Around the world in novels

Kazuo Ishiguro

A boarding school with a terrible secret, and children raised for a purpose they slowly come to understand.

Haruki Murakami

A song on a plane throws a man back to the lovers and losses of his Tokyo student years.

Albert Camus

A man shoots a stranger on a beach and feels nothing — and the world decides that is his real crime.

Franz Kafka

A traveling salesman wakes up transformed into a monstrous insect, and his family's love curdles into disgust.

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

A young Nigerian woman navigates America, race, and the long way back to the man she left.

Arundhati Roy

Twins in Kerala, a single day that breaks a family, and the small things that decide everything.

Salman Rushdie

A boy born at the stroke of India's independence is telepathically bound to a thousand others born the same hour.

David Mitchell

Six nested stories across centuries, from a Pacific voyage to a post-apocalyptic future, all secretly linked.

Mikhail Bulgakov

The Devil arrives in Soviet Moscow with a talking black cat, and chaos becomes a kind of justice.

Ralph Ellison

A Black man in mid-century America discovers that no one, Black or white, actually sees him.

Barbara Kingsolver

A zealous missionary drags his wife and four daughters into the Congo, and Africa unmakes them all.

Gabriel García Márquez

The novel that made magic realism a global language.

Min Jin Lee

Four generations of a Korean family in Japan.

Chinua Achebe

The most-read African novel ever written.

Neil Gaiman

The old gods immigrants brought to America are fading, and a war with the new gods of media and tech is coming.

Khaled Hosseini

Two women bound to the same cruel husband forge an unlikely bond across thirty years of Afghan history.

Yaa Gyasi

Two half-sisters in Ghana, one married to a slaver, one sold into slavery — and eight generations of their split fates.

Gabriel García Márquez

A man waits fifty-one years, nine months, and four days for the woman he loved in his youth to be free again.

Isabel Allende

Four generations of the Trueba family live through love, ghosts, and revolution in an unnamed Latin American country.

Kazuo Ishiguro

An aging English butler takes a country drive and finally reckons with a life given entirely to service, and the love he let pass.

Zadie Smith

Two wartime friends, their tangled families, and the comic, chaotic making of multicultural London across three generations.

Viet Thanh Nguyen

A communist spy embedded in the South Vietnamese army flees to America, still secretly reporting on the exiles around him.

Milan Kundera

In Prague under Soviet occupation, a surgeon, his wife, and his mistress test whether a life is lighter or heavier for its choices.

Umberto Eco

A brilliant monk and his young novice investigate a string of deaths in a medieval abbey where a forbidden book may be killing readers.

Susanna Clarke

A gentle man lives alone in an endless labyrinth of statues and tides, keeping a journal, until he realizes he is not truly alone.