Lithuania is a small country with a disproportionately heavy history, and reading about it changes how the place looks: the old town stops being pretty architecture and becomes a specific set of events.
Two kinds of book are here. Translated Lithuanian literature — very little exists, most came through university presses or small independents, and some titles are easier to find secondhand than new. And books written in English, tagged as such below, generally easier to buy and several written for readers coming to this history cold.
Table of Contents
Where to Start
If you read only one, make it the first. If you read three, take one from each of the first three sections — a novel, a deportation memoir and a history.
Vilnius Poker
Written in secret during the Soviet period and published as it collapsed. A paranoid, hallucinatory, structurally strange novel about Vilnius under occupation, told by an unreliable narrator convinced the city is controlled by a hidden force called Them. Not an easy book and not a charming one — probably the most important Lithuanian novel of the twentieth century, and it does what no history can: it puts you inside the psychology of living under surveillance.
A fifteen-year-old girl and her family are deported from Kaunas to Siberia in 1941. Written for young adults, which is why it is the most widely read book about Lithuania in English — and why some dismiss it. They shouldn't: Šepetys is Lithuanian-American and researched it thoroughly, and for many readers abroad it is the only reason they know the deportations happened.
Cultural Handbooks — the Practical Kind
A different category. These do not explain the history — they explain how people here behave and why, which is what catches newcomers out.
Lithuania — Culture Smart!
Belonogoff is an American writer who lived and worked here, and it shows. Covers customs, values and traditions; the historical and religious background in brief; life at home; eating and drinking; do's, don'ts and taboos; business etiquette; and communication, spoken and unspoken. Paperback, hardback and Kindle.
Lithuanian Customs and Traditions
Deeper and more traditional than Culture Smart! — national holidays, the calendar of feast days, family celebrations and the customs attached to each. Bilingual, so doubly useful if you are learning the language.
Three things these books say that nobody says out loud
Give an odd number of flowers — even numbers are for funerals, and Lithuanians are far too polite to correct you. Reserve is not coldness: initial formality is a form of respect, warmth arrives later and means more, and arrivals from louder cultures routinely misread it as being disliked. Punctuality is expected, and family and tradition sit closer to the centre of life than in much of Western Europe.
Lithuanian Fiction in Translation
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. It is about exile, about writing seriously 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. One of the outstanding Lithuanian novels of its era, and the best book about the bohemian Vilnius that Užupis still trades on.
Silva Rerum
A multi-volume family saga set in the seventeenth- and eighteenth-century Grand Duchy — enormously popular domestically, and the book that did most to make Lithuanians interested in their own pre-modern history again. None of Silva Rerum I–IV has been published in English, and no translation has been announced; it is translated into eight other languages, which is why English-language lists keep including it. Sabaliauskaitė's only book available in English is Vilnius. Wilno. Vilna. Three Short Stories (Baltos lankos, 2015, translated by Romas Kinka), who has published extracts of Silva Rerum but not the novels.
Deportation and the Soviet Era
Between 1941 and 1952 tens of thousands of Lithuanians were deported to Siberia and Central Asia. Almost every Lithuanian family has this in its history, and it explains more about the country's politics than anything else you could read.
Deported to the Arctic at fourteen. She escaped, returned to Lithuania, wrote this account and — knowing it would be found — buried the manuscript in a jar in the garden. She was deported again; the manuscript was recovered decades later, after her death. Short, plain and almost unbearable, with no literary artifice in it at all, which is exactly why it works.
Sruoga was a poet and professor imprisoned in Stutthof concentration camp, and the tone is what makes the book extraordinary: savagely, disorientingly funny, the camp written as absurd theatre. Soviet authorities suppressed it for over a decade. Later filmed — see our films guide.
Litvak History
Before the war Vilnius was one of the great centres of Jewish life in Europe, the Jerusalem of the North. Around 95% of Lithuania's Jewish population was murdered in the Holocaust, much of it in the first months and much of it locally. You cannot understand Vilnius without this.
Not solely about Lithuania: the lands between Berlin and Moscow where fourteen million people were killed by two regimes between 1933 and 1945. Lithuania sits at the centre, and Snyder's framing explains why this region's history differs from Western Europe's in kind, not degree.
How Poland, Ukraine, Lithuania and Belarus emerged as separate nations from a shared past, and why that was neither obvious nor inevitable — why Vilnius was Polish, why that is contested, and what "Lithuanian" has meant at different times.
The resistance movement inside the Vilna ghetto, and what happened when it collapsed and the fighters fled to the forests. Led by Abba Kovner, a young poet, with two teenage girls — Vitka Kempner and Ruzka Korczak — among his closest lieutenants; at seventeen Kempner was reportedly the first person to blow up a Nazi train in occupied Europe. Cohen writes it as narrative rather than academic history, and it moves.
A 900-year chronicle of Eishyshok, a single shtetl near Vilnius: nine centuries of ordinary life — markets, marriages, arguments, weather — and then the final chapters. Eliach was born there, and 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.
