Around the world in eight novels: fiction that crosses every border

The best way to travel without leaving your chair is a novel written from the inside of a place. Not a tourist's postcard, but a story that carries the weather, the arguments, the private jokes of somewhere you've never been.

Start in Japan, with Haruki Murakami's Norwegian Wood — melancholy, tender, and steeped in 1960s Tokyo. Move to Nigeria and America both through Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie's Americanah, a sharp, funny reckoning with what it means to become 'black' only after you emigrate. In Kerala, Arundhati Roy's The God of Small Things bends English into something entirely its own to tell of caste and forbidden love.

No global shelf is complete without Gabriel Garcia Marquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude, the novel that made magic realism a language spoken on every continent. Min Jin Lee's Pachinko follows a Korean family across generations in Japan; Chinua Achebe's Things Fall Apart tells the arrival of empire from the other side, and remains the most-read African novel ever written.

Finish with two feats of pure storytelling: Salman Rushdie's Midnight's Children, where one boy's life is handcuffed to India's, and Carlos Ruiz Zafon's The Shadow of the Wind, a love letter to books set in a haunted, postwar Barcelona. Eight novels, eight worlds — and not a passport required.