Books About Lithuania: 21 Essential Reads in English

A fifteen-year-old girl and her family are deported from Kaunas to Siberia in 1941. Written for young adults, which is why it's the most widely read book about Lithuania in English by a wide margin — and why some people dismiss it.

They shouldn't. Šepetys is Lithuanian-American and researched it thoroughly, and for a great many readers outside Lithuania this book is the only reason they know the deportations happened at all.

Deeper and more traditional than Culture Smart! — national holidays, the calendar of feast days, family celebrations, and the customs attached to each. Bilingual, which makes it doubly useful if you're learning the language.

Widely regarded as the central work of Lithuanian modernism. A Lithuanian poet works as a lift operator in a New York hotel, and the novel moves between the elevator, his memories, and his disintegrating mind.

Škėma fled Lithuania in 1944 and died in a car crash in 1961. The book is about exile, about being a serious writer in a language almost nobody reads, and about what displacement does to a person.

A love story set in Užupis in the late Soviet years, narrated partly by a man who becomes a bat. Regarded as one of the outstanding Lithuanian novels of its era, and the best book about the bohemian Vilnius that Užupis is still trading on.

A multi-volume family saga set in the seventeenth and eighteenth-century Grand Duchy of Lithuania — enormously popular domestically, and the book that did most to make Lithuanians interested in their own pre-modern history again.

Sruoga was a poet and professor imprisoned in Stutthof concentration camp. What makes this book extraordinary is the tone: it is savagely, disorientingly funny. He writes about the camp as absurd theatre, which is either a survival mechanism or the only honest way to describe it.

Soviet authorities suppressed it for over a decade because it didn't fit the required narrative. Later filmed — see our films guide.

Not solely about Lithuania — it covers the lands between Berlin and Moscow where fourteen million people were killed by two regimes between 1933 and 1945. But Lithuania sits at the centre of it, and Snyder's framing explains why this region's history is different from Western Europe's in kind, not just degree.

How Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus emerged as separate nations from a shared past — and why that was neither obvious nor inevitable. Explains why Vilnius was Polish, why that's contested, and what "Lithuanian" has meant at different times.

A 900-year chronicle of Eishyshok, a single shtetl near Vilnius, reconstructed in extraordinary detail. Nine centuries of ordinary life — markets, marriages, arguments, weather — and then the final chapters.

Eliach was born there. She also created the Tower of Life, the 1,500-photograph installation at the US Holocaust Memorial Museum in Washington. Many of those faces are the people in this book.

Kruk was a librarian who ran the ghetto library and kept a daily chronicle of the Vilna ghetto and, later, the camps in Estonia where he died in 1944. He knew what he was doing: recording a community's destruction as it happened, from inside it.

It is a primary source rather than a narrative, and it reads like one. But it's the closest thing that exists to a direct record of Jewish Vilnius in its last years.

Subtitled A Pagan Empire within East-Central Europe, 1295–1345. How the last pagan state in Europe expanded into an enormous power while under sustained crusade — and how it managed the diplomacy of remaining pagan while dealing with Christian neighbours.

Properly academic and dense with primary sources. It is also, essentially, the only serious English-language treatment of this period, which makes it indispensable if the Grand Duchy interests you.

The standard scholarly account of Lithuania from prehistory to the partitions, written by Lithuanian historians and published in English by the Lithuanian Institute of History.

More reference work than reading experience — but if you want the authoritative version rather than an outsider's summary, this is it.

Miłosz won the Nobel Prize in Literature and was born in what is now Lithuania, studied in Vilnius, and wrote in Polish. That combination is itself the subject: this is a memoir about coming from a place whose identity was contested, and about being formed by a Europe that no longer exists.

A boy growing up in the Lithuanian countryside, in a world of forests, old beliefs and slowly arriving modernity. Much gentler than everything else on this list, and a useful corrective — Lithuania is not only its twentieth century.

Venclova is a poet, a former Soviet dissident and a friend of Brodsky and Miłosz. This is his city, walked and remembered — part guide, part autobiography, part argument about what Vilnius is.