Journey Without Maps by Graham Greene. Greene traveled through the Liberian interior in 1935, on foot with a group of porters and his cousin, with only rough hand-drawn maps to guide him. The result is one of his best non-fiction books — part travel writing, part self-examination, entirely vivid. Still the essential literary companion to Liberia.
The Liberian Civil War by Mark Huband. A journalist's account of the first civil war (1989–1996), drawn from direct reporting. Unsentimental and essential for understanding what happened and why.
Liberian Dreams: Back-to-Africa Narratives from the 1850s, edited by Wilson Jeremiah Moses. A collection of primary texts from Black Americans who emigrated to Liberia in the nineteenth century. Useful historical context for understanding the Americo-Liberian founding story and its complications.
Culture in Liberia: An Afrocentric View of the Cultural Interactions between the Indigenous Liberians and the Americo-Liberians by Santosh C. Saha. Academic but accessible analysis of the cultural tensions at the root of Liberia's modern history.