A Greenlandic-Danish scientist investigates a boy's fall from a roof in Copenhagen.
Bjartur of Summerhouses and his sheep against everything; Laxness's Icelandic epic.
Knausgaard's father, alcohol and the cleaning of a house of death; 3,600 pages begin.
A 14-year-old receives letters teaching the history of philosophy, then finds out who she is.
Stalkers loot an alien Zone for artefacts; the Strugatskys' novel behind Tarkovsky's film.
Solzhenitsyn's literary investigation of the camps from 227 witnesses; the abridged edition is enough.
Russians remember the end of the Soviet Union and the 1990s; Alexievich's chorus.
Voices of the liquidators, widows and resettled villagers; Alexievich's Nobel oral history.
A standalone Geralt adventure set between the short stories, with his swords stolen.
An old woman in a Silesian village and hunters who keep dying; Tokarczuk's eco-thriller.
Jacob Frank, an 18th-century Jewish messiah, across Poland and Turkey in 900 pages numbered backwards.
Fragments about travel, anatomy and a Chopin's heart smuggled to Warsaw; Tokarczuk's Booker International.
Two constructor robots build machines that write poetry and simulate kingdoms; Lem's comic fables.
Haile Selassie's court told by its servants; Kapuscinski on power anywhere.
Kapuscinski's forty years reporting Africa, from Ghana's independence to Rwanda.
Annie Ernaux's life from 1941 to 2006 as a collective French memory in the third person; her Nobel.
A Muslim party wins the French presidency in 2022; Houellebecq published it the day of Charlie Hebdo.
A French girl and a Chinese man in colonial Saigon; Duras at 70 remembering.
A 17-year-old on the Riviera destroys her father's engagement; Sagan wrote it at 18.
A concierge who hides her intelligence and a girl planning suicide in a Paris building.
A man learns he came to Wales on the Kindertransport and follows the trail back; Sebald with photographs.
A 15-year-old and a tram conductor in 1958 Heidelberg, and her trial years later.
A murderer with a perfect nose in 18th-century France distils the scent of girls.
Oskar stops growing at three and drums through Danzig's twentieth century; Grass's Nobel.
Pessoa's assistant bookkeeper Bernardo Soares and his fragments; the anti-novel of Lisbon.
A city goes blind and is quarantined; Saramago without punctuation.
Elena and Lila in a Naples courtyard in the 1950s; the first Neapolitan novel.
Marco Polo describes fifty-five cities to Kublai Khan, all of them Venice.
You, the reader, keep starting novels that break off; Calvino's game.
Tomas, Tereza and Sabina in Prague 1968; Kundera's novel of philosophy and sex.
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