Search Results for: Taiwan

Taiwan: living on the edge

August 9, 2012 By in Asia, The stories Tags: , , , , , , , , 16 Comments

Taiwan is the country with the most tenuous claim to be included on the list of independent countries I’m reading books from this year. It was a member of the UN until 1971, when the dispute between its government, the Republic of China, and the Chinese government, the People’s Republic of China, led to the UN voting to withdraw its recognition of the ROC and thus Taiwan. From that time onwards, although Taiwan governs its internal affairs independently and many countries around the world maintain informal diplomatic relations with it (the UK government sent a parliamentary delegation to visit the country in 2011, for example), the nation has officially been part of China. Only 22 UN members recognise it as a separate sovereign state.

I was curious to see what literature from this disputed land might be like, so when @markbooks suggested Pai Hsien-yung’s Crystal Boys, I was quick to add it to the list.

Claiming to be ‘the first modern Asian gay novel’, the 1983 book portrays the lives of a group of young male prostitutes in Taipei’s underworld. Following A-Qing, a teenage run-away who was expelled from school and thrown out of home for being found in a compromising position with a supervisor, the narrative explores the precarious lives of these young men, peeling back the layers to show the tenderness, vulnerability and hurt within.

The subject matter and suggestive cover picture of a half-naked Taiwanese youth set up an expectation of explicitness that is actually quite misleading. In fact, beyond passing references, the book doesn’t feature a single sex scene. Instead, all the drama and extreme experience is played out in the dialogue between the characters, in which cruel insults and desperate appeals are laughed off in a welter of banter. There is the boy Wu Min who talks about his plans for suicide only for his friends to think he is joking until he goes home to slash his wrists and the chief who pushes the youngsters into encounters with seemingly heartless abandon.

Yet, beneath the hard shell that nights around the lotus pond in Taipei’s New Park and later at the Cosy Nest café force them to develop, the boys possess a great deal of warmth and tenderness that often expresses itself in surprising ways. When Wu Min is in hospital and unable to meet his medical bills, the boys all donate blood to keep him alive – ‘what we share in common are bodies filled with aching, irrepressible desire and hearts filled with insane loneliness’, observes A-Qing, articulating the bond that ties him to his friends. In addition, A-Qing, who misses his younger brother Buddy, is forever adopting and protecting younger boys who remind him of home.

Indeed, by far the most daring and subversive aspect of the book is not its presentation of sexuality and prostitution but its use of those things to express ideas about nationhood, sovereignty and identity. As homosexuality was illegal in mainland China until 1997, it is effectively off-limits, out-of-bounds and dangerous territory in the book. This enables Pai Hsien-yung to use the crystal boys’ world as a powerful metaphor, as the opening lines of the novel show:

‘There are no days in our kingdom, only nights. As soon as the sun comes up, our kingdom goes into hiding, for it is an unlawful nation; we have no government and no constitution, we are neither recognised nor respected by anyone, our citizenry is little more than rabble. […] It’s as though our kingdom were surrounded and hidden by a tightly woven fence – cut off from the outside world, isolated for the time being. But we are always keenly aware of the constant threat to our existence by the boundless world on the other side of the fence.’

At times, the narrative becomes a little stilted and episodic, with too many characters crowding in one after the other. Pai Hsien-yung’s tendency to stress the emotional suffering of the boys can also be a little repetitive and could have done with some tighter editing.

However, none of this detracts from the fact that this is a courageous and fascinating work from a writer not afraid to speak out against the majority. The book is a gripping insight into a fragile and contested world. Powerful stuff.

Crystal Boys (Nieh-Tzu) by Pai Hsien-yung, translated from the Chinese by Howard Goldblatt (Gay Sunshine Press, 1995)

Book of the month: Maggie Shen King

December 30, 2022 By in Asia, Book of the month, Post-world, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 2 Comments
Wedding Parade

A few months ago, to celebrate the publication of the new UK edition of Reading the World: How I Read a Book from Every Country, I ran a giveaway. The terms of entry were simple: all those who wanted the chance to receive a signed copy simply had to leave a comment recommending me a book.

The response was wonderful and it was great to receive input from readers all over the planet, just as I did when I first set out to read the world in 2012. The suggestions were as intriguing as they were varied and will no doubt keep me busy for some time. However, they have already yielded some cracking reads and my last book of the month of 2022 is one of them, put forward by Lauren.

As its title implies, An Excess Male by Taiwanese-American author Maggie Shen King is built around imagining a world in which there are too many men. Set in an authoritarian, near-future mainland China, it envisions a society where the gender-selection practices driven by directives such as the one-child policy (but also at play in countries like India) have skewed the ratio of women to men so drastically that government-sanctioned polyandry is instituted in order to give as many men as possible the opportunity to marry and reproduce.

The novel focuses on one family in the process of interviewing for a third husband – ‘going to the max’ as it’s known in the world of the book. Told variously through the eyes of the prospective suitor Wei-guo, wife May-ling, and her two existing husbands, brothers Hann and XX, the narrative explores the experience of being trapped in a system that controls and subverts basic human needs and desires, exposing numerous secrets along the way.

Essentially, this book is about finding a way to say the unsayable, and live an authentic life in the face of the systematic stripping of human dignity and autonomy. As with Crystal Boys, my 2012 Taiwanese read, homosexuality (which was only declassified as a mental illness in China in 2001) becomes a shorthand for this. In the world of the novel, men who love men are known as ‘wilfully sterile’ and are sent for re-education, as well as denied various rights.

The speculative, near-future setting is also a powerful tool. By creating a society that does not quite exist, Shen King is able to express criticisms, depict hypocrisy and portray tensions much more directly and tellingly than a realist novel would allow. As Megan Walsh argues in her brilliant book, The Subplot: What China is Reading and Why it Matters, sci-fi has been especially successful in mainland China partly because of the wiggle room it allows authors – it’s no coincidence that Cixin Liu’s The Three-Body Problem, translated by Ken Liu, became the first novel to be a bestseller both at home and abroad. For an author like Shen King, raised in a territory that has not been allowed to assert its sovereignty on the global stage for decades, the attraction is clear.

Yet any reader who interprets An Excess Male purely as a criticism of China’s approach to Taiwan is missing a great deal. Many of the anxieties around surveillance and the intrusion of technology into private relationships find their echo in contemporary anglophone society. The same can be said of various approaches to categorising and labelling people, and thereby limiting their freedoms and opportunities. The fact, for example, that being placed on a mental-health watchlist is seen as the first step towards being excluded from mainstream society resonates uncomfortably with many practices in the so-called Free World. Much as many anglophone readers might like to, we cannot get away with simply branding China as the villain here: there are problems to address in our societies too.

This subtlety is also evident in the writing and in the way the story plays out. As the best dystopian fiction tends to do, the novel reveals flashes of beauty in brokenness. Suffocating though it is, the tightly controlled system of polyandry allows for closeness and even whole kinds of intimacy unknown in more liberal societies; the fraternal bond between some co-husbands, for example, is a touching and sustaining thing, a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. There are also some lovely touches in the writing, such as the foreign nuns who appear at one point, speaking a kind of accented language riddled with the habits usually associated with Chinese stereotypes. XX’s perspective, as a character on the autism spectrum, is also, for the most part, deftly handled.

The result is a compelling and thought-provoking read. Drawing on her intimate knowledge of both Taiwanese and US society, Shen King creates a story that neatly bridges the gap between the two. In so doing, she brings readers everywhere face to face with one of the most fundamental human dilemmas: how to survive when your personal needs go against what is perceived to be the greater good.

An Excess Male by Maggie Shen King (Harper Voyager, 2017)

Picture: ‘Wedding Parade’ by Cormac Heron on flickr.com

Being translated

September 3, 2017 By in Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , 16 Comments

 

 

 

 

 

Having spent the past five years thinking a lot about translation and how important it is, I’ve been delighted to have a chance to observe the process from a different angle over the past twelve months. My novel Beside Myself has received book deals in around nine language territories, which means that I have had the privilege of seeing my writing translated into other tongues.

This has been a strange experience. As I don’t speak Thai, Polish, Chinese or Italian (some of the languages in which my work now exists), I have no way of knowing how the respective translators have rendered my story. I have had to trust them and my publishers to produce a fair representation of my original work, one that I hope will convey the kernel and spirit of the narrative to readers in their respective language markets.

From my own research and experience with reading translations, I am aware that this might involve a degree of alteration or the inclusion of extra bits of explanation in order to convey concepts that may not be familiar to people in other parts of the world.

As such, the process has brought home to me once more the generosity and fragility of translation – that it is essentially an exercise that relies on strangers reading your work with sympathetic and discerning eyes.

However, although I can’t read the foreign-language versions of my novel (apart from the French – of which more soon!), I have been able to consider the different book jackets and titles that publishers have chosen to give my work. This has been an education in the way that different book markets operate and so I am sharing a selection below. Above, from left to right, are the UK hardback, UK paperback, US hardback and US paperback covers for comparison.

(For those who don’t know, the novel centres around a pair of identical twins who swap places in a game and then get trapped in the wrong lives when one of them refuses to change back.)

 

Vida robada

This is the cover of the Spanish edition. I like the sepia feel of the picture, which harks back to my central characters’ childhoods in the 1980s.

The literal translation of the title is ‘Stolen life’. This is interesting as it makes a more definitive statement about who is to blame for what happens in the novel than the original title. Spanish readers will have the sense that someone has done something wrong before they even begin the first page.

 

 

Moja siostra …czy ja?

The Polish cover is intriguing. We’re in thriller territory here. The mirror gets across the idea of twinship and doubleness. However there is a much darker feel to everything, as though the beautiful woman in the reflection is about to come to serious harm.

The title (‘My sister… or me?’) is much more direct than the English or Spanish versions. In Poland, readers know that this is a story about choosing between sisters as soon as they glimpse the spine of the book.

 

 

Beside Myself

The Taiwanese edition seems like a halfway house between the two previous versions. We have the slightly retro-feeling little girls, but the fragmenting of the picture lends a dark feel as though everything is about to fall apart.

The Taiwanese publisher has kept the English title on the cover (apparently this is common practice in this part of the world), but I’m not sure whether the Chinese characters are a literal translation of it or a different title – can anyone help me out?

