Growth of the Soil


Knut Hamsun - 1917
    It created an international sensation upon first publication and led to the author's 1920 Nobel Prize in Literature. Rich in symbolism, it continues to resonate with modern readers today.

Hell


Henri Barbusse - 1908
    Alternately voyeur and seer, he obsessively studies the private moments and secret activities of his neighbors: childbirth, first love, marriage, betrayal, illness and death all present themselves to him through this spy hole. Decades ahead of its time, "Hell" shocked and scandalized the reviewing public when first released in English in 1966. Even so, the New Republic praised "the beauty of the book's nervous yet fluid rhythms... The book sweeps away life's illusions."

The Guide


R.K. Narayan - 1958
    Mistaken for a holy man, he plays the part and succeeds so well that God himself intervenes to put Raju's newfound sanctity to the test. Narayan's most celebrated novel, The Guide won him the National Prize of the Indian Literary Academy, his country's highest literary honor.

Till We Have Faces


C.S. Lewis - 1956
    Lewis reworks the classical myth of Cupid and Psyche into an enduring piece of contemporary fiction. This is the story of Orual, Psyche's embittered and ugly older sister, who posessively and harmfully loves Psyche. Much to Orual's frustration, Psyche is loved by Cupid, the god of love himself, setting the troubled Orual on a path of moral development.Set against the backdrop of Glome, a barbaric, pre-Christian world, the struggles between sacred and profane love are illuminated as Orual learns that we cannot understand the intent of the gods "till we have faces" and sincerity in our souls and selves.

Rituals


Cees Nooteboom - 1980
    But his inconsistencies are interrupted when he meets two men who are the epitome of order and regulation.

The Enigma of Arrival: A Novel in Five Sections


V.S. Naipaul - 1987
    He observes the gradual but profound changes wrought on the English countryside by the march of progress.

Journey Under the Midnight Sun


Keigo Higashino - 1999
    He begins to piece together the connection of two young people who are inextricably linked to the crime; the dark, taciturn son of the victim and the unexpectedly captivating daughter of the main suspect. Over the next twenty years we follow their lives as Sasagaki pursues the case - which remains unsolved - to the point of obsession. Stark, intriguing and stylish, Journey Under the Midnight Sun is an epic mystery by the bestselling Japanese author.

A Tale for the Time Being


Ruth Ozeki - 2013
    A diary is Nao’s only solace—and will touch lives in a ways she can scarcely imagine.Across the Pacific, we meet Ruth, a novelist living on a remote island who discovers a collection of artifacts washed ashore in a Hello Kitty lunchbox—possibly debris from the devastating 2011 tsunami. As the mystery of its contents unfolds, Ruth is pulled into the past, into Nao’s drama and her unknown fate, and forward into her own future. Full of Ozeki’s signature humour and deeply engaged with the relationship between writer and reader, past and present, fact and fiction, quantum physics, history, and myth, A Tale for the Time Being is a brilliantly inventive, beguiling story of our shared humanity and the search for home.

Strait is the Gate


André Gide - 1909
    There he falls deeply in love with his cousin Alissa and she with him. But gradually Alissa becomes convinced that Jerome's love for her is endangering his soul. In the interests of his salvation, she decides to suppress everything that is beautiful in herself - in both mind and body.

The River Ki


Sawako Ariyoshi - 1959
    On its journey seaward, it passes through countryside that has long been at the heart of the Japanese tradition. And it flows too past the mountains and the villages, past the dams, ditches and rice fields that provide such a richly textured backdrop to this novel.Powerful enough to sweep away people on its banks and placid enough to carry along with its flow a sumptuous wedding procession, The River Ki dominates the lives of the people who live in its fertile valley and imparts a vital strength to the three women, mother, daughter and granddaughter, around whom this novel is built. It provides them with the courage to cope, in their different ways, with the unprecedented changes that occurred in Japan between the last years of the last century and the middle of this century.Sawako Ariyoshi, one of Japan's most successful modern novelists, describes this social and cultural revolution largely through the eyes of Hana, a woman with the vision and integrity to understand the inevitability of the death of the traditional order in Japan. Ariyoshi writes with a love for detail bound to a broader understanding of the importance of the geographical and biological forces that mold her characters-and the result is a story that flows with all the vitality of The River Ki itself.

Villain


Shūichi Yoshida - 2007
    Her family and friends are shocked and terrified. The pass—which tunnels through a mountainous region of southern Japan—has an eerie history: a hideout for robbers, murderers, and ghostly creatures lurking at night. Soon afterward, a young construction worker becomes the primary suspect. As the investigation unfolds, the events leading up to the murder come darkly into focus, revealing a troubled cast of characters: the victim, Yoshino, a woman much too eager for acceptance; the suspect, Yuichi, a car enthusiast misunderstood by everyone around him; the victim’s middle-aged father, a barber disappointed with his life; and the suspect’s aging grandmother, who survived the starvation of postwar Japan only to be tormented by local gangsters. And, finally, there is desperate Mitsuyo, the lonely woman who finds Yuichi online and makes the big mistake of falling for him.  A stunningly dark thriller and a tapestry of noir, Villain is the English-language debut for Shuichi Yoshida, one of Japan’s most acclaimed and accomplished writers. From desolate seaside towns and lighthouses to love hotels and online chat rooms, Villain reveals the inner lives of men and women who all have something to hide. Part police procedural, part gritty realism, Villain is a coolly seductive story of loneliness and alienation in the southernmost reaches of Japan.

The Museum of Unconditional Surrender


Dubravka Ugrešić - 1996
    These objects—a cigarette lighter, lollipop sticks, a beer-bottle opener, etc.—like the fictional pieces of the novel itself, are seemingly random at first, but eventually coalesce, meaningfully and poetically.Written in a variety of literary forms, The Museum of Unconditional Surrender captures the shattered world of living in exile. Some chapters re-create the daily journal of the narrator's lonely and alienated mother, who shops at the improvised flea-markets in town and longs for her children; another is a dream-like narrative in which a circle of women friends are visited by an angel. There are reflections and accounts of the Holocaust and the Yugoslav Civil War; portraits of European artists; a recipe for Caraway Soup; a moving story of a romantic encounter the narrator has in Lisbon; descriptions of family photographs; memories of the small town in which Ugresic was raised.Addressing the themes of art and history, aging and loss, The Museum is a haunting and an extremely original novel. In the words of the Times Literary Supplement, "it is vivid in its denunciation of destructive forces and in its evocation of what is at stake."

So Long a Letter


Mariama Bâ - 1980
    It is the winner of the Noma Award.

Under Satan's Sun


Georges Bernanos - 1926
    The work develops a theme that persistently inspired Bernanos: the existence of evil as a spiritual force and its dramatic role in human destiny. This haunting novel follows the fortunes of a young, gauche, and fervent Catholic priest who is a misfit in the world and in his church, creating scandal and disharmony wherever he turns. His insight into the inner lives of others and his perception of the workings of Satan in the everyday are gifts that fatefully come into play in the priest's chance encounter with a young murderess, whose life and emotions he can see with a dreadful clarity, and whose destiny inexorably becomes entangled with his own.

Outlaws of the Marsh


Shi Nai'an
    One by one, over a hundred men and women are forced by the harsh feudal officialdom to take to the hills. They band together and defeat every attempt of the government troops to crush them. Within this framework we find intrigue, adventure, murder, warfare, romance ... in a connected series of fascinating individual tales, told in the suspenseful manner of the traditional storyteller.