The Fortress
1970 · 406 pages
Ahmet Shabo returns from an Ottoman war to a Sarajevo where his family has died of plague and one honest sentence ruins a man. The marriage he makes there is his only refuge.
★ 5.5
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 Famished Road
1991 · 500 pages
Azaro is an abiku, a spirit child who keeps refusing to die, and Okri sets him loose in a Nigerian slum where ghosts crowd the bar and political thugs hand out poisoned milk.
★ 5.7
Naomi
1924 · 237 pages
Joji, a Tokyo engineer, takes home a fifteen-year-old cafe waitress to raise into a Western-style wife, and she ruins him instead. Naomi became the emblem of Japan's modern girl and scandalized older readers.
★ 6.3
My Name Is Red
1998 · 417 pages
The dead man narrates his own murder, and so do a coin and a tree, in the Istanbul of 1591 where painting a face as the eye sees it is treated as blasphemy.
★ 6.7
Red Sorghum
A Novel of China
1986 · 359 pages
Bandits waylay a bride bound for a leprous distiller, and the son conceived in the sorghum grows up under Japanese occupation. Mo Yan makes rural Shandong's violence gorgeous and unbearable at once.
★ 6.8