 

 

The Person Who Stole My Name 

The Chinese cover is the most unusual of the ones I have seen. In fact, when I was first sent it, I was so intrigued that I asked my agent to find out what the thinking behind it was (in case you were wondering, there aren’t any flamingos in the novel).

The answer came back that the separation of the species – the little girl and the birds – was intended to indicate loneliness. This is a central theme in the novel, so that makes sense to me.

As with the Spanish title, Chinese readers of ‘The person who stole my name’ will have the sense that a wrong has been done to someone before they turn to the first page.

 

À sa place

The French cover also prompted a question, as to my British eyes it seemed to have slightly erotic overtones (again, not a strong feature of the book). My French editor, however, assures me that this is not the case in the French market.

I really like the ambiguity of the title (‘In her place’), which leaves open the question of which twin’s identity is under threat.

As I can read French (very slowly and with a big dictionary), I will be able to see how the story has been carried over into this new language. I’m planning to get stuck in as soon as I finish editing my next novel.

I’ll let you know how I get on…

Postcard from my bookshelf #4

April 15, 2017 By in Post-world, Postcards from my bookshelf, The stories Tags: , , , , , , 8 Comments

One of the things I loved about my Year of Reading the World was the way it brought me into contact with booklovers around the planet. In the five years it’s been going, this blog has had views from more than 230 territories – far more places than the 196 UN-recognised nations (plus Taiwan) that I set out to read books from in 2012.

It’s been brilliant hearing from readers in so many regions and the international nature of the project is a constant reminder to me of the potential stories have to connect us across cultural, geographical, political and religious divides.

However, one nation stands head and shoulders above the rest in terms of its interest in the quest. Roughly a third of all the views this website has ever had have come from the US. That’s three times as many as those from the next most-interested country: my homeland, the UK. Indeed, it was the interest of US-based TV channel CNN International that first brought the project onto the radar of many people around the world.

As such, I decided that this month’s translated book gift should go to someone from the US, in recognition of that nation’s enthusiasm for the idea of reading the world.

As you might imagine from the stats, there have been lots of American entries for this project. These include people of all ages and backgrounds, many of whom have inspiring things to say about what books have done for them. There are aspiring writers, librarians, students, teachers, translators and many others in the mix. And there are a number of people who have faced or are facing extraordinary personal challenges.

I was struggling to pick a winner. But then one comment caught my eye and I knew in an instant which book I wanted to send to that person.

The message came from Jane Banks, a university professor-turned-book editor in New Orleans. She wrote this:

I mostly edit books by non-native writers. I have edited two books on the war in the Balkans, both translated from Albanian, one Ph.D. dissertation by a student from Iran, a book about utopian urban planning in Europe and Central America by a professor from Portugal, and my current book by a professor in Australia on video piracy and online culture in her native China.

I love these projects because they give me a window on other countries and cultures and because armchair traveling is next best to the real thing. I would love to read books, fiction or non fiction, that have a significant sense of place. I live in New Orleans and find that books set here often use the city itself as a character. I’d like to read books like that, from any country at all.

Immediately, I thought of the novel Metropole by Hungarian writer Ferenc Karinthy. It’s an extraordinary book in which a linguist accidentally gets on the wrong plane and finds himself in a country where, unusually for him, he can make neither head nor tail of the language. Disorientated and increasingly anxious, he wanders around a city that becomes ever more menacing and strange – a character in its own right, just as Jane describes.

So there you are, Jane. This one’s on its way to you. I hope you enjoy it as much as I did.

There will be a bonus postcard from my bookshelf this month in celebration of World Book Day. Keep your eyes peeled for an announcement on 23 April. 

And if you’d like a chance to receive a postcard from my bookshelf, visit the project post and leave a comment telling me a bit about you and what you like to read. The next regular recipient will be announced on May 15.

Book of the month: Alan Cherchesov

July 29, 2014 By in Book of the month, Post-world Tags: , , , , , , , 2 Comments

IMG_0449

The nation that July’s Book of the Month hails from is not represented on the A Year of Reading the World list of 195 UN-recognised states plus Taiwan. One of the 22 republics representing ethnic minority groups in Russia, the region now known as North Ossetia-Alania was absorbed into the bigger country in the mid-19th century and has been part of it ever since. Had I read this book back in 2012, I would have had to file it under ‘Russia’ or perhaps put it among my ‘Rest of the World’ contenders.

Much like his homeland, novelist Alan Cherchesov, who is also founder and director of the Institute of Civilization in the North Ossetian capital Vladikavkaz, is little-known in the English-speaking world. Indeed, it was only by chance that I heard of him. Having read Andrei Volos’s mini masterpiece Hurramabad – one of the most exquisite books I encountered during my project – for Tajikistan, I received an email from Natasha Perova at the publisher Glas New Russian Writing. She thanked me for my review and suggested a couple of other titles on their list that might interest me.

Two years later, as I began to look around for stories to consider for my Book of the Month slot, I remembered that email and tracked down the works on it. And I’m very glad that I did, because in Cherchesov’s novel, Requiem for the Living, I discovered one of the most extraordinary narratives I have ever read.

Relating the exploits of a mysterious orphan, Alone, who comes to live in a remote mountain aul  (village) as a child and gradually assumes control of the entire community, the novel weaves a haunting and troubling picture. As the population contends with the arrival of the sinister Belgians who are intent on exploiting the region’s resources, the contempt of the ethnic Russians and the locals’ own blind adherence to feuds and traditions, we see the inscrutable protagonist manipulate the course of events ‘twining the multicoloured threads of all these individuals lives together’ in a brave and painful attempt to escape his own dubious past. Part fable, part morality tale and part epic, the novel – narrated by the son of one of the other main characters – reveals how loyalties can at once bind us together and tear us apart.

Cherchesov has a gift for evoking the remote world of his story through succinct descriptions. From the prison cell with ‘two dozen bunks, soiled plasterwork, and a permanent atmosphere of stubborn, lonely fury’ to the powerful narration of a horse and cart careening over a precipice, he brings the strange, dreamlike events of his narrative close to us.

The same is true of his encapsulation of the feelings and anxieties of his characters in small details. The observation, for example, that for an Ossetian villager ‘speaking Russian in front of a crowd of people was almost like stripping naked in public’ tells us all we need to know about the relations between the two ethnic groups.

In particular, Cherchesov is a master of portraying conflicting emotions and reveals again and again how emotional weather can change in the space of a sentence, as rapidly as the mist rolls in to shroud the aul. Using a technique known as free indirect discourse, he plaits the narrative into the thoughts and words of his characters, laying bare the way we buck and struggle under the pull of irreconcilable concerns and desires. Episodes such as the unravelling of a love triangle involving a jealous shopkeeper and the narrator’s father, the morning-after curdling of tenderness between Alone and the prostitute to whom he loses his virginity, and his drunken rant to the narrator after a girl kills herself for love of him come alive because of the inconsistencies that the author threads through them.

For all its brilliance, though, the novel does come with a sizeable health warning. This is not an easy book. Indeed, the word ‘labyrinthine’ might have been coined for it. From the sentence level up, it is intricate and demanding, often switching between time periods and perspectives in a handful of words.

This is made all the more challenging by the fact that there are no section or chapter breaks, so that the narrative is a single 351-page chunk. The reason for this could be, as a German critic writing in Die Welt has suggested, because the work owes a lot to a complex Eastern literary genre known as ‘divan’, in which threads weave together like the patterns of a carpet. While this may be true, it does not make for a relaxing read. In particular, Cherchesov’s tendency to withhold backstory until very late in the narrative can make for moments of extreme bafflement as characters’ carry out seemingly bizarre actions that only make sense much later.

Nevertheless, the book rewards those who persevere. I’ll warrant few of us raised in the Western literary tradition will have come across much like this before. It is certainly one of the strangest and at times most mesmerising stories I have ever read. And, like the region it comes from, it deserves to be more widely known.

Requiem for the Living by Alan Cherchesov, translated from the Russian by Subhi Shervell (Glass New Russian Writing, 2005)

FAQ

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Here are my answers to some of the questions I get asked most often about A Year of Reading the World. If you don’t find find what you’re looking for here, please feel free to drop me a line (ann’at’annmorgan.me) and I’ll do my best to help.

How can I follow this project?

Although my Year of Reading the World is finished, I still write about books and related things on this site. If you’d like to have these posts emailed to you when I publish them, click the ‘follow’ tab in the bottom right-hand corner of your screen or in the sidebar.

Alternatively, if you want to keep up with post-world developments, including my book, Reading the World or The World Between Two Covers, as it’s known in the US, you can follow me on Twitter (@A_B_Morgan) by clicking the Twitter button in the sidebar. For Facebook users, there’s a dedicated A Year of Reading the World page (like it and you’ll make my day). If you’re a visual sort, there’s the A Year of Reading the World Instagram account, where I’m recording snapshots from the adventure of publishing my book this year.

And if you want to get in touch directly just leave a comment or drop me a line at ann’at’annmorgan.me

How did you read 196 (plus one extra) books in one year?

With difficulty is the short answer! I had to be very organised. I worked out the amount I needed to get through every day (around 150 pages to keep on track to read four books a week) and made sure I stuck to it. This meant reading for two hours on my commute (I was working full-time for most of the year) and an hour or two in the evening. I sometimes read in my lunch break too.

In actual fact, the reading was only half the battle – writing the blog posts and doing all the research took as much time, so I got up early to spend an hour or two on this before I left for work. I was very grateful to the many readers who helped me out with information and suggestions along the way, and to my friends, family and now-husband Steve for putting up with me being quite boring that year! For all the hard work, though, it was a lot of fun.

How did you choose what to read?

This varied from country to country (you can find out the reasons for each choice by clicking on the country names on the list). Sometimes a book caught my imagination or just sounded so tempting I had to give it a try. At other times, visitors to the blog made very convincing arguments as to why I had to go for certain titles. A few books got so many recommendations that they were obviously national favourites. And in the cases of countries with very little work in translation, I was often lucky to find even one option.

How can I see what book you chose for each country?

You can find details of the books that were recommended for each country on the list. Click on the country name to see the review of the title I chose in each case.

How can I buy the books you read for each country?

That very much depends on the book. Many of the titles I read are widely available through the usual commercial channels. Others have to be obtained through specialist, local retailers – where this is the case I have usually given the details in the blog post about each book. Some of the titles may have gone out of print since my project and others are still not commercially available. I am hopeful that English-language publishers will be inspired to acquire these books in time.

