A good book can be read in a weekend, but a great book takes time. Like an intricate puzzle or a glass of wine, a great book is ripe with newfound realizations, sparkling with mystery and awe, and as such should be enjoyed slowly, adoringly.

Suzy Hansen’s Notes on a Foreign Country: An American Abroad in a Post-American World is one of these great books. Part autobiography part historical nonfiction part investigative journalism, the novel centers around what it means to be an American, both in the United States and abroad. In exploring this seemingly esoteric question, Hansen unveils hard, heavy truths about American exceptionalism—the impacts of which are inextricably linked to imperialism abroad and racism at home.

She weaves her own personal narrative as an American journalist living in Istanbul, gradually growing conscious of her “ingrained prejudices” and “black holes of knowledge” together with historical examinations of the ways in which American influence seeps like a “heavy liquid into every corner of the earth.” She traces the proliferation of free market capitalism across time and space, specifically as it bankrolls U.S.-backed military coups, the appointments of foreign dictators as puppets of American institutions, and the subsidizing of war-torn regions by multinational corporations, all of which lead to oppression, ignorance and disenfranchisement on a global level. Meanwhile, she questions her own role in this convoluted web, as well as that of her colleagues, who despite best intentions are the “beneficiaries of the delusions of globalization.” The gentle interplay of individual positionality and global political endeavor pulls readers into Hansen’s world of entangled individual and national identity, responsibility, and complicity.

To come to terms with the sheer scale of America’s international influence, as Hansen eloquently elucidates, is reason enough to lower the book for a minute, to let the pages cool and breathe. The author’s exquisite articulations of being abroad have a similar effect, revealing to readers profoundly visceral truths to which only an artist could put words. For this reason, Notes on a Foreign Country is a timeless work, overflowing with philosophical insights that remind readers that quite often understanding begins with newly discovered ignorance—the kind that comes from being in an entirely unfamiliar place. As Hansen says in the first chapter, “the impact of merely seeing foreign things with my own eyes was the equivalent of reading a thousand history books.” Most importantly, she reminds us that as Americans we must strive to lesson the distance between ourselves and our fellow human beings. Only in doing so can we to brake away from our constructed realities, shed the layers of ignorance and truly see the world as it is.