Sophomore World Literature
Argentina
Ficciones by Jorge Luis Borges
Dreamlike labyrinths explore time and memory.
Hopscotch by Julio Cortázar
The reader becomes a character in this jazz-flavored story of an Argentine expatriate in Paris.
Brazil
Show Down by Jorge Amado
Canada
The Handmaid's Tale by Margaret Atwood
A fundamentalist government ends women's rights in a grim future.
My Year of Meats by Ruth L. Ozeki
Strange things happen in the love lives of two women--one a Japanese-American filmmaker from New York, the other a Japanese housewife--linked by a Japanese television show sponsored by an American meat exporter.
Colombia
Chronicle of a Death Foretold by Gabriel García Márquez
A man returns to the town where a baffling murder took place 27 years earlier, determined to get to the bottom of the story.
The General in His Labyrinth by Gabriel García Márquez
The novel follows Simon Bolivar as he takes his final journey in 1830 down the Magdalena River toward the sea. Forced from power, dogged by assassins, and prematurely aged and wasted by a fatal illness, the General is still a remarkably vital and mercurial man. He seems to remain alive by the sheer force of will that led him to so many victories in the battlefields and love affairs of his past. As he wanders in the labyrinth of his failing powers and still-powerful memories he defies his impending death until the last.
Love in the Time of Cholera by Gabriel García Márquez
Fermina Daza and Florentino Ariza consummate their passion at the beginning of the 20th century after having waited over 50 years.
Of Love and Other Demons by Gabriel García Márquez
A priest hired to exorcize a young girl realizes that she is not sick but instead horrified after living with superstitous nuns in their convent during colonial times.
One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
Tells the story of the Buendia family, set against the background of the evolution and eventual decadence of a small South American town.
Cuba
The Color of Summer, or the New Garden of Earthly Delights by Reinaldo Arenas
Czech Republic
Immortality by Milan Kundera
Through the actions of three characters--Agnes, her husband, and her sister--and others in contemporary France and Weimar Germany, the author reflects on the image of the individual, the Western cult of sentiment, and the meaning of love.
Finland
Dance of the Tiger: a Novel of the Ice Age by Björn Kurtén
Kurtén draws on recent anthropological discoveries and his vivid imagination to create a compelling tale of life thirty-five thousand years ago, telling the story of Tiger as he seeks revenge for a savage attack on his tribe.
France
Madame Bovary by Gustave Flaubert
When Emma Rouault marries Charles Bovary she imagines she will pass into the life of luxury and passion that she reads about in sentimental novels and women's magazines. But Charles is a dull country doctor, and provincial life is very different from the romantic excitement for which she yearns. In her quest to realize her dreams she takes a lover, and begins a devastating spiral into deceit and despair.
Old Goriot Honoré de Balzac
A father sacrifices for his ungrateful daughters' dowries.
The Three Musketeers by Alexandre Dumas
During the reign of France's King Louis XIV, D'Artagnan and three musketeers unite to defend the honor of Anne of Austria against the plots of Cardinal Richeliu.
The Wanderer, of the End of Youth by Alain-Fournier
The story of Augustin Meaulnes, whose life is irrevocably altered by a strange chance meeting with a young woman of almost unearthly beauty and innocence. For years he seeks to rediscover his lost, ideal love, but beings to doubt her reality - until he is passionately, tragically reunited with her.
Germany
The Sorrows of Young Werther by Johann Wolfgang von Goethe
The Tin Drum by Günter Grass
Acclaimed as the greatest German novel written since the end of World War II, The Tin Drum is the autobiography of thirty-year-old Oskar Matzerath who has lived through the long Nazi nightmare and who, as the novel begins, is being held in a mental institution. Willfully stunting his growth at three feet for many years, wielding his tin drum and piercing scream as anarchistic weapons, he provides a profound yet hilarious perspective on both German history and the human condition in the modern world.
Great Britain
England
Arthur & George by Julian Barnes
As boys, George, the son of a Midlands vicar, and Arthur, living in shabby genteel Edinburgh, find themselves in a vast and complex world at the heart of the British Empire. Years later—one struggling with his identity in a world hostile to his ancestry, the other creating the world’s most famous detective while in love with a woman who is not his wife–their fates become inextricably connected.
The Voices by Susan Elderkin
As a child, Billy Saint finds guidance from the landscape of the Australian bush that surrounds him, unaware that his ever-increasing involvement with the untamed land is drawing him into something terrifying and powerful beyond his control.
Ireland
The Commitments by Roddy Doyle
A group of working-class Irish youths with a passion for the music of Sam Cooke and Otis Redding form a rock 'n' roll band and attempt to bring soul to Dublin.