Can you give me pdfs of the books you read?

No. I do not own the rights to the books I read and it would be illegal and unfair for me to share authors’ work in this way. The authors deserve to be paid for their writing. In a few cases, authors and translators have chosen to make the books freely available online. Where this is the case, I have usually included this information in the blog post about the book.

Why is my country not on the list?

The list of countries I read books from is made up of the 195 UN-recognised sovereign states plus former UN member Taiwan. You can find out more about this here. In addition to works from the 196 states, I also read a book from one extra territory chosen by blog visitors to represent the territories not on my list. This was Jalal Barzanji’s The Man in Blue Pyjamas from Kurdistan. You can find out more about the Rest of the World contenders here.

What was your favourite book?

This is almost impossible to answer. I read so many excellent things during the project that it’s very hard to pick one out – my response tends to vary depending on what day of the week you catch me. Some of the books were wonderful simply because of the stories they told and the way they were written. Others were special because of the lengths people went to to get them to me.

However, I have drawn up a list of my ten favourite commercially available reads, which you can find below. Unlike some of the other books on the list, you should be able to buy copies of these:

  • Albania – Ismail Kadare Broken April
  • Canada – Nicole Brossard Mauve Desert
  • Czech Republic – Bohumil Hrabal Too Loud a Solitude
  • Mongolia – Galsan Tschinag The Blue Sky
  • Myanmar – Nu Nu Yi Smile as they Bow
  • Pakistan – Jamil Ahmad The Wandering Falcon
  • Serbia – Srdjan Valjarevic Lake Como (limited availability)
  • Sierra Leone – Ismael Beah A Long Way Gone
  • Tajikistan – Andrei Volos Hurramabad
  • Togo – Tete-Michel Kpomassie An African in Greenland

Will you review my book?

Although my Year of Reading the World finished at the end of 2012, I have recently introduced a ‘Book of the month’ slot on this blog, where I write about one book I have particularly enjoyed each month. These books are usually suggested to me by other readers, publishers and experts, rather than the writers themselves. However, if you think your book might be of particular interest to me, you are welcome to leave a comment telling me about it.

I’m afraid I can’t provide feedback on unpublished works not featured on this blog. That said, I am always keen to hear about initiatives and events to do with reading, writing, literature and the world. If you have something you think I might be interested in, please feel free to get in touch (ann’at’annmorgan.me).

Thanks.

When is a country not a country?

November 24, 2011 By in Project preparation Tags: , , , , , , , 37 Comments

One of the first challenges I had to face when starting to prepare for my project to read a book from every country in 2012 was to decide exactly what I meant by ‘country’. Having grown up in the UK, where there’s always someone talking about making a bid for independence – whether it’s Northern Ireland, Scotland, Wales, Cornwall, Yorkshire or some of the feistier parts of south-east London – I had an inkling that this might be trickier than it first appeared.

But it wasn’t until I typed ‘number of countries in the world’ into Google that I realised quite what I was letting myself in for.

There are a lot of conflicting answers to the question. The UN has 193 members. There will be 205 countries represented at the London 2012 Olympic Games. And all in all there are at least 258 national flags in the world today (see the video below, which has 257 of them apart from the one for South Sudan, the world’s newest country, which declared independence from Sudan in July 2011).

Then there are the stateless nations, like the Kurds, who define themselves as a separate group but don’t have a territory to call their own. I’m not sure if anyone has counted these up, but I get the impression that the number of these depends on where you stand.

A lot of the issues have to do with the definition of what we mean by a sovereign state. As set out in the Montevideo Convention, sovereign statehood essentially boils down to having a permanent population, defined borders, a government and dealings with other states. You’re a state if you say you are and the people in and around you agree. But as the nightly news will tell you, this is often not as simple as it sounds.

The list I’m working from now comprises all UN-recognised countries plus Palestine and Taiwan. When I started the project, I was using what seemed to be the most universally accepted list of sovereign states out there. This included all UN-recognised countries, plus Kosovo. I took the liberty of adding Taiwan to this because it used to be a member of the UN and still maintains relations with many countries. This gave me a grand total of 196.

However as the project went on, I realised the list I’d been using was actually based on states recognised by Western countries such as the US. Given that this is a global project, this seemed a little wonky.

So I decided to change the world (there’s a phrase I’ve always wanted to write) and use a list of states with some degree of recognition (past or present) from the UN as a more global barometer of statehood. Counting permanent observer and ‘non-member entity’ Palestine and Taiwan, this came to 196 too and in practice only meant swapping Palestine for Kosovo on the list.  So this is what I did – not purely to save myself work, but also because as far as I could see recognition by this global organisation was one of the clearest and most universally agreed upon definitions of countryhood around.

It’s by no means a perfect system though and it will mean odd omissions from my list, like Puerto Rico and Hong Kong, both of which, despite having quite distinct cultures and histories are technically territories of other states. Still, it’s the best I’ve got to go on for now. And it will certainly keep me busy.

Please do keep the suggestions of titles coming – I’m going to need all the help I can get!

This post was updated on 10 June 2012 to reflect my decision to include Palestine in Kosovo’s stead on the list.

Can you help me read the world?

October 24, 2011 By in Project preparation Tags: , , , , , , , 50 Comments

In 2012, the world is coming to London for the Olympics and I’m going out to meet it. I’m planning to read my way around as many of the globe’s 196 countries (yes, I count Taiwan) as I can, sampling one book from every nation.

I want to read a story from Swaziland, a novel from Nepal, a book from Bolivia, a… well, you get the picture.

It’s going to be tough — according to the Society of Authors, only 3 per cent of the books published in the UK each year are translations. There are plenty of languages that have next to nothing translated into English. Then there are all the tiny tucked away places like Nauru and Tavalu (I know, I hadn’t either), where there may not be much written down at all.

Some countries have a culture of almost exclusively oral storytelling (alright, get your giggles over with now). Others have governments that don’t like to let works of art leak out to corrupt westerners.

And that’s not to mention the whole issue of what constitutes a national literature in the first place. Is it by a person born in that place? Is it written in the country? Can it be about another nation state?

Frankly I don’t know. I’m hoping I’ll figure out the answers (or at least my answers) to some of these questions en route.

What I do know is I can’t do it by myself. As anyone who’s dropped in on my A year of reading women blog will realise, I tend to stick mostly to British and North American writers, with the occasional South African, Australian and Indian thrown in. My knowledge of world literature is shamefully anglocentric.

So I need your help. I need you to tell me what’s hot in Russia, what’s cool in Malawi, and what’s downright smoking in Iceland. I hope to get as good a list together as possible in advance so I can hit the ground sprinting come New Year’s Day.

The books can be classics or current favourites. They can be obscure folk tales or commercial triumphs. All I ask is that they capture something of the character of a country somewhere in the world — oh, and that they’re good.

With thanks to Jason Cooper for the idea.

Picture by Steve Lennon

The list

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This is a record of all the valid book recommendations I received before, during and in the year after my 2012 quest. I chose one book for each nation for the project. These are underlined and you can click the titles or country names to read my thoughts on each choice.

I continue to update the list by choosing one new title a month as my Book of the month. Links to these reviews are highlighted in orange. If you have a recommendation (or you know about an English version of one of the books marked ‘translation sought’), please leave a comment at the bottom.