The Last Days of the Jerusalem of Lithuania
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. A primary source rather than a narrative, and the closest thing that exists to a direct record of Jewish Vilnius in its last years.
History and Politics
Lieven was the only Western journalist permanently based in the Baltics during the independence struggle, and this is his account — Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, from ancient origins to the collapse of the USSR. Now three decades old, which makes it a period document as well as a history, capturing a moment nobody knew the outcome of.
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 among Christian neighbours. Properly academic and dense with primary sources, and essentially the only serious English-language treatment of this period.
The History of Lithuania Before 1795
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 it is the authoritative version rather than an outsider's summary.
Miłosz won the Nobel Prize in Literature, was born in what is now Lithuania, studied in Vilnius and wrote in Polish. That combination is the subject: 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 among forests, old beliefs and slowly arriving modernity. Gentler than everything else here, and a useful corrective: Lithuania is not only its twentieth century.
Books About Vilnius
A history of Vilnius told through the outsiders who passed through — Napoleon's army, Dostoevsky, assorted travellers and occupiers. The organising insight: Vilnius has almost always been a city where the people in charge were not from there, and where the population changed completely more than once.
Venclova is a poet, a former Soviet dissident and a friend of Brodsky and Miłosz. His city, walked and remembered — part guide, part autobiography, part argument about what Vilnius is.
Where to Find Them
- Amazon — most reliable for the translated titles, though some are print-on-demand or secondhand
- Vilnius bookshops — several carry an English-language Lithuanian literature section, and staff know these books well
- Lithuanian libraries — the national and university libraries hold English translations; joining is straightforward once you have an asmens kodas
- Secondhand — often the only route for out-of-print translations
A note on reading order
Just arrived and want the fastest useful understanding: Briedis for the city, Grinkevičiūtė for the history, Snyder for the region — roughly a week of reading. If you would rather stay in English-language originals: Lieven for how independence happened, Cohen for Jewish Vilnius, Briedis for the city itself.
Frequently Asked Questions
What's the best book about Lithuania for a complete beginner?
Vilnius: City of Strangers by Laimonas Briedis if you want history and you're living here, or Between Shades of Gray by Rūta Šepetys if you want something you'll finish in an evening.
Is much Lithuanian literature available in English?
Not much. The market is small and few titles get translated. The ones that have — Gavelis, Škėma, Kunčinas — tend to be significant works that earned the effort.
What should I read about the Soviet deportations?
Shadows on the Tundra by Dalia Grinkevičiūtė — a memoir written in secret and buried in a jar. Short, plain and devastating.
Are there books about Jewish Vilnius?
Cohen's The Avengers for the ghetto resistance, Eliach's There Once Was a World for what existed before it, and Kruk's diary for the primary source. Snyder's Bloodlands sets the region around them.
Is Czesław Miłosz Lithuanian or Polish?
Both and neither, which is the point. Born in what is now Lithuania, educated in Vilnius, wrote in Polish, won the Nobel Prize. His work is largely about what that combination means.
Where can I buy these in Lithuania?
Larger Vilnius bookshops carry English-language sections including Lithuanian literature in translation, and staff know these books well. Libraries are a good route once you have a personal code.
I want to understand how people here behave, not the history. What do I read?
Lithuania — Culture Smart! by Lara Belonogoff, written in English by an American who lived and worked here. Pair it with Danutė Bindokienė-Brazytė's bilingual Lithuanian Customs and Traditions before a Kūčios dinner or a name day.
How many of these are actually in print, and how hard are the rest to find?
It varies enough to check before planning a reading order around a title. Culture Smart! is comfortably in print; Bindokienė-Brazytė is secondhand only; several translated titles turn up as print-on-demand or used copies rather than new stock. Amazon is the most reliable single route, and the libraries hold English translations.
Which of these were written in English, and which are translations?
Each card carries a tag. The English originals are the outsiders' books — Snyder, Lieven, Cohen, Eliach, Briedis, Rowell and Belonogoff — plus Rūta Šepetys, who is Lithuanian-American. The translations are the Lithuanian literature itself: Gavelis, Škėma, Kunčinas, Grinkevičiūtė and Sruoga.
Vilnius Poker is described as difficult. Is it worth pushing through?
Only if you want the thing it does, which no history book can. What it gives you is the psychology of living under surveillance from the inside — the part of the Soviet period that explains how older Lithuanians are about it. If you want the same period at two hours rather than a fortnight, read Grinkevičiūtė's Shadows on the Tundra instead.
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Disclosure
Book links go to Amazon, and as an Amazon Associate we earn from qualifying purchases — at no additional cost to you. It does not affect which books we include or how we describe them; several titles here are hard to find and unlikely to earn anything. See our editorial guidelines.
As an Amazon Associate I earn from qualifying purchases. Book links on this page go to Amazon and carry our affiliate tag — if you buy through one we earn a small commission at no additional cost to you. It does not affect which books are here or how they are ranked: three titles on this list cannot be bought at all and say so, and the two we would earn most from are not the two at the top.