of the unhoused” (Geraldine Brooks, Pulitzer Prize-winning author of March).
Down and Out in Paris and London
Speaking of Down and Out in Paris and London, George Orwell’s heavily autobiographical debut has been called “the most lucid portrait of poverty in the English language” (The Nation).
Written while Orwell himself was living penniless in the cities of the title, Down and Out in Paris and London contains often lightly fictionalized versions of his own struggles and experiences on the streets, which would eventually feed into his classic dystopian novel 1984.
The Song of Kahunsha
“Dickensian in its plot and its vivid prose,” this novel by the celebrated Indian author and playwright Anosh Irani (The Cripple and His Talismans) “is as beautiful as it is heartbreaking” (Booklist).
Ten-year-old Chamdi has spent his entire life in a Bombay orphanage, imagining the city outside its walls as Kahunsha, a “city without sadness.” When he learns that the orphanage is to be shut down, however, he finds himself expelled into the streets of a Bombay that is nothing like the city of his dreams, where he will have to make grim and often terrible choices merely to survive.
In the Slammer with Carol Smith
A “veteran writers’ writer,” Hortense Calisher brings her “unique, often haunting mastery of language” (Kirkus Reviews) to the streets of Spanish Harlem in the story of Carol Smith, whose peripheral involvement in a revolutionary bombing plot has landed her in and out of prison, psychiatric wards, and halfway houses for the last 20 years.
Surrounded by a memorable cast of characters, Carol’s story is “complicated and disjointed but fascinating and eloquent,” in a novel that “merits – and stands up to – a second reading” (Library Journal).
At the Edge of the Haight
Winner of the PEN/Bellwether Prize for Socially Engaged Fiction, “To read At the Edge of the Haight is to live inside the everyday terror and longings of a world that most of us manage not to see, even if we walk past it on sidewalks every day” (Barbara Kingsolver, author of The Poisonwood Bible).
Homeless at 20, Maddy Donaldo lives in the secret spaces within San Francisco’s Golden Gate Park until she has the misfortune to witness a murder that turns her life upside down in this “gripping debut novel” (Shelf Awareness).
The Not Wives
“A provocative and well-told story about chosen community, friendship, and human frailty” (Kirkus Reviews), The Not Wives tells the story of three women in Occupy-era New York as they navigate new directions for their lives.
From nontenured professor to bartender to unhoused teenager, each one will see their lives intertwining in this “terrific literary novel about what it means to belong to yourself while trying to be a part of something bigger” (Independent Book Review).
Hotel Living
“Homeless, but in First Class.” That’s how the lifestyle of Stathis Rakis is described in this Lambda Literary Award finalist filled with “plenty of storytelling verve to keep readers engaged” (Booklist).
During the heady days between 9/11 and the financial collapse of 2008, Rakis is a Greek immigrant who is living a glitzy but nomadic lifestyle as a well-paid management consultant. “The lifestyles described toe the line between fascinating and sickening,” writes Paste magazine, describing this high-octane book filled with “universal appeal” (Entertainment Weekly).
Siddhartha
One of the most beloved books by the legendary German poet, novelist, and Nobel laureate Hermann Hesse, Siddhartha was inspired by Hesse’s own travels in Sri Lanka, Indonesia, India, and beyond.
Originally published in 1922, this story of one youth’s spiritual awakening has become one of the most read and discussed books on Buddhist philosophy and thought in Western letters, as well as an indispensable book about finding your own path that has been read and re-read in college dormitories all over the world.
Nomadland: Surviving America in the Twenty-First Century
Adapted into the 2020 film which swept the Oscars and won Best Picture, Jessica Bruder’s “devastating, revelatory book” (Washington Post) takes readers inside the lives of one of America’s invisible work forces – a world filled with itinerant older Americans who have been forced into a nomadic life chasing seasonal work in RVs and campers.
The result is a “remarkable book of immersive reporting” (The New Yorker) which showcases our nation’s precarious financial future, and its effect on thousands of Americans in the present.
Evicted: Poverty and Profit in the American City
Named one of the best books of the year by a dizzying array of publications and celebrities, this “vivid and unsettling” book (New York Review of Books) from Princeton sociologist Matthew Desmond follows eight real-life families as they struggle to keep a roof over their heads in grim economic times.
In a “wrenching and revelatory” (The Nation) study that won the Pulitzer Prize, Desmond showcases an economic future that is closer than many of us might want to believe, and offers possible solutions for one of the most pressing financial crises of modern times.