  • Afghanistan Atiq Rahimi A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear; The Patience Stone / Khaled Hosseini The Kite Runner; A Thousand Splendid Suns / Anna Badkhen Waiting for the Taliban / Emmanuel Guibert The Photographer /  (as told to) Batya Swift Yasgur Behind the Burqa
  • Albania Ismail Kadare The Palace of Dreams; Broken April / Fatos Kongoli The Loser / Elvira Dones Sworn Virgin
  • Algeria Leïla Marouane The Sexual Life of an Islamist in Paris / Anouar Benmalek Abduction / Assia Djebar So Vast the Prison / Boualem Sansal An Unfinished Business; The German Mujahid / Al-Tahir Wattar The Earthquake / Anouar Benmalek The Lovers of Algeria / Yasmina Khadra The Attack
  • Andorra Albert Salvadó The Teacher of Cheops
  • Angola José Eduardo Agualusa My Father’s Wives; Creole / Pepetela The Return of the Water Spirit / Ondjaki Good Morning Comrades; The Whistler / Jose Eduardo Agualusa The Book of Chameleons / Manuel Rui Monteiro Quem me dera ser Onda (translation sought) / José Luandino Vieira Our Musseque
  • Antigua and Barbuda Jamaica Kincaid Lucy; Annie John / Marie-Elena John Unburnable / Althea Prince Loving this Man; Ladies of the Night / Gisele Isaac Considering Venus / Joanne C. Hillhouse et al. Pepperpot (pan-Caribbean anthology)
  • Argentina Martin Kohan Seconds Out / César Aira How I Became a Nun; An Episode in the Life of a Landscape Painter / Ernesto Sábato The Tunnel / Alicia Steimberg Musicians and Watchmakers / Jorges Luis Borges / Tomás Eloy Martínez Purgatory (trans. Frank Wynne) / Matias Nespolo 7 Ways to Kill a Cat (trans. Frank Wynne) / Carlos Gamerro The Islands / Iosi Havilio Opendoor / Luisa Valenzuela / Ricardo Piglia / Guillermo Martínez / Manuel Puig / Adolfo Bioy Casares The Invention of Morel / Julio Cortázar Hopscotch / Samanta Schweblin Fever Dream
  • Armenia Armand Inezian Bringing Ararat / Grigoris Balakian Armenian Golgotha / Narine Abgaryan, tr. Lisa C. Hayden Three Apples Fell from the Sky
  • Australia Tim Winton Cloudstreet / Helen Garner The Children’s Bach / Markus Zusak The Book Thief / Nam Le The Boat / Andrew McGahan The White Earth / Elizabeth Jolley / Alex Miller Lovesong / Jill Ker Conway The Road from Coorain / Gail Jones A Guide to Berlin
  • Austria Elias Canetti The Torch in my Ear / Anna Kim Frozen Time / Thomas Bernhard Extinction / Stefan Zweig / Julya Rabinovich Splithead / Robert Seethaler A Whole Life
  • Azerbaijan Gioulzar Akhmedova Magnolia / Maksud Ibragimbekov / Anar Razayev / ? Ali and Nino
  • The Bahamas Ian Strachan God’s Angry Babies / Garth Buckner Thine is the Kingdom
  • Bahrain Ali Al Saeed Quixotiq / Sarah A Al Sahfei Yummah
  • Bangladesh Taslima Nasrin Shame / Tahmima Anam The Good Muslim / Humayun Ahmed To the Woods Dark and Deep / Ekhlasuddin Ahmed When the Evening Darkens / Shawkat Osman The Laughter of a Slave / Anwar Pasha Rifles Bread Women
  • Barbados Karen Lord Redemption in Indigo / Agymah Kamau Flickering Shadows; Pictures of a Dying Man / Glenville Lovell Fire in the Canes; Song of Night; Too Beautiful to Die
  • Belarus Artur Klinov The Sun City of Dreams / Uladzimir Karatkievich King Stakh’s Wild Hunt / Vasil Bykau Sotnikau or The Ordeal / Viktar Martsinovich Paranoia / Svetlana Alexievich Voices from Chernobyl / Uladzimir Karatkevich The Spikes Under Your Sickle / Ivan Melezh People of the Swamp / Svetlana Alexievich Chernobyl Prayer: A Chronicle of the Future
  • Belgium Hergé The Adventures of Tintin / Peter Terrin The Guard / Stefan Brijs The Angel Maker / Francois Emmanuel Invitation to a Voyage / Dimitri Verhulst The Misfortunates / Louis Paul Boon My Little War / Paul Verhaeghen Omega Minor / Amélie Nothomb / Saskia De Coster We and Me / Annelies Verbeke Thirty Days / Jacqueline Harpman I Who Have Never Known Men
  • Belize Zoila Ellis On Heroes, Lizards and Passion
  • Benin Gisèle Hountondji / Jean Pliya / Florent Couao-Zotti / Adelaide Fassinou / Rashidah Ismaili Abubakr Stories We Tell Each Other
  • Bhutan Kunzang Choden The Circle of Karma / Karma Ura The Hero with a Thousand Eyes / T Sangay Wangchuk Seeing with the Third Eye / Dorji Penjore Bomena / Pema Euden Coming Home / Sonam Kinga
  • Bolivia José Edmundo Paz-Soldán / Víctor Montoya / Renato Prada Oropeza / Giovanna Rivero Sweet Blood / Juan de Recacoechea American Visa / Liliana Colanzi Our Dead World
  • Bosnia and Herzegovina Zlata Filipovic Zlata’s Diary / Saša Stanišić How the Soldier Repairs the Gramophone / Aleksandar Hemon The Lazarus Project / Ivo Andric The Bridge on the Drina / Meša Selimović Death and the Dervish; Fortress
  • Botswana Angus, Maisie and Travers McNeice The Lion Children / Bessie Head A Question of Power / Unity Dow
  • Brazil João Ubaldo Ribeiro House of the Fortunate Buddhas; An Invincible Memory / Clarice Lispector / Rubem Fonseca / Paulo Freire / Clarice Lispector Agua Viva / Jorge Amado Jubiabá; The Double Death of Quincas Water-Bray / João Guimarães Rosa / Paulo Coelho / Machado de Assis Dom Casmurro / Chico Buarque Budapest / Lygia Fagundes Telles The Marble Dance / Zulmira Ribeiro Tavares Family Heirlooms / Patrícia Melo, tr. Clifford E. Landers The Body Snatcher
  • Brunei Eva Maria Kershaw Dusun Folktales: A Collection of Eighty-eight Folktales in the Dusun Language of Brunei with English Translations / Christopher Sun (aka Sun Tze Yun) Four Kings / Amir Falique The Forlorn Adventure
  • Bulgaria Elias Canetti The Tongue Set Free / Kalin Terziyski Is there Anybody to Love You? / Georgi Gospodinov Natural Novel / Kapka Kassabova Street Without a Name / Anton Donchev Time of Parting / Milen Ruskov Thrown into Nature / Emiliyan Stanev The Peach Thief / Dimitar Dimov Doomed Souls / Aleko Konstantinov, tr. Victor A. Friedman, Christina E. Kramer, Grace E. Fielder and Catherine Rudin Bai Ganyo
  • Burkina Faso Sarah Bouyain / Frédéric Pacéré Titinga / Nobert Zongo The Parachute Drop
  • Burundi Marie-Therese Toyi Weep Not, Refugee / Roland Rugero Baho!
  • Cambodia U Sam Oeur Crossing Three Wildernesses / Alice Pung Unpolished Gem / Vaddey Ratner In the Shadow of the Banyan / Loung Ung / Haing S Ngor / Bree Lafreniere and Daran Kravanh Music Through Dark
  • Cameroon Mongo Beti La Pauvre Christ de Bomba (The Poor Christ of Bomba); Mission to Kala / Beatrice Fri Bime Mystique: a collection of lake myths
  • Canada Robertson Davies / Nicole Brossard Mauve Desert / Alice Munro / Lauren B Davis Our Daily Bread / Darcie Friesen Hossack Mennonites Don’t Dance / Anne Michaels Fugitive Pieces / Thomas King Green Grass, Running Water / Elizabeth Hay Late Nights on Air / Michael Ondaatje In the Skin of a Lion / Frances Itani Deafening / Joseph Boyden The Three Day Road / Carol Shields / Donna Morrissey / Timothy Findley Not Wanted on the Voyage / Michael Crummey Galore / Anita Rau Baudami Tamarind Mem; The Hero’s Walk / Zoe Whittall Bottle Rocket Hearts
  • Cape Verde (Cabo Verde) Germano Almeida The Last Will & Testament of Senhor da Silva Araújo / Dina Salústio The Madwoman of Serrano
  • Central African Republic Pierre Makombo Bamboté Dada’s Travels from Ouadda to Bangui / ed. Polly Strong African Tales: Folklore of the Central African Republic / Etienne Goyémidé / Adrienne Yabouza Co-wives, Co-widows
  • Chad Joseph Brahim Seid Told by Starlight in Chad
  • Chile Roberto Bolano The Savage Detectives / Alejandro Zambra The Private Lives of Trees; Bonsai / Isabel Allende The House of the Spirits (trans. Magda Bodin) / Diamela Eltit / Alberto Fuguet / María Luisa Bombal / Luis Sepúlveda / Antonio Skármeta / Lina Meruane Seeing Red
  • China Zhu Wen I Love Dollars / Jian Rong Wolf Totem / Ma Jian Stick Out Your Tongue; Red Dust/ Cao Xuequin Dream of the Red Chamber / Wu Cheng’en Journey to the West / Zhang Yueran / Chan Koonchung The Fat Years (trans. Michael Duke) / Yan Lianke Dream of Ding Village / Mo Yan The Garlic Ballads; Shifu, You’ll Do Anything for a Laugh / Zhu Wen / Zhang Yueran / Han Dong Banished! / Yan Ge / Xialou Guo Village of Stone / Mian Mian Candy / Wang Shuo Playing for Thrills / Chen Xiwo I Love My Mum / Xu Zechen / Xue Xinran The Good Women of China; China Witness; Message from an Unknown Chinese Mother / Hok-Pang Tang & David Coomler A Time of Ghosts / Huo Da Jade King / Wang Xiaobo / Cao Wenxuan Bronze and Sunflower / Yan Lianke Lenin’s Kisses / Shuang Xuetao Rouge Street
  • Colombia Evelio Rosero The Armies / Pilar Quintana Tickles in the Tongue / Juan Gabriel Vasquez The Informers / Eduardo Garcia Aguilar Boulevard of Heroes / Fernando Vallejo Our Lady of the Assassins / Hector Abad Faciolince / Laura Restrepo Delirium / Fernando Vallejo / Gabriel García Márquez / James Cañón Tales from the Town of Windows / Leila Cobo
  • Comoros Mohammed Toihiri The Kafir of Karthala / Ali Zamir A Girl Called Eel
