25 Books to Read Before You Die: World Edition
When it comes to art that expands people’s worlds, nothing quite compares to literature. The immersive experience that books provide transports readers not only to other places but to other frames of mind. This year, for our third annual 25 Books to Read Before You Die list, we sought to highlight literature that exposes readers to cultures and ways of life that may be different from their own. We hope to inspire people to read out of their comfort zone — and the 25 books on this list are well worth experiencing. They are vital works that speak not just to a public close at hand, but to the world at large.
by Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Nigeria
“This is a book I had to write,” Adichie said. Half of a Yellow Sun is an evocative novel, a consuming experience. It tells the story of Biafra, the secessionist state in eastern Nigeria that existed from 1967 to 1970. Adichie writes it big and all the way through. The story begins before the war, continues during, and ends after. You see it through five different characters, each full and struggling. It is a war story, but it is also a life story, beautiful and well told. Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie is one of the greats. — Britt
by Ryunosuke Akutagawa
Japan
Known primarily in the West for providing the source story to Kurosawa’s wonderful film Rashomon, in Japan Akutagawa is regarded as the father of the modern short story and as a cult figure, revered for his short, tragic life and the sinister shades contained in many of his stories. This collection includes the disturbing and perfectly rendered “Hell Screen.” — Jason C.
by Svetlana Alexievich
Belarus
Alexievich has done something incredibly brave here, in seeking out and sharing the stories that no one wants to acknowledge surrounding the worst nuclear accident in history. These firsthand accounts of the disaster and its aftermath put a human face on something that feels like a very singular, distant historical event. Voices From Chernobyl exposed me to perspectives that I didn’t know I was missing; it was very difficult to read, but I couldn’t turn away. — Ashleigh
by Jorge Amado
Brazil
Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon is a radiant, masterful work — a lavishly composed tale rich with convincing characters and absorbing subplots. Concerned mostly with the hardships of progress (political, commercial, civil, and interpersonal), Gabriela, Clove and Cinnamon is, at once, a folk novel, a romance, a political thriller, and a social critique. Jorge Amado expertly weaves together tantalizing threads of lust, infidelity, betrayal, murder, tradition, and humor, creating an extraordinarily expansive work. This is indeed the rare novel that immerses us completely in the sights, sounds, and smells of a milieu most of us will never get to experience firsthand. — Jeremy G.
by Mikhail Bulgakov
Russia
What greater emphasis could I place on this book than to say that if you only read one Russian novel in your life, let it be this one. The Devil arrives in Moscow, bringing with him a fantastical troop of nefarious characters, wreaking havoc on all who cross their path. Let’s not forget The Master, a writer committed to a psych ward, and his faithful lover, Margarita, who literally flies to Hell in order to be with him. Written during Stalin’s reign, and with a second story line imagining Pontius Pilate’s struggle at the trial of Jesus, this satirical masterpiece embodies all of the great interplay between shadow and light. A truly essential read. — Aubrey
by Italo Calvino
Italy
Invisible Cities is an exquisite book, fantastical and glittering and strange. Marco Polo and Kublai Khan sit together in a garden in the evening, and Marco Polo regales Khan with tales of cities he has encountered — cities of trade, of water, of sand, and also cities of the dead, of the mad, of dreams. Calvino’s brilliant, quicksilver mind is on full display here, mapping the desires and fears of our human condition onto an ever-shifting landscape. — Jill
by Eileen Chang
China
The six stories in this dazzling introduction to Eileen Chang, one of China’s most admired modern writers, will sweep you up with their wayward characters, shifting power dynamics, and lush sensory detail. Chang writes about romance and desire, about trickery and deceit, about exerting one’s will despite painfully restrictive cultural pressures. Set in 1940s Hong Kong and Shanghai during a time of great change and upheaval, her stories will leave you absolutely reeling. — Renee P.
by J. M. Coetzee
South Africa
Set in a South Africa ravaged by civil war and oppressive military rule, Coetzee’s extraordinary novel zeros in on one man: Michael K, a mildly disfigured “simpleton” who sets out on a mission to escape Cape Town and bring his ailing mother to the countryside of her childhood. But the journey, beset at every turn by roving soldiers and the threat of imprisonment, turns into a test of endurance and a dogged quest for freedom. Amid the rubble of this devastated, claustrophobic landscape, Michael manages to find brief moments of clarity, made all the more lucid by Coetzee’s spare yet vibrant prose. Life and Times of Michael K is a masterpiece of perspective and a book that will leave you thankful — for what you have, and to have read it. — Renee P.
