Novels that allow you to see the world. 

Europe

• Tracy Chevalier - the Girl with the Pearl Earring (atmospheric novel about a Dutch servant working for the artist Vermeer)

• Michael Frayn - The Interpreter (Cold War Russia, spies, with humour, love and betrayal).

• Patricia Highsmith - The Talented Mr Ripley (Crime novel of mistaken identities set across Italy)

• Leo Tolstoy - War and Peace (beautiful panoramic novel of Russia during the Napoleonic Wars with a varied and colourful range of characters. It’s huge, but I couldn’t put it down)

• Alexander Solzhenitsyn - A Day in the Death of Ivan Ivanisevic (the story of a single day in the gulags in Stalinist Russia)

• Ernest Hemingway - The Sun Also Rises (jazz age novel of Americans in Paris and Spain)

• Graham Greene - the Third Man (spy novel in post-war Vienna, when the city is divided into British, American, French and German sectors)

• Joanne Harris - Chocolat (a woman turns a French town upside by opening an indulgent chocolate shop)

• Stephen Galloway - The Cellist of Sarajevo (a cellist played throughout the shelling of Bosnia. Three interlocking narratives about life at this time)

• Bernhard Schlink - The Reader (A German man discovers that the woman he had an affair with as a boy became a Nazi concentration camp worker)

• Xiaolu Guo - A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (A Chinese student starts learning English in London. Partly a romance but also about the feeling of being foreign and the writer does interesting things with language!)

• Jonathan Safran Foer - Everything is Illuminated (An American is trying to uncover his past in the Ukraine with the help of a hilarious guide. Tragic and funny.)

• Markus Zusak - The Book Thief (Death narrates this novel set in Nazi Germany. It’s quirky, moving, easy reading and funny).

• Charles Dickens - A Tale of Two Cities (Paris and London during the French Revolution. Political, romantic, moving).

• Milan Kundera - The Unbearable Lightness of Being (Prague, love, existence, Communism)

Africa/Middle East

• Chinua Achebe - Things Fall Apart (the most famous novel in Africa - a Nigerian village before and after colonisation. A must-read tragedy.)

• Barbara Kingsolver - The Poisonwood Bible (The family of an American missionary move to the Congo at the beginning of the civil war in the 1960s. Multiple vivid narrators; a dramatic, gripping story, beautifully written)

• Ayaan Hirsi Ali - Infidel (Autobiography of her life in Somalia, Saudi Arabia, Ethiopia, Kenya and Holland, including FGM, extremism, questions of faith and immigration)

• Paul Bowles - The Sheltering Sky (Harrowing but brilliant novel about America tourists in Post WW2 Morocco, and across Saharan Africa. Extremely powerful but brutal).

• Alan Paton - Cry the Beloved Country (A seminal novel about the tensions between black and white South Africa and the struggle to be a good person in a bad time)

• Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie - Half a Yellow Sun or Purple Hibiscus (World famous Nigerian writer on the civil war in the 1960s, love, betrayal, family, death, conflict).

• Tayeb Salih- Season of Migration to the North (voted best Arabic novel of all time, about a Sudanese man returning from studying in the UK and the cultural clashes).

• Alexander McCall Smith - The No. 1 Ladies Detective Agency (lighthearted easy reading novel about a detective in Botswana)

• J M Coetzee - Disgrace (A South African professor has an affair with a student, stirring up deep-seated racial problems. Some violence)

Asia

•  Kamila Shamsie - Burnt Shadows (A dramatic story sweeping from Nagasaki to Partition India, to 9/11 to Afghanistan and Guantanamo. Compelling and essential reading for anyone interested in 20th century horrors).

• Han Kang - Human Acts (Controversial novel about the brutal put down of the 1980 student uprising in Korea)

• Mohsin Hamid - Moth Smoke (Pakistani drug addict banker losing his job and love, clever plot) or The Reluctant Fundamentalist (Pakistani Harvard student post 9/11 and whether he has become radicalised)

• Orhan Pamuk - My Name is Red (a murder mystery set among miniaturist artists in Ottoman Turkey. Full of crazy narrators (e.g. a dog, a coin!), truly original, won a Nobel prize)

• Marjane Satrapi - Persepolis (a sometimes funny, sometimes sad autobiographical graphic novel about growing up under the Islamic Revolution in Iran and later being a Muslim in Europe)

• Michael Ondaatje - Anil’s Ghost (human rights workers uncovering war crimes mystery in Sri Lanka)

• Rohinton Mistry - A Fine Balance (a beautiful tragi-comic novel set mainly in Mumbai, up to the Indira Gandhi years. Haunting and you get incredibly involved with the characters. Large but so worth it!).