  • Congo, Democratic Republic of Amba Bongo /  Frederick Yamusangie Full Circle
  • Congo, Republic of Emmanuel Dongala Johnny Mad Dog; Little Boys Come from the Stars / Sony Lab’ou Tansi The Antipeople / Alain Mabanckou Letter to Jimmy
  • Costa Rica Anacristina Rossi / Carmen Naranjo / Oscar Nunez Olivas Cadence of the Moon / Anacristina Rossi The Madwoman of Gandoca / ed Barbara Ras Costa Rica: A Traveler’s Literary Companion
  • Côte d’Ivoire Bernard Dadié Climbié / Ahmadou Kourouma Allah is not Obliged / Véronique Tadjo, tr. Tadjo with John Cullen In the Company of Men
  • Croatia Miroslav Krleža On the Edge of Reason / Dubravka Ugrĕsic The Ministry of Pain; In the Jaws of Life / Slavenka Drakulic A Guided Tour through the Museum of Communism / Marija Jurić Zagorka Daughter of the Lotrščak; A Stone on the Road; The Witch of Gric / Antun Gustav Matoš / Robert Perišič Our Man in Iraq / Ivana Sajko Love Novel
  • Cuba Mayra Montero Dancing to Almendra / Ena Lucia Portela One Hundred Bottles / Alejo Carpentier / Reinaldo Arenas / Antonio José Ponte / Leonardo Padura / Reinaldo Arenas / Leonardo Padura Fuentes / Virgilio Piñera / José Lezama Lima / Severo Sarduy /  Guillermo Cabrera Infante / Lydia Cabrera Afro-Cuban Tales / Leonardo Padura The Man Who Loved Dogs
  • Cyprus Anna Marangou/Andreas Coutas (trans. Xenia Andreou) Famagusta: the Story of the City / Eve Makis / Christy Lefteri A Watermelon, a Fish and a Bible / Panos Ioannides Gregory and other stories / Elmos Konis Magnette / Nora Nadjarian Ledra Street
  • Czech Republic (Czechia) Bohumil Hrabal Too Loud a Solitude / Hana Demetz The House on Prague Street / Tomáš Zmeškal Love Letter in Cuneiform Script / Josef Škvorecký The Engineer of Human Souls (trans. Paul Wilson) / Jáchym Topol The Devil’s Workshop
  • Denmark Jakob Ejersbo Exile: Book One of the African Trilogy / Morten Ramsland Dog Head / Christian Jungersen The Exception / Louise Bugge Laermann Constanze Mozart / Peter Høeg Smilla’s Sense of Snow
  • Djibouti Abdourahman Waberi In the United States of Africa; Passage of Tears
  • Dominica Phyllis Shand Allfrey The Orchid House / Elma Napier Black and White Sands / Jean Rhys / Pupils of Atkinson School The Snake King of the Kalinago / Alick Lazare Pharcel / Various Home Again / Christborne Shillingford Most Wanted: street stories from the Caribbean
  • Dominican Republic Juan Bosch / Arambilet Neguri’s Secret / Junot Diaz The Brief Wonderous Life of Oscar Wao / Pedro Mir When they Loved the Communal Land / Julia Alvarez / Rita Indiana Tentacle
  • East Timor Luis Cardoso The Crossing
  • Ecuador Jorge Icaza Huasipungo / Alicia Yáñez Cossío The Potbellied Virgin
  • Egypt Ahdaf Soueif The Map of Love; Cairo: My City, Our Revolution / Sonallah Ibrahim Stealth / Mohamed Mansi Qandil Moon Over Samarqand / Waguih Ghali Beer in the Snooker Club / Naguib Mahfouz Midaq Alley; The Thief and the Dogs; Miramar; The Final Hour/ Alaa Al Aswany The Yacoubian Building / Radwa Ashour / Nawal El Saadawi / May Telmissany Dunyazad / Salwa Bakr / ed. Marilyn Booth My Grandmother’s Cactus / Gamal al-Ghitani Zayni Barakat / Yusef Zeidan Azazil / Radwa Ashour Granada; Spectres / Ibrahim Abdel Meguid No One Sleeps in Alexandria / Bahar Tahir / Muhammad Bisati / Basma Abdel Aziz The Queue
  • El Salvador Horacio Castellanos Moya Senselessness
  • Equatorial Guinea Juan Tomás Ávila Laurel By Night the Mountain Burns / Donato Ndongo Shadows of your Black Memory / Maria Nsue Angue Ekomo (translation sought) / TrifoniaMelibea Obono La Bastarda
  • Eritrea Senait Mehari Heart of Fire / Sulaiman Addonia The Consequences of Love / Dawit Gebremichael Habte Gratitude in Low Voices
  • Estonia Jaan Kross Professor Martens’ Departure; Treading Air / Viivi Luik The Beauty of History
  • Ethiopia Maaza Mengiste Beneath the Lion’s Gaze / Dinaw Mengestu Children of the Revolution / Abraham Verghese Cutting for Stone
  • Fiji Peter Thomson Kava in the Blood / Epeli Hau’ofa Kisses in the Nederends; Tales of the Tikongs / Mikaele M.K. Yasa Of Baluka and Nibong Palm
  • Finland Arto Paasilinna The Year of the Hare / Mika Waltari The Egyptian / Johanna Sinisalo Troll: A Love Story / Sofi Oksanen Purge / Emmi Itäranta Memory of Water / Antti Tuomainen The Man Who Died
  • France Alain-Fournier The Wanderer / Marie NDiaye Rosie Carpe / Marie Darrieussecq My Phantom Husband / Colette Chéri / Faiza Guene Dreams from the Endz / Raymond Queneau Exercises in Style (trans. Barbara Wright) / Georges Perec Life:a User’s Manual (trans. David Bellos) / Jean-Marie Gustave Le Clezio Wandering Star / Jean Echenoz Lightning / Delphine de Vigan Underground Time / Faïza Guène Just Like Tomorrow / Alexis Jenni The French Art of War / Laurence Cossé A Novel Bookstore / Hélène Grémillon The Confidant / Jérôme Ferrari Where I Left My Soul / Marguerite Yourcenar / Michel Houellebecq / André Schwarz-Bart A Woman Named Solitude (trans. Ralph Manheim) / Abnousse Shalmani Khomeini, Sade and Me / Lydia Salvayre Cry, Mother Spain / Tiphaine Rivière Notes on a Thesis / Bessora/Barroux Alpha: Abidjan to Garde du Nord / Gerty Dambury, tr. Pam Allen The Restless
  • Gabon Daniel Mengara Mema
  • The Gambia Dayo Forster Reading the Ceiling / Dembo Fanta Bojang & Sukai Mbye Bojang Folk Tales and Fables from The Gambia 
  • Georgia Sana Krasikov One More Year / ed Elizabeth Heighway Contemporary Georgian Fiction / Cabua Amirejibi Data Tutashkhia / Mikheil Javakhishvili Kvachi / Otar Chiladze A Man Was Going Down the Road / Nino Haratischvili The Eighth Life: (for Brilka)
  • Germany Jenny Erpenbeck Visitation; The End of Days / Günter Grass The Tin Drum / Christa Wolf / Heinrich Böll The Lost Honour of Katharina Blum / Emine Sevgi Özdamar Bridge of the Golden Horn / Walter Benjamin Illuminations (trans. Harry Zohn) / Clemens Meyer All the Lights / Christa Wolf Medea / Franz Fühmann / Inka Parei The Shadow-Boxing Girl / Hans Fallada Alone in Berlin / Jurek Becker Jacob the Liar / Herman Hesse Siddhartha / Thomas Mann / Yoko Tawada Memoirs of a Polar Bear / Anke Stelling, tr. Lucy Jones Higher Ground / Anonymous A Woman in Berlin
  • Ghana Ayi Kwei Armah The Beautyful Ones Are Not Yet Born / Isaac Neequaye / Ama Ata Aidoo / Jo de Graft Hanson Amanfi’s Gold / Gheysika Adombire Agambila Journey / Various Anansi Stories
  • Greece Kostas Hatziantoniou The Black Book of Bile; Agrigento / Margarita Karapanou Kassandra and the Wolf / Panos Karnezis / Nikos Kazantzakis Freedom or Death; The Last Temptation
  • Grenada Tobias Buckell / Merle Collins The Ladies are Upstairs
  • Guatemala Miguel Angel Asturias The President / Rodrigo Rey Rosa / Rigoberta Menchú I, Rigoberta Menchú / Augusto Monterroso / Eduardo Halfon The Polish Boxer
  • Guinea Camara Laye The Radiance of the King; The Guardian of the Word
  • Guinea-Bissau Amilcar Cabral Unity and Struggle / Abdulai Silá The Ultimate Tragedy
  • Guyana Oonya Kempadoo Buxton Spice
  • Haiti Marvin Victor / Lyonel Trouillot Children of Heroes / Dany Laferriere How to Make Love to a Negro without Getting Tired; I am a Japanese Writer / Louis-Philppe Dalembert / Edwidge Danticat The Farming of the Bones / Franketienne / Gary Klang / Josaphat-Robert Large / Emmelie Prophète Blue
  • Honduras Guillermo Yuscaran Points of Light / Ramón Amaya Amador
  • Hungary Sándor Márai Embers / Dezső Kosztolányi Skylark / Zsigmond Móricz Be Faithful Unto Death / Antal Szerb Journey by Moonlight / Péter Esterházy Not Art / Tibor Fischer Under the Frog / Antal Szerb The Pendragon Legend / László Krasznahorkai War and War (trans. George Szirtes) / Ferenc Karinthy Metropole /  Imre Kertész Fatelessness / Albert Wass / Rejtő Jenő / Péter Nádas A Book of Memories; Parallel Stories / Iván Mándy On the Balcony / Ferenc Molnár The Paul Street Boys
  • Iceland Arnaldur Indridason Jar City / Halldór Laxness The Atom Station / Ófeigur Sigurðsson / Gyrðir Eliasson Stone Tree / Auður A Ólafsdóttir The Greenhouse