by Julio Cortázar
Argentina
Pablo Neruda has famously said, “People who do not read Cortázar are doomed. Not to read him is a serious invisible disease.” Cortázar is an elixir; Hopscotch is precise and brilliant and disturbing as hell. Reading Hopscotch is a visceral, architectural experience. Although at times Cortázar delves into irony, the questions of truth and of relevance in fiction — of how to look at the absurdity of our own lives and find both despair and enlightenment — are absolutely sincere. This book is frustrating and necessary and true. — Jill
by Elena Ferrante
Italy
My Brilliant Friend, the first in Elena Ferrante’s Neapolitan Novels, is a meditation on the complexity of women’s lives. Over the decades-long friendship between protagonists Lila and Lenù, we journey with them through their impoverished Naples neighborhood as each navigates a world that blurs the line between brutality and love during a time when power structures and obstacles, in place for centuries, begin to topple. This is a story about friendship, class, violence, feminism, politics, loyalty, motherhood, and, ultimately, what happens when women are denied progress. My Brilliant Friend is an incomparable reading experience written with unquestionable intelligence. Within pages, this masterpiece unfolding in your hands will have you wondering what on earth will ever compare. Ferrante is notably absent from the spotlight. She writes pseudonymously, allowing her writing to be its own voice. If this is what forgoing personal accolades looks like, let every writer henceforth take note. — D Lozano
by Eduardo Galeano
Uruguay
In Mirrors, Uruguayan journalist and author Eduardo Galeano continued his poetic illumination of the forgotten, offering his most sweeping, cohesive, and empathetic work. Written in the singular style that characterizes all of his books, Mirrors is composed of some 600 beautifully crafted vignettes. Galeano, in a dazzling display of literary prowess, recollects 5,000 years of human history — paying due attention to the silenced, neglected, and disregarded individuals and groups of days past and present. While Galeano’s fidelity to memory, justice, and truth are indeed remarkable, it is the grace, humor, and compassion with which he writes that set his works far beyond the realm of his contemporaries. — Jeremy G.
by Bohumil Hrabal
Czech Republic
Bohumil Hrabal’s fiction is amongst the finest to come out of Europe in the late 20th century. His once-banned, unforgettable allegorical masterpiece, Too Loud a Solitude, is the charming tale of Hantá, a reclusive old man tasked with compacting wastepaper, who also rescues rare books and other important texts from their fated destruction. A testament to the power of books, knowledge, ideas, and the written word, Too Loud a Solitude is utterly brilliant in its brevity. — Jeremy G.
by Keri Hulme
New Zealand
The Bone People is a dark, deeply moving story that will remain with you for a long time to come. Keri Hulme’s unique use of language and lyrical style give the narrative a musicality unlike anything you’ll ever read. The Bone People is Hulme’s only novel and was the winner of the 1985 Booker Prize. More than 30 years later, it remains a testament to the power of love and its ability to transform lives. — Shawn
by Tove Jansson
Finland
Tove Jansson is best known as the creator of the Moomins, and her writing for adults has the same blend of simplicity and wonder that marks those works. Written shortly after her mother died, and about a little girl whose mother has similarly passed away, The Summer Book is a series of vignettes that follow a grandmother and her granddaughter through a summer spent in the Finnish archipelago. Little Sophia, with the cheerful tyranny of the very young, herds her stoic grandmother all over their island as they observe the fleeting beauty of the Scandinavian summer, look for adventures, and speak with the frankness of the very young and the very old about life, death, God, and the foibles of other people. As the narrative passes back and forth between these two, one at the beginning of her life and one at the end, Jansson’s clear prose — capable of sentiment without being sentimental — contains multitudes. The Summer Book is bright but dense; it is slim enough to read in a day but holds a whole world between its covers. — Patrick D.
by Jamaica Kincaid
Antigua
Published in 1985, Annie John is Jamaica Kincaid’s powerful first novel. It tells the story of a young girl, growing up in Antigua, whose relationship with her mother turns increasingly acrimonious. Annie John is told in short chapters, each a complete vignette first published in the New Yorker. It’s at least somewhat autobiographical — as a young girl, Kincaid was very close to her mother, but after her brothers were born, their relationship became more antagonistic. Kincaid gives us a keen emotional topography of the mother-daughter relationship and carefully nuanced descriptions of both interior and exterior worlds. — Mary Jo
by Halldór Laxness
Iceland
Independent People is a novel of contrasts, especially in its nuanced exploration of character: isolation and family, socialist ideals and the guilt of betrayal, symbol and dream against the brutal truth of nature. Though Laxness’s prose is lucid and smooth, his development and depth of image can be as complex as Joyce’s or Woolf’s. Unusually for epics, especially one in which man’s undoing waits in every change of weather, Independent People is also awfully funny. Laxness has a wonderful sense of irony; the reader knows much more than any one character can see. Independent People exalts in the idea of sympathy as one of the only ways that vastly different people — dreamer and realist, socialist and independent, parent and child — can truly touch each other’s lives. It is one of the great novels of the 20th century. — Jill
by Clarice Lispector
Brazil
Clarice Lispector’s debut novel (published when she was in her early 20s) hums with a heady mix of existential distress and youthful uncertainty. Joana, Near to the Wild Heart’s main character, is encumbered by the myriad vagaries of everyday reality and, given her introspective and indecisive temperament, finds herself nearly estranged from all those close to her (and often even herself). Near to the Wild Heart is an emotionally rich novel that compels one to consider, as Joana struggles to do, the ever-changing, malleable, and indeterminate nature of individual being. Beautiful and bewitching, the uniqueness of Lispector’s style makes all of her fiction imperative reading. — Jeremy G.
