The Library of Babel, the Garden of Forking Paths and Pierre Menard; Borges in seventeen stories.
A novel you can read in two orders; Cortazar's Paris and Buenos Aires.
Two visceral realist poets hunted through Mexico City and beyond by fifty narrators.
Five parts, a missing German novelist and the murdered women of Santa Teresa; Bolano's unfinished monument.
Four generations of the Trueba family and a coup; Allende's debut.
A man arrives in Comala looking for his father and finds a town of the dead; the book that taught Garcia Marquez.
Everyone in town knows the twins will kill Santiago Nasar and nobody stops it.
Florentino waits fifty-one years, nine months and four days for Fermina; Garcia Marquez's romance.
An escaped Australian convict in Bombay's slums, mafia and Afghanistan; 900 pages of backpacker legend.
A Bangalore driver murders his master and explains why in letters to the Chinese premier; Adiga's Booker.
The decline of an aristocratic Qing family through a boy and his cousins; the greatest Chinese novel.
Warlords, strategists and the fall of the Han; the Chinese epic every game borrows.
The Monkey King escorts a monk to India in a hundred chapters; the Chinese classic behind every Goku.
Three daughters of China: a warlord's concubine, a communist official and the author, through Mao's century.
A distillery family in Shandong during the Japanese invasion; Mo Yan's Nobel novel behind Zhang Yimou's film.
Cheng Xin and the end of the universe; the trilogy goes to the largest scale in fiction.
Wallfacers, the dark forest theory and the Trisolaran fleet.
Four generations of a Korean family in Japan from 1910; Min Jin Lee's epic.
A Seoul woman stops eating meat and her family cannot bear it; the Booker International that led to Han Kang's Nobel.
A 36-year-old who is only normal behind a till; Murata's deadpan bestseller.
The shining prince and the women of the Heian court; the first novel, written by a woman around 1010.
Four sisters in Osaka before the war and the search for a husband for the third; Tanizaki's masterpiece.
A student and his Sensei, and the confession of a betrayal from the Meiji era; Soseki's classic.
A Tokyo dilettante and a geisha at a hot-spring town; Kawabata's Nobel novel.
Two moons over Tokyo in 1984 and a cult; three volumes.
A missing cat, a missing wife and a dry well in a Tokyo suburb; Murakami's big one.
A runaway boy and an old man who talks to cats; fish fall from the sky.
Toru, Naoko and Midori in 1960s Tokyo; the Murakami without magic that made him famous.
A woman's life in 14th-century Norway in three volumes; Undset's Nobel.
Moomintroll and his mother search for father in the first Moomin book; Tove Jansson's valley begins.
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