  • India Suketu Mehta Maximum City / Rohinton Mistry Family Matters; A Fine Balance / Premchand / Rahul Bhattacharya The Sly Company of People who Care / Amitav Ghosh River of Smoke / Tabish Khair The Thing about Thugs / Aman Sathi A Free Man / Sunetra Gupta / Omair Ahmad Jimmy the Terrorist / UR Ananthamurthy Bharathipura / Chandrakanta A Street in Srinagar / Siddharth Chowdhury Day Scholar / Kishwar Desai Witness the Night / Namita Devidayal Aftertaste / Manu Joseph Serious Men / Kavery Nambisan: The Story that Must Not Be Told / Kalpish Ratna The Quarantine Papers / Uppamanyu Chattergee Way to go / Chandrahas Choudhury Arzee the Dwarf / Manju Kapur The Immigrant / Neel Mukherjee The Immigrant / Mani Sankar Mukherji The Middleman / I. Allan Sealy The Trotter Nama / Shashi Warrier / Aniruddha Bahal /  Vikram Chandra /  M T Vasudevan Nair Mist; The Legacy; The Demon Seed; Second Turn; Kaalam / Asha Poorna Devi / Ruskin Bond / Gurcharan Das India Unbound / Mark Tully / Shashi Tharoor The Great Indian Novel / Mahasweta Devi  Imaginary Maps; Bitter Soil; Hajar Churashir Maa / RK Narayan Malgudi Days / Jhaverchand Meghani / Kushwant Singh Train to Pakistan; The Portrait of a Lady / ed Rakesh Khanna The Blaft Anthology of Tamil Pulp Fiction / Shivaji Sawant Mrityunjay / OV Vijayan / Govardhanram Tripathi Saraswatichandra / Satyajit Ray Feluda series / Sunil Gangopadhyay Those Days / Rabindranath Tagore / Sashi Deshpande / Kiran Nagarkar Cuckold; Seven Sixes are Forty-Three / Charu Nivedita Zero Degree / Tarun Tejpal Alchemy of Desire / Manoshi Bhattacharya Chittagong Summer of 1930 / Sankar Chowringhee / Shanta Gokhale Crowfall / Maitreyi Devi Na Hanyate / Aruna Chakrabarti Srikanta / Ruskin Bond / Thakazhi Sivasankara Pillai Chemmeen / Mulk Raj Anand Untouchable / Vikram Seth A Suitable Boy / Vivek Shanbhag Ghachar Ghochar / Geetanjali Shree Mai
  • Indonesia Yusuf Bilyarta Mangunwijaya (Romo Mangun) Burung-Burung Manyar; Rara Mendut; Durga/Umayi / Ayu Utami / Mochtar Lubis / Pramoedya Ananta Toer This Earth of Mankind / Dewi Lestari Supernova / Agustinus Wibowo Blanket of Dust (translation sought) / Andrea Hirata The Rainbow Troops / Eka Kurniawan Man Tiger / Ayu Utami, tr. Pam Allen Saman
  • Iran Akbar Golrang Parpin Flowers /Nasrin Alavi We are Iran / Shahrnush Parsipur Touba and the Meaning of Night / Mahmoud Dowlatabadi The Colonel (trans. Tom Patterdale) / Adnan-Ahmed / Fariba Hachtroudi The Man Who Snapped His Fingers
  • Iraq Samuel Shimon An Iraqi in Paris / Ali Bader The Tobacco Keeper / Hassan Blasim The Madman of Freedom Square / Rodaan Al Galidi Thirsty River / Samira Al-Mana / Wafaa Abed Al Razzaq / A Alwan The Sheikh’s Detective / Fuad al-Takarli The Long Way Back
  • Ireland James Joyce Ulysses / Maria Edgeworth Castle Rackrent / William Trevor / Sebastian Barry The Secret Scripture / Flann O’Brien The Third Policeman; At Swim–Two–Birds
  • Israel David Grossman Falling Out of Time; To the End of the Land; Be My Knife / Amos Oz A Tale of Love and Darkness (trans. Nicholas de Lange) / Savyon Liebrecht / AB Yehoshua / Ronit Matalon / Alex Epstein / Aharon Appelfeld Blooms of Darkness  / Sara Shilo The Falafel King is Dead / Etgar Keret / Yehoshua Kenaz / Zeruya Shalev Pain
  • Italy Roberto Saviano Zero Zero Zero; Gomorrah /  Leonardo Sciascia The Day of the Owl (trans. Archibald Colquhoun) / Fabio Geda In the Sea there are Crocodiles (trans. Howard Curtis) / Elena Ferrante The Lost Daughter; The Days of Abandonment; My Brilliant Friend / Antonio Tabucchi Pereira Maintains / Diego Marani New Finnish Grammar / Alessandro Baricco Ocean Sea; Mr Gwyn / Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa The Leopard / Alessandro Manzoni / Luigi Pirandello / Primo Levi / Italo Svevo / Dino Buzzati The Tartar Steppe / Elena Varvello Can You Hear Me?
  • Jamaica Kei Miller / Lindsay Barrett / Margaret Cezair-Thompson The Pirate’s Daughter / Colin Channer / Brian Meeks Paint the Town Red / Patricia Powell / Victor Stafford Reid / Vanessa Spence / Marlon James The Book of Night Women; John Crow’s Devil
  • Japan Haruki Murakami Kafka on the Shore; 1Q84 / Natsume Sōseki The Miner; I am a Cat/ Michitsuna no Haha (Michitsuna’s mother) The Kagero Diary (trans. Sonja Arntzen) / Yukio Mishima Death in Midsummer (trans. Seidensticker, Keene, Morris, Sargent) / Hiromi Kawakami Manazuru / Shiba Ryotaro / Yoko Ogawa Hotel Iris / Yoriko Shono / Yumiko Kurahashi / Yoko Tawada / Yasunari Kawabata Snow Country / Mieko Kawakami, tr. Sam Bett and David Boyd Breasts and Eggs
  • Jordan Ibrahim Nasrallah Time of White Horses / Abdulrahman Munif Cities of Salt
  • Kazakhstan Rollan Seisenbayev The Day the World Collapsed / Mukhamet Shayakhmetov The Silent Steppe: The Story of a Kazakh Nomad Under Stalin / Nursultan Nazarbayev My Life, My Times and the Future / Ilyas Esenberlin Nomads / Mukhtar Auezov Abai (translation sought)
  • Kenya Binyavanga Wainaina One Day I Will Write About This Place / Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o A Grain of Wheat; Wizard of the Crow / Philo Ikonya Kenya, Will You Marry Me? / NK Read Children of Saba / Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor Dust / Nanjala Nyabola Travelling While Black
  • Kiribati Teweiariki Teaero Waa in Storms
  • Kurdistan* Jalal Barzanji The Man in Blue Pyjamas. 
  • Kuwait Saif Marzooq al-Shamlan Pearling in the Arabian Gulf / Jehan S Rajab Invasion Kuwait / Haya al-Mughni Women in Kuwait / Danderma The Chronicles of Dathra, a Dowdy Girl from Kuwait
  • Kyrgyzstan Chinghiz Aitmatov Jamilia; The Place of the Skull; Farewell Gul’sary; The Day Lasts More than a Hundred Years; Short Novels; White Steamship; Tales of the Mountains and Steppes; Cranes Fly Early;Time to Speak; Mother Earth and Other Stories
  • Laos Outhine Bounyavong Mother’s Beloved
  • Latvia David Bezmozgis The Free World / Agate Nesaule A Woman in Amber / Inga Zolude A Solace for Adam’s Tree / Sandra Kalniete With Dance Shoes in Siberian Snows / Janis Klidzejs The Child of Man (translation sought)
  • Lebanon Joumana Haddad I Killed Scheherazade  / Elias Khoury Yalo; Gate of the Sun / Hanan al-Shaykh One Thousand and One Nights; The Locust and the Bird / Jabbour Douhaiy June Rain / Alexandra Chreiteh Always Coca-Cola / Iman Humaydan Wild Mulberries / Amin Maalouf Samarkand; Leo the African / Rashid al-Daif Dear Mr Kawabata / Amin al Rihani / Gibran Khalil Gibran / Najwa Barakat Oh Salaam!
  • Lesotho Thomas Mofolo Chaka / AS Mopeli-Paulus Blanket Boy’s Moon; The World and the Cattle / Morabo Morojele How We Buried Puso / Various Basali! Stories by and about women in Lesotho
  • Liberia Helene Cooper The House at Sugar Beach / Ellen Johnson Sirleaf This Child Will Be Great / Mardia Stone Konkai: Living Between Two Worlds
  • Libya Hisham Matar In the Country of Men; Anatomy of a Disappearance / Ibrahim Al-Khoni Anubis: A Desert Novel; Gold Dust; The Animists; The Bleeding of the Stone; The Puppet; The Seven Veils of Seth / Ahmed Fagi Homeless Rats; 30 Short Stories
  • Liechtenstein Iren Nigg / Stefan Sprenger / Heinrich Harrer Seven Years in Tibet / CC Bergius The Noble Forger
  • Lithuania Laura Sintija Černiauskaitė / Various No Men, No Cry / Ricardas Gavelis Vilnius Poker / Jonas Mekas / Juozas Baltusis / Andrius Tapinas Hour of the Wolf / Balys Sruoga Forest of the Gods / Antanas Škėma The White Shroud / Laimonas Briedis Vilnius: City of Strangers
  • Luxembourg Jean Back Amateur / Robi Gottlieb-Cahen Minute Stories
  • Macedonia (North Macedonia) Rumena Bužarovska Scribbles; Wisdom Tooth / Goce Smilevski Sigmund Freud’s Sister; Conversation with Spinoza / Elizabeta Bakovska On the way to Damascus
  • Madagascar ed. Jacques Bourgeacq and Liliane Ramarosoa Voices from Madagascar / Naivo Beyond the Rice Fields
  • Malawi Samson Kambalu The Jive Talker / Aubrey Kachingwe No Easy Task
  • Malaysia Shih-Li Kow Ripples and Other Stories / A Samad Said / Adibah Amin This End of The Rainbow / Dina Zaman King of the Sea
  • Maldives Abdullah Sadiq Dhon Hiyala and Ali Fulhu
  • Mali Amadou Hampâté Bâ The Strange Destiny of Wangrin / Yambo Ouloguem Bound to Violence
  • Malta Immanuel Mifsud Happy Weekend / Pierre Mejlak / Simon Bartolo / Oliver Friggieri / Herbert Ganado My Century / Trevor Zahra / Kilin (Mikiel Spiteri)
  • Marshall Islands Ed Daniel Kelin Marshall Islands Legends and Stories / Marshallese school students (the Unbound Bookmaker Project) The Important Book about Majuro / Jack Niedenthal For the Good of Mankind / Bob Barclay In Melal: A Novel of the Pacific / Dirk R Spennemann Bwebwenatoon etto: a collection of Marshallese legends and traditions
  • Mauritania Mohamed Bouya Bamba Angels of Mauritania and the Curse of the Language / Mbarek Ould Beyrouk The Desert and the Drum
  • Mauritius Anand Mulloo Watch Them Go Down / Barlen Pyamootoo Benares / Nathacha Appanah, tr. Geoffrey Strachan The Last Brother
  • Mexico Juan Pablo Villalobos Down the Rabbit Hole / Octavio Paz The Labyrinth of Solitude (trans. Lysander Kemp) / Laura Esquivel Like Water for Chocolate (trans. Carol Christensen and Thomas Christensen) / Martín Solares The Black Minutes / Carlos Fuentes / Jorge Volpi / Rosario Castellanos / Carmen Boullosa / Mario Bellatín / Elena Garro / Juan Rulfo / Elena Poniatowska / Sergio Pitol / Juan Rulfo Pedro Paramo / Valeria Luiselli Faces in the Crowd / Fernanda Melchor Hurricane Season
  • Micronesia, Federated States of Luelen Bernart The Book of Luelen
  • Moldova Ion Drutse Moldavian Autumn; The Story of an Ant / Vladimir Lorchenkov The Good Life Elsewhere