by Javier Marías
Spain
Often mentioned as a potential future Nobel laureate in literature, Javier Marías is primarily concerned with connections between people. In his fiction, he examines relationships and secrets in close detail, and explores how possible it is for people to truly know each other. Margaret Jull Costa’s translation of A Heart So White renders his Proustian sentences in exquisite English. This book is perhaps the greatest accomplishment of Marías’s long career thus far. — Adam P.
by Rohinton Mistry
India
A Fine Balance floored me; it was more emotionally affecting than almost any other book I’ve read. Mistry’s sweeping, epic story, fantastic cast of characters, and gorgeous sensory imagery paints a full-to-bursting portrait of India and its people. Dickensian in scope and devastating in impact, A Fine Balance is one of the masterpieces of the 20th century. — Jill
by Abdelrahman Munif
Saudi Arabia
Cities of Salt might just be the most important Arabic-language novel published in the entire 20th century, as it brilliantly dramatizes what happens when oil is discovered in an unnamed Persian Gulf kingdom in the 1930s. Unsurprisingly banned in Saudi Arabia, this first volume of a quintet exploring the collision between Western industrialism and traditional ways of life — and the human and societal costs of this collision — looms larger every year that passes as a monument to truth. — Jason C.
by Haruki Murakami
Japan
When a powerful man tells you to find something or else, you do what he says. So when the nameless narrator of Murakami’s game-changing third novel is tasked with tracking down a uniquely marked sheep pictured in a photo, he begrudgingly accedes. This absurd assignment becomes the catalyst for a surreal, fatalistic journey for the narrator, who, by his own admission, has nothing to lose. But much is at stake in A Wild Sheep Chase, set in Japan in the ’70s, and Murakami weaves in commentary on politics, philosophy, and modernity to create a rich, evocative tale. A Wild Sheep Chase was the author’s first book to be published in English, and it showcases the irresistible charm and propulsive creative energy of an author destined to become an international sensation. — Renee P.
by Georges Perec
France
Life: A User’s Manual is the magnum opus of one of the most startlingly inventive and original novelists who ever lived. The French polymath Georges Perec, an associate of the Oulipo collective, once wrote a full-length novel without ever using the letter “e”, then he wrote one in which “e” is the only vowel employed at all. In Life: A User’s Manual, he deconstructs the lives in a fictional apartment block in Paris at one single moment in 1975. The result is a tapestry of interwoven stories that are alternately funny and sad and which originate from the most esoteric writing constraints imaginable. Arguably the totemic post-war French novel. — Jason C.
by José Saramago
Portugal
A devastating and often horrific look at societal breakdown, Blindness is one of the most acclaimed novels from José Saramago, Portugal’s only Nobel laureate for literature. Far more than a mere dystopian plague novel, Blindness is a metaphorical account of society’s basest tendencies in the face of catastrophe. Saramago’s magnificently wending sentences and trademark style lend grace and beauty to an otherwise gruesome tale of epidemic chaos. — Jeremy G.
by Bruno Schulz
Poland
Schulz is a master of metaphor, and his lush, poetic sentences burst with sensory detail. He transforms the pedestrian — salesgirls, brooms, bolts of cloth — into fantastic apparitions, lit with significance and color. His stories involve rare birds’ eggs, bicycles, and a quarter of the city that is gray and does not exactly exist. They are about reality and illusion, the perversion of order, and the luxurious overgrowth of imagination. They are quite possibly like nothing you’ve ever read before. — Jill
by W. G. Sebald
Germany
One of the most inventive and strange novels of the past 25 years, The Rings of Saturn follows a nameless narrator on a walking tour of Suffolk in England. We meditate with the narrator, not only on the physical landscape, but also on his thoughts and memories, as we’re led through this peripatetic book. Black and white photographs punctuate the novel, and help provide a reading experience like few others. — Adam P.
Also by Powell’s Staff
• 25 Women to Read Before You Die
• 25 Books to Read Before You Die
• Midyear Roundup: Best Books of 2016 So Far
