On the balcony of my family’s apartment in Beirut, where I lived again last year, I’ve spent many hours drinking Arabic coffee and reading books -- including lots of biographies and memoirs set in the Middle East and beyond. Here’s a shortlist of some of my favorites.

[Click here for a Q&A with Salma.]

"House of Stone: A Memoir of Home, Family, and a Lost Middle East" by Anthony Shadid

The late New York Times reporter and Pulitzer Prize-winner chronicles his attempt to rebuild his ancestors’ graceful but decaying house in southern Lebanon. As he figures out how to deal with the messy renovation, he digs deep into his family heritage in the region, both before and after his grandparents emigrated to America in the mid-20th century. Shadid’s memoir is evocative, funny, and a terrific introduction to the area’s history under the Ottoman Empire, as well as to its ever-tenuous present.

"The Locust and the Bird: My Mother's Story" by Hanan Al-Shaykh

The renowned Lebanese novelist tells her mother Camila’s life story, recounting her forced marriage at age 13 as an illiterate young girl, and the heady love affair that would scandalize the family. A gorgeously written biography, it follows Camila through marital trauma, swooning romance, and family strife, into her old age as the head of an unwieldy clan. The book is a fulfillment of a promise Al-Shaykh made to Camila to someday tell her story, and it’s as much a narrative about a Lebanese era as it is about Al-Shaykh’s own formidable mother.

"Palestinian Walks: Forays into a Vanishing Landscape" by Raja Shehadeh

Shehadeh is a Palestinian attorney and writer who lives in the West Bank city of Ramallah, and this book is an enchanting, wistful ode to the landscapes of his youth as they’ve changed in recent decades. He retraces the countryside rambles he took as a child and young adult in Palestine, ranging through fields and orchards and olive groves in the years before his extended family and local villagers began to lose their claim on the lands they’d once called home.

"Speak, Memory: An Autobiography Revisited" by Vladimir Nabokov

Nabokov’s memoir reads at times like a novel. A stylistically masterful collection of the author’s memories and impressions from life in his native Russia in the years between 1903 and 1940, it veers Proustian in its attention to the memory-evoking sensory detail, not to mention in scenes where Nabokov reflects on how his many childhood illnesses brought him closer to his mother. Few other memoirs written before or since come close. A classic, to read again and again.