  • Monaco ed. Richard and Danae Projetti Grace Kelly: Princesse du Cinema
  • Mongolia Galsan Tschinag The Blue Sky
  • Montenegro Petar II Petrović-Njegoš The Mountain Wreath / Andrej Nikolaidis / Xenia Popovich A Lullaby for No Man’s Wolf 
  • Morocco Diss Chraïbi Heirs to the Past; Le Passé Simple (The Simple Past) / Tahar Ben Jelloun The Sacred Night; The Sand Child; This Blinding Absence of Light (trans. Linda Coverdale); A Palace in the Old Village (trans. Linda Coverdale) / Bensalem Himmich The Polymath / Mohammed Achaari The Arch and the Butterfly / Fatima Mernissi / Muhammad Shukri For Bread Alone / Muhammad Barrada The Game of Forgetting 
  • Mozambique Mia Couto The Sleepwalking Land; Under the Frangipani / Paulina Chiziane Niketche / Ungulani Ba Ka Khosa Ualalapi / Luis Bernardo Honwana We Killed Mangy Dog / Paulina Chiziane The First Wife
  • Myanmar (Burma) Cho Tu Zaw / Ma Thida / Nu Nu Yi Inwa Smile as they Bow
  • Namibia Joseph Diescho Troubled Waters / Neshani Andreas The Purple Violet of Oshaantu
  • Nauru Timothy Detudamo Legends, Traditions and Tales of Nauru / Ben Bam Solomon et al Stories from Nauru
  • Nepal Samrat Upadhyay Buddha’s Orphans / Ajit Baral The Lazy Conman and Other Stories / Parijat Blue Mimosa / Jagadish Ghimire Antarman ko yatra / Prajwal Parajuly The Gurkha’s Daughter
  • Netherlands Harry Mulisch The Discovery of Heaven / Cees Noteboom Lost Paradise; All Souls’ Day; Rituals / Tessa de Loo / Gerbrand Bakker The Twin / Kader Abdolah The House of the Mosque / Abdelkader Benali / Jan van Mersbergen Tomorrow Pamplona / Arthur Japin The Two Hearts of Kwasi Boachi / Tommy Wieringa Little Caesar / Bernlef Out of Mind / Jan Wolkers Turkish Delight / WF Hermans The Darkroom of Damocles / Arnon Grunberg Tirza; Skin and Hair / Esther Gerritsen Craving / Nescio Amsterdam Stories / Gerard Reve The Evenings / Herman Koch Dear Mr M
  • New Zealand Charlotte Grimshaw Singularity / Maurice Shadbolt Season of the Jew / Keri Hulme The Bone People / Lloyd Jones Mr Pip / Alan Duff Once Were Warriors / Witi Ihimaera Tangi / Janet Frame / Patricia Grace Potiki / Eleanor Catton The Luminaries
  • Nicaragua Gioconda Belli Infinity in the Palm of her Hand 
  • Niger recounted by Nouhou Malio The Epic of Askia Mohammed
  • Nigeria Wole Soyinka The Interpreters; Season of Anomy / Toyin Falola A Mouth Sweeter than Salt / Lola Shoneyin The Secret Lives of Baba Segi’s Wives / Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie Americanah; Half of a Yellow Sun / Chinua Achebe Things Fall Apart
  • North Korea Ri In Mo My Life and Faith / Kye Wol Hyang
  • Norway Karl Ove Knausgaard My Struggle / Per Petterson To Siberia; Out Stealing Horses (trans. Ann Born) / Knut Hamsun Hunger / Lars Saabye Christensen The Half Brother / Jan Wiese The Naked Madonna / Linn Ullmann Before You Sleep / Agnar Mykle Lasso Round the Moon / Gerd Brantenberg Egalia’s Daughters / Sigrid Undset Kristin Lavransdatter (trans. Tiina Nunnally) / Carl Frode Tiller Encircling / Tarjei Vesaas The Ice Palace / Helga Flatland A Modern Family
  • Oman Ibrahim Farghali Smiles of Saints / Khadija bint Alawi Al-Dhahab My Grandmother’s Stories / Unni Wikan Behind the Veil in Arabia: Women in Oman / Abdulaziz Al Farsi Earth Weeps, Saturn Laughs
  • Pakistan Mohsin Hamid Moth Smoke; The Reluctant Fundamentalist / Sara Suleri Meatless Days / Bapsi Sidhwa Ice Candy Man; An American Brat; The Pakistani Bride/ Bina Shah A Season for Martyrs; Slum Child / Jamil Ahmad The Wandering Falcon / Daniyal Mueenuddin In Other Rooms, Other Wonders / HM Naqvi Home Boy / Uzma Aslam Khan / Musharraf Ali Farooqi The Story of a Widow; Between Clay and Dust / Ali Sethi The Wish Maker / Kamila Shamsie Kartography; Broken Verses; Burnt Shadows / Mohammed Hanif / Bina Shah A Season for Martyrs
  • Palau Susan Kloulechad Spirits’ Tides
  • Palestine Ibtisam Barakat Tasting the Sky: A Palestinian Childhood / Sahar Khalifeh Wild Thorns / Susan Abulhawa Mornings in Jenin / Mahmoud Shukair Mordechai’s Moustache and his Wife’s Cats, and Other Stories / Sonia Nimr, tr. Marcia Lynx Qualey Wondrous Journeys in Strange Lands
  • Panama Juan David Morgan The Golden Horse / Carlos Russell
  • Papua New Guinea Russell Soaba Maiba / Regis Stella Gutsini Posa; Mata Sara / Russell Soaba Maiba / Bernard Narokobi Two Seasons / Vincent Eri The Crocodile / Nash Sorariba / Michael Somare Sana /
  • Paraguay  Augusto Roa Bastos I, the Supreme 
  • Peru Mario Vargas Llosa Death in the Andes; Aunt Julia and the Scriptwriter (trans. Ursule Molinaro, Hedwig Rappolt); The Storyteller (trans. Helen Lane) / Jaime Bayly / José María Arguedas / Santiago Roncagliolo
  • Philippines Charlson Ong / Joel Toledo / Miguel Syjuco Illustrado / F Sionil José / Jessica Hagedorn Dogeaters / Bino Realuyo The Umbrella Country / Ninotchka Rosca State of War  / Azucena Grajo Uranza Bamboo in the Wind / Marivi Soliven The Mango Bride
  • Poland Stanislaw Lem / Olga Tokarczuk Primeval and Other Times; House of Day, House of Night / Pawel Huelle Cold Sea Tales; Castorp; The Last Supper; Mercedes Benz/ Zygmunt Miloszewski Entanglement; A Grain of Truth/ Witold Gombrowicz Pornografia / Wiesław Myśliwski Stone upon Stone / Magdalena Tulli In Red / Dorota Maslowska Snow White and Russian Red / Marek Krajewski The Eberhard Mock books / Grazyna Plebanek Illegal Liaisons / Antoni Libera Madame / Andrzej Stasiuk On the Road to Babadag; Dukla; Fado; Nine; White Raven / Stefan Chwin Death in Danzig / Michal Witkowski Lovetown / Jacek Hugo-Bader White Fever / Wojciech Jagielski The Night Wanderers / Kazimierz Moczarski Conversations with an Executioner / Wojciech Tochman Like Eating a Stone / Olga Tokarczuk Flights
  • Portugal Eca de Queiroz The Mandarin and Other Stories / José Saramago Blindness; The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis; The Gospel According to Jesus Christ / Fernando Pessoa / Pero Vaz de Caminha Carta de Pêro Vaz de Caminha / Agustina Bessa-Luís
  • Qatar Mohammed Ali Victory over Abu Derya: The Quest for Pearls in the Arabian Gulf / Abdul Aziz Al Mahmoud The Corsair
  • Romania Herta Müller The Passport / Filip and Matei Florian The Baiut Alley Lads / Mircea Cartarescu / Mircea Eliade / Bogdan Teodorescu Sword
  • Russia Alina Bronsky The Hottest Dishes of the Tartar Cuisine / Aleksandr Solzhenitsyn One Day in the Life of Ivan Denisovich (trans. Ralph Parker) / Vladimir Sorokin Day of the Oprichnik / Mikhail Lermontov A Hero of Our Time / Mikhail Bulgakov The Master and Margarita (trans. Michael Glenny) / Roman Senchin MINUS / Alan Cherchesov Requiem for the Living /Off the Beaten Tracks: Stories by Russian Hitchhikers / Oleg Zaionchkovski Happiness is Possible / PD Ouspensky Strange Life of Ivan Osokin / Alan Cherchesov Requiem for the Living / Leo Tolstoy Anna Karenina / Guzel Yakhina Zuleikha
  • Rwanda Philip Gourevitch We Wish to Inform You that Tomorrow We Will Be Killed with our Families / Jean Hatzfeld Into the Quick of Life / Barassa Teta / John Rusimbi By the Time She Returned / Gilbert Gatore The Past Ahead / Gaël Faye, tr. Sarah Ardizzone Small Country
  • Saint Kitts and Nevis Caryl Phillips / Bertram Roach Only God Can Make a Tree
  • Saint Lucia Derek Walcott Omeros / Garth St Omer A Room on the Hill; Shades of Grey; Nor Any Country; J-, Black Bam and the Masqueraders / Dr Earl Long Consolation; Voices from a Drum / McDonald Dixon Season of Mist / Michael Aubertin Neg Maron
  • Saint Vincent and the Grenadines H Nigel Thomas Spirits in the Dark; Behind the Face of Winter; Return to Arcadia / George Thomas Ruler in Hairoona / Cecil Browne The Moon is Following Me / Richard Byron-Cox Were Mama’s Tears in Vain? / Marcia King-Gamble / Trish St Hill /  Nickie Williams /
  • Samoa Misa Telefoni Retzlaff Love and Money / Lani Wendt Young Telesa: The Covenant Keeper / Albert Wendt The Adventures of Vela; Sons for the Return Home; Pouliuli / Sia Figiel Where We Once Belonged; The Girl in the Moon Circle; They Who do not Grieve
  • San Marino Giuseppe Rossi The Republic of San Marino
  • Sao Tome and Principe Olinda Beja The Shepherd’s House 
  • Saudi Arabia Rajaa Al-Sanea Girls of Riyadh / Raja Alem My Thousand and One Nights: A Novel of Mecca / Abdul Rahman Munif Endings; Cities of Salt; The Trench; Variations on Night and Day / ed. Abubaker Bagader Voices of Change / Ghazi Abdul Rahman Al Gosaibi
  • Senegal Mariama Bâ So Long a Letter / Ken Bugul Riwan ou Le Chemin de Sable (Riwan or The Path of Sand) / Boubacar Boris Diop Doomi Golo: The Hidden Notebooks
  • Serbia Milos Crnjanski A Novel About London; Migrations / Danilo Kiš / David Albahari Bait / Milorad Pavic Dictionary of the Khazars / Srdjan Valjarevic Lake Como / Zoran Živković
