So Long a Letter
1981 · 96 pages
Widowed after thirty years, a Senegalese teacher writes to her closest friend about the husband who took her daughter's teenage friend as a second wife. It won the first Noma Award.
★ 6.1
The Books canon
Sourced and shelved.
Every book chosen by hand and annotated for why it matters.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
Browse all 1,178 books or filter by subject, era, place, and author.
The Travels
1355 · 472 pages
Ibn Battuta left Morocco at twenty-one for the hajj and stayed away twenty-nine years, judging cases in Delhi and crossing the Sahara to Mali. He dictated all 75,000 miles from memory.
★ 6.7
The Muqaddimah
1377 · 512 pages
Ibn Khaldun found history's engine in group solidarity, which carries a tribe from desert to throne, then dissolves in city luxury within three generations. Europe produced nothing comparable for centuries.
★ 6.7
Persepolis
2003 · 153 pages
Satrapi was a schoolgirl in Tehran when the Shah fell and fourteen when her parents sent her alone to Vienna. She draws the revolution, the war and her exile in black and white.
★ 6.7
The Satanic Verses
1988 · 576 pages
Two men fall from an exploding jet and live, one sprouting a halo, the other hooves. The Ayatollah Khomeini's death sentence put Rushdie underground for nine years, and his Japanese translator was murdered.
★ 6.8
A History of the Crusades
1951 · 336 pages
Runciman tells the Crusades from Constantinople looking west, and the men in armor come off badly. Three volumes of grand narrative build toward his verdict: one long act of intolerance in God's name.
★ 6.9
The Arabian Nights
Author unknown
1100 · 464 pages
Scheherazade marries a king who executes each new wife at dawn and stays alive by telling stories that break off before the end. Sinbad, Aladdin, and Ali Baba reached the world through her.
★ 7.5