Mr. President
1946 · 320 pages
In an unnamed Latin American capital, a beggar's killing of a colonel gives a dictator the pretext to destroy his enemies. Asturias renders the terror as fever dream, in prose that hallucinates.
★ 6.8
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.
This Earth of Mankind
1980 · 368 pages
Minke, a Javanese student under Dutch rule, loves the daughter of a concubine running the estate its Dutch owner cannot. Indonesia banned it for a generation and now claims it as its greatest.
★ 6.8
Season of Migration to the North
1966 · 169 pages
Mustafa Sa'eed sailed north to London and left ruined Englishwomen behind him, an African answer to Conrad's Heart of Darkness. Arab writers voted it the century's most important novel in Arabic.
★ 6.4
Nervous Conditions
1988 · 304 pages
The first novel any Black Zimbabwean woman published in English opens with a girl not sorry her brother died: his death frees her for the mission school, where education costs her cousin everything.
★ 6.2
The Joy Luck Club
1989 · 288 pages
Four women who fled China met over mahjong in San Francisco, and when one dies her daughter takes the empty seat. Tan's sixteen interlocking stories carry the mothers' buried lives across.
★ 6.1
Bless Me, Ultima
1972 · 277 pages
Ultima, a folk healer, joins Antonio's family in wartime New Mexico, and the boy is pulled between his mother's church and his father's plains. Schools have taught it and banned it ever since.
★ 6.0