  • Seychelles Glynn Burridge Voices / William Travis Beyond the Reefs; Shark for Sale
  • Sierra Leone Aminatta Forna The Memory of Love / Ishmael Beah A Long Way Gone
  • Singapore Su-Chen Christine Lim Fistful of Colours 
  • Slovakia Pavol Rankov / Peter Pišťanek Rivers of Babylon / Daniela Kapitánová Samko Tale’s Cemetery Book / Jana Beňová Seeing People Off
  • Slovenia Slavoj Žižek / Nataša Kramberger Heaven in a Blackberry Bush, a Novel in Stories / Andrej Blatnik You do Understand / Andrej Skubic Fužine Blues / Miha Mazzini The German Lottery / Vladimir Bartol Alamut / Luka Novak The Golden Shower or What Men Want / Vladimir Bartol Alamut
  • Solomon Islands John Saunana The Alternative / ed. Alice Aruhe’eta Pollard and Marilyn J. Waring Being the First: Storis Blong Oloketa Mere lo Solomon Aelan / Celo Kulagoe
  • Somalia Nuruddin Farah Secrets; Sweet and Sour Milk
  • South Africa Gavin Evans Dancing Shoes is Dead / Ingrid Winterbach The Book of Happenstance / Damon Galgut The Quarry / Kgebetli Moele The Book of the Dead / Diane Awerbuck Cabin Fever / Siphiwo Mahala African Delights / Henrietta Rose-Innes Nineveh / Ivan Vladislavic The Loss Library / Nelson Mandela The Long Walk to Freedom / Alan Paton Cry, the Beloved Country / Bryce Courtenay The Power of One / Dalene Matthee Fiela’s Child; Circles in the Forest
  • South Korea Hwang Sok-yong The Guest; The Old Garden / Lee Hye-Kyung A House on the Road / Shin Kyung-Sook Please Look After Mom; Violets / Han Kang The Vegetarian
  • South Sudan Julia Duany ‘To Forgive is Divine Not Human’ 
  • Spain Miguel Delibes Five Hours with Mario / Javier Cercas Soldiers of Salamis; The Anatomy of a Moment (trans. Anne McClean) / Alberto Mendez The Blind Sunflowers / Miguel de Cervantes Don Quixote (trans. Edith Grossman) / Carlos Ruiz Zafón The Shadow of the Wind /  Enrique Vila-Matas Dublinesque / Juan Goytisolo Exiled from Almost Everywhere / Antonio Muñoz Molina Sefarad / Javier Marías The Infatuations / Juan Marsé The Snares of Memory
  • Sri Lanka Romesh Gunesekera Reef / Carl Muller The Jam Fruit Tree / Shehan Karunatilaka Chinaman / Ru Freeman A Disobedient Girl / Siri Gunasinghe The Shadow / Kathleen Jayawardena Circles of Fire / S Ponnuthurai Ritual / Sunethra Rajakarunanayake Metta / Keerthi Welisarage The Doomed / Martin Wickramasinghe
  • Sudan Amir Tag Elsir The Grub Hunter / Tarek Eltayeb The Palm House / Tayeb Salih Season of Migration to the North / Leila Aboulela Minaret
  • Suriname Cynthia Mcleod The Cost of Sugar; The Free Negress
  • Swaziland (Eswatini)  Sarah Mkhonza Weeding the Flowerbeds
  • Sweden Henning Mankell Chronicler of the Winds / Per Olov Enquist The March of the Musicians (trans. Joan Tate); The Story of Blanche and Marie / Jens Lapidus Easy Money / Karin Altenberg Island of Wings / Jonas Hassen Khemiri Montecore / Hjalmar Soderberg Doctor Glas / Lotta Lotass / Amelie Posse / John Ajvide Lindqvist Let the Right One In / Jonas Jonasson The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared / Lena Andersson Wilful Disregard
  • Switzerland Friedrich Dürrenmatt The Pledge / Hansjörg Schertenlieb A Happy Man / Gottfried Keller A Village Romeo and Juliet / Annemarie Schwarzenbach / Friedrich Glauser In Matto’s Realm / Peter Bichsel Children’s Stories / Aglaja Veteranyi Why the Child is Cooking in the Polenta / Hugo Loetscher Noah / Gerhard Meier Isle of the Dead / Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz Beauty on Earth 
  • Syria Fadi Azzam Sarmada / Zakaria Tamer Breaking Knees / Ghadda Samman / Rafik Schami Damascus Nights / Hassan Bahri / Hanna Mina Sun on a Cloudy Day / Khaled Khalifa In Praise of Hatred / Shahla Ujayli A Bed for the King’s Daughter
  • Taiwan Su Wei-chen / Pai Hsien-yung Crystal Boys
  • Tajikistan Andrei Volos Hurramabad / Sadriddin Aini The Sands of Oxus: Boyhood Reminiscences of Sadriddin Aini
  • Tanzania Muhammed Said Abdulla / Abdulrazak Gurnah Desertion / Edwin Semzaba / Ismael Mbise Blood on Our Land / Agoro Anduru / Adam Shafi / Bethsaida Orphan Girls’ Secondary School Their Voices, Their Stories / Sophia Mustafa Broken Reed / Tengio Urrio The Girl from Uganda / S Ndunguru The Lion of Yola / Ronny Mintjens More Than a Game
  • Thailand Chart Korbjitti The Judgement; No Way Out; Time; Mad Dogs & Co / Kukrit Pramoj / Kampoon Boontawee A Child of the Northeast / Saneh Sangsuk The White Shadow: Portrait of the Artist as a Young Rascal
  • Togo Jeanette D Ahonsou / Pyabelo Chaold Kouly / Tété-Michel Kpomassie An African in Greenland
  • Tonga Joshua Taumoefolau A Providence of War / Epeli Hau’ofa Tales of the Tikongs
  • Trinidad and Tobago VS Naipaul A House for Mr Biswas; In a Free State / Monique Roffey The White Woman on the Green Bicycle / Robert Antoni / Keith Jardim Near Open Water / Earl Lovelace Is Just a Movie / Vahni Capildeo One Scattered Skeleton / Errol John Moon on a Rainbow Shawl
  • Tunisia Habib Selmi The Scents of Marie-Claire / Abdelwahab Meddeb Talismano / Hassouna Mosbahi A Tunisian Tale / Ali Douagi / Mahmoud Messadi
  • Turkey (Türkiye) Orhan Pamuk Snow / Latife Tekin Dear Shameless Death / Elif Shafak The Forty Rules of Love / Erendiz Atasu The Other Side of the Mountain / Murathan Mungan / Orhan Kemal / Halide Edip Adıvar / Reşat Nuri Güntekin / Refik Halit Karay / Sabahattin Ali / Yaşar Kemal / Kemal Tahir / Fakir Baykurt / Sait Faik Abasıyanık / Güneli Gün On the Road to Baghdad / Ahmet Hamdi Tanpinar The Time Regulation Institute / Sema Kaygusuz The Well of Trapped Words / Ahmet Altan Endgame
  • Turkmenistan John Kropf Unknown Sands / Ak Welsapar The Tale of Aypi; Cobra
  • Tuvalu Various Tuvalu: A history
  • Uganda Okot p’Bitek Song of Lawino / Moses Isegawa Abyssinian Chronicles; Snakepit / Doreen Baingan Tropical Fish: Stories Out Of Entebbe / Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi Kintu / Timothy Wangusa Upon This Mountain / Julius Ocwinyo Fate of the Banished; The Unfulilled Dream; Footprints of the Outsider / Goretti Kyomuhendo The First Daughter; Waiting; Secrets No More / Glaydah Namukasa Voice of Dream / Jennifer Nansubuga Makumbi The First Woman
  • Ukraine Andrey Kurkov Death and the Penguin / Theodore Odrach Wave of Terror  / Nikolai Gogol Evenings on a Farm Near Dikanka / Oleg Sentsov Life Went on Anyway: Stories
  • United Arab Emirates Qais Sedki Gold Ring / Maha Gargash The Sand Fish / Ameera Al Hakawati Desperate in Dubai / Mohammad Al Murr The Wink of the Mona Lisa; Dubai Tales / Deepak Unnikrishnan Temporary People
  • United Kingdom Angus MacLellan Stories from South Uist / Christina Hall To the Edge of the Sea / Deborah Levy Swimming Home / Siân Melangell Dafydd Y Trydydd Peth / Vanessa Gebbie / Caryl Lewis Martha, Jack and Shanco / Virginia Woolf / Kazuo Ishiguro The Remains of the Day / JK Rowling / ed. Nikesh Shukla The Good Immigrant / Graeme Armstrong The Young Team
  • United States of America Neil Gaiman American Gods / Sean Murphy The Time of New Weather / Norton Juster The Phantom Tollbooth / Michael Shaara The Killer Angels / Barbara Kingsolver The Poisonwood Bible / Cormac Mccarthy All the Pretty Horses / Eliot Weinberger / Jhumpa Lahiri / Amy Tan / Sandra Cisneros / Tomas Pynchon/ Hunter S Thompson Fear and Loathing in Las Vegas / Harriette Arnow The Dollmaker
  • Uruguay Juan Carlos Onetti The Shipyard; The Pit and Tonight / Felisberto Hernández Lands of Memory / Rafael Courtoisie / Cristina Peri Rossi /Eduardo Galeano / Mario Benedetti / Horacio Quiroga The Decapitated Chicken
  • Uzbekistan Sabit Madaliev / Hamid Ismailov The Railway / Bibish The Dancer from Khiva: One Muslim Woman’s Quest for Freedom
  • Vanuatu Sethy Regenvau Laef Blong Mi: From Village to Nation
  • Vatican City Luigi Marinello & The Millenari Shroud of Secrecy of Gone with the Wind in the Vatican 
  • Venezuela Francisco Suniaga / Alberto Barrera Tyszka The Sickness / Ana Teresa Torres / Romulo Gallegos / Federico Vegas Falke
  • Vietnam Phan Hon Nhien The Joker; Cold Eyes; Left Wing / Bao Ninh The Sorrow of War (trans. Frank Palmos, Phan Thanh Hao) / Nguyen Nhat Anh / Nguyen Ngoc Thuan Open the Window, Eyes Closed / Duong Thu Huong Paradise of the Blind
  • Yemen Wajdi al-Ahdal A Land without Jasmine / Zayd Mutee’ Dammaj The Hostage 
  • Zambia Gaile Parkin Baking Cakes in Kigali / Field Ruwe / Binwell Sinyangwe A Cowrie of Hope / Namwali Serpell The Old Drift
  • Zimbabwe Petinah Gappah An Elegy for Easterly / Tsitsi Dangarembga Nervous Conditions / Brian Chikwava Harare North / Tendai Huchu The Hairdresser of Harare / Shimmer Chinodya Chioniso and Other Stories / Stephen Lungu Out of the Black Shadows / Christopher Mlalazi They are Coming; Running with Mother

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