• Ruth Prawer Jhabvala - Heat and Dust (a love affair between a British woman and Indian man and the scandal this creates)

• Amy Tan - The Bonesetter’s Daughter or The Joy Luck Club  (Chinese Americans discover the brutality, mythology, history and roots of their past. Easy to read.)

• Haruki Murakami - Kafka on the Shore  (surreal story of a boy, a library, a talking cat and an underworld set in Japan) or Norwegian Wood (Japanese doomed love teenage story, easy reading, emo cult novel)

• Khaled Hosseini - The Kite Runner or A Thousand Splendid Suns (highly readable novels about boys and girls respectively, living in Afghanistan and overseas with lots of action, drama and shocking sections).

• Suzanne Joinson - The Lady Cyclist’s Guide to Kashgar (dual narrative set in Central Asian female missionaries, a Yemeni refugee and an English woman. Covers faith, crime, sexuality, art, conflict and a great interlocking narrative. Dramatic, shocking, thought-provoking).

• E M Forster -- A Passage to India (a trial involving a white woman who accuses an Indian man of rape heralds the fall of the empire)

• Marguerite Duras - The Lover (short beautiful novel about a French schoolgirl’s affair with a Chinese businessman in Vietnam)

• Yann Martel - Life of Pi (An Indian boy gets stuck on a boat with only a tiger for company. Allegorical)

• Monica Ali - Brick Lane (A Bangladeshi woman who speaks no English moves to London for an arranged marriage, in a time of race riots)

• George Orwell - Burmese Days (the last days of Empire in Burma, showing the corruption and mess of the British with a wry slant)

• Meera Kandaswamy - When I Hit You (shocking novel about domestic violence set in India. Prize winning and really eye opening)

Americas

• Gabriel Garcia Marquez - 100 years of Solitude (magic realism following the history of an unnamed South American state but based on Marquez’s Colombia. If you read one novel set in South America in your lifetime, it should be this!)

• Roxane Gay - Ayiti (short, varied and sometimes shocking stories about Haiti)

• Louis de Bernieres - the War of Don Emmanuel’s Nether Regions (humorous, sad, panoramic novel covering coups, the jungle, the Andes and the city in another fictionalised South American State which resembles Peru. If you are going on the Peru trip, read this!)

• Junot Diaz - The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao (Coming of age of a chubby teenager in the Dominican Republic and Florida. Helps if you speak some Spanish)

• Barbara Kingsolver - The Lacuna (the Mexico City of Trotsky and Frida Kahlo - art, politics, drama)

• Barbara Kingsolver - Prodigal Summer (compelling multiple narrative of living with nature on farms and national parks in USA)

• Toni Morrison - Beloved (a woman kills her child rather than let it grow up a slave in the USA. Prizewinning, haunting)

• Margaret Atwood - Cat’s Eye (a haunting tale of bullying and art set in Toronto) or The Handmaid’s Tale (a dystopian future where women are enslaved for reproduction).

• F Scott Fitzgerald - The Great Gatsby (the classic US jazz age novel of the 1920s - parties, prohibition, love, crime and extreme wealth)

• Sandra Cisneros - The House on Mango Street (Latino child immigrants to the USA tell their lives through a series of snapshots. Easy, enjoyable reading)

• Ernesto Che Guevara - The Motorcycle Diaries (highly readable account of the revolutionary’s travels through Argentina up to a leper colony in Peru, and the people and poverty he met)

• Laura Esquivel - Like Water for Chocolate (food, recipes, love, ghosts and heroes in traditional Mexico. Easy to read)

• Jean Rhys - Wide Sargasso Sea (short evocative Caribbean novel retelling Bertha, the madwoman in Jane Eyre’s story before she comes to England.)

• Celeste Ng - Everything I Never Told You (Chinese American perfect student is found drowned. Is it suicide or murder? Easy reading)

• Donna Tartt - The Secret History (Classics students at an elite American college get caught up in a murderous turn of events)

Australasia/Oceania

• Kate Grenville - the Secret River (The first settlers in Australia coming from the UK as criminals, trying to make a living and the horrific things they do)

• Lloyd Jones - Mister Pip (In Papua New Guinea students are learning Great Expectations under the threat of a bloody civil war)

• Nevil Shute - A Town Called Alice (Australians trapped in Asia in WW2 trying to make their way home)

• Bill Bryson - Down Under (humorous travel writing about the continent)

• Somerset Maugham - The Moon and Sixpence (an artist abandons his suffocating European life to go and live in the South Pacific. Based on Gauguin's life)