Scotland
Any Human Heart by William Boyd
The journals of Logan Mountstuart chronicle his eighty-five years of life, from his boyhood in Uruguay to his education at Oxford, his wartime exploits, his career as an art dealer, and his retirement in France.
Wales
Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett
Saga set in medieval Britain telling of the lives of a group of men and women whose destinies are fatefully linked with the building of a cathedral.
Greece
Zorba the Greek by Nikos Kazantzakis
Zorba, an irrepressible, earthy hedonist, sweeps his young disciple along as he wines, dines, and loves his way through a life dedicated to fulfilling his copious appetites.
India
Fasting, Feasting by Anita Desai
As Uma, the unmarriageable adult daughter of an Indian lawyer, copes with her parents' demands and traditional Indian family life, her younger brother, Arun, must face a vastly different life living with an American family in a Massachusetts suburb.
Italy
The Baron in the Trees by Italo Calvino
Cosimo, a young Italian nobleman of the eighteenth century, rebels against parental authority by climbing into the trees and remaining there for the rest of his life. He adapts efficiently to an arboreal existence - hunts, sows crops, plays games with earth-bound friends, fights forest fires, solves engineering problems, and even manages to have love affairs. From his perch in the trees, Cosimo sees the age of Voltaire pass by and a new century dawn.
If On a Winter's Night a Traveler by Italo Calvino
This postmodernist narrative, in the form of a frame story, is about the reader trying to read a book called If On a Winter's Night a Traveler.
Invisible Cities by Italo Calvino
Marco Polo and Kublai Khan meet to talk of fabulous imagined cities.
Me and You by Niccolò Ammaniti
Lorenzo Cuni is a 14-year-old loner. His wealthy parents think he is away on a school skiing trip, but in fact he has stowed away in a forgotten cellar. For a week he plans to live in perfect isolation, keeping the adult world at bay. Then a visit from his estranged half-sister, Olivia, changes everything.
Japan
Masks by Fumiko Enchi
A stunning and subtle novel about seduction and infidelity in latter-day Japan and about the destructive force of feminine jealousy and resentment, Mieko Togano, a handsome and cultivated woman in her 50s, manipulates - for her own bizarre purposes - the relationship between her widowed daughter-in-law, Yasuko, and the two men in love with her.
Silence by Shusaku Endo
A Portugese priest arrives from Rome to rebuild the shattered Christian community in feudal Japan and to find out why another priest was tortured.
The Twilight Years by Sawako Ariyoshi
Akiko is a working wife and mother of a teenage son. When her mother-in-law suddenly dies of a stroke, Akiko becomes the sole caregiver for her selfish father-in-law Shegezo. A novel that raises important issues about the quality of life at the end of life, caregiving for the old, and the dilemma of women who have both career and family obligations.
Mexico
The Death of Artemio Cruz by Carlos Fuentes
Artemio Cruz, a corrupt soldier, politician, journalist, tycoon, and lover, lies on his deathbed, recalling the shaping events of his life, from the Mexican Revolution through the development of the Institutional Revolutionary Party.
Nigeria
Yoruba Girl Dancing by Simi Bedford
When Remi is torn from her snug, loving family in Nigeria and sent to a stodgy boarding school in England, she slowly learns to use her cultural difference to her advantage.
I Saw the Sky Catch Fire by T. Obinkaram Echewa
As young Ajuzia prepares to leave for America, his grandmother, Nne-nne, recreates the history of their country, Nigeria, through a series of powerful tales, tales he will fully understand only when he returns.
Peru
Deep Rivers by José María Arguedas
Russia
The Brothers Karamazov by Fyodor Dostoyevsky
Self-denial and the spirit are at war with passion and violence in this family tragedy.
Dead Souls by Nikolai Gogol
Chichikov, an enigmatic stranger and schemer, buys deceased serfs' names from their landlords' poll tax lists hoping to mortgage them for profit and to reinvent himself as a gentleman.
Spain
Don Quixote by Miguel de Cervantes
The misadventures of poor elderly knight make for timeless social satire.
South Africa
Age of Iron by J. M. Coetzee
South African professor Mrs. Curren has always been opposed to apartheid's brutality though she has lived isolated from its horrors, but as she nears death from cancer, she confronts a generation of blood and revenge.
Disgrace by J. M. Coetzee
In South Africa, a shamed professor faces difficult changes on his daughter's farm.
Tsotsi by Athol Fugard
Tsotsi adopts a name meaning "Thug" as he leads a small gang in murdering fellow countrymen in retribution for black ghetto life.
Vietnam
Paradise of the Blind by Duong Thu Huong
Hang grows up in Vietnam in the shadow of the love of her mother and her aunt, and when lack of money stops her education, she becomes an export worker in the Soviet Union where she manages to retain her heritage.