ALBANIA
Ismail
Kadare The Three-Arched Bridge
In this novel Ismail Kadare, the first European
to receive the International Booker Prize for literature awarded in 2005,
chronicles the events surrounding the construction of a bridge to illustrate the
bitter history of cultural enmity in the Balkans.
AUSTRIA
Rosina Lippi
Homestead
In a series of interconnected
vignettes spanning 1909-1977, Lipipi breathes life into the Austrian village of
Rosenau, an isolated dairy-farming community.
AMSTERDAM
Ian McEwan
Amsterdam: A Novel
In this Booker Prize winning
novel, former lovers of Molly hover like vultures over her funeral ready to tear
one another apart.
ENGLAND
Penelope Fitzgerald
The Bookshop
With a modest inheritance,
Florence Green, a widow, plans to open the first and only bookstore in a tiny
Sussex sea town, but encounters unexpected resistance from one of the local
gentry.
Michael Frayn
Spies
Two young boys, neighbors during
WWII, get caught up in the secrets and betrayals of wartime domestic life in a
small English village.
Sheri Holman
The Dress Lodger
Scrawny and tough,
fifteen-year-old Gustine works as a potter by day and a prostitute by night.
This engrossing piece of historical fiction brilliantly portrays 19th
century urban life during the cholera epidemic.
Ian McEwan
Atonement
Set during the seemingly idyllic
summer of 1935 at the country estate of the Tallis family, this novel probes the
lives of the young Tallises from that one scorchingly hot day that ultimately
affected everyone.
FRANCE
Albert Camus
The Stranger
Written in 1946, Camus' compelling
and troubling tale of a disaffected, apparently amoral young man has earned a
durable popularity in part because it reveals so vividly the anxieties of its
time.
Joanne Harris
Chocolat
The battle lines between church
and chocolate are drawn in this bewitching tale of a confectioner who settles in
a sleepy French village to arouse the appetites of the pleasure-starved
parishioners.
Sebastian Japrisot
A Very Long Engagement
Mathilde Donnay, the compelling
heroine of this novel set during WWI, relentlessly searches for the truth about
what happened to the five French soldiers who were marched into no man’s land
for the Germans to shoot.
GERMANY
Robert Ford
The Student Conductor
A young American conductor goes
to study in West Germany and is troubled by the country’s unquiet past.
Ursula Hegi
Stones From the River
While telling the story of Trudy,
a dwarf woman who struggles to find acceptance in her small German town, Hegi
paints an unforgettable picture of life during the two World Wars.
Bernard Schlink
The Reader
Michael Berg is 15 when he begins
a long and passionate affair with Hanna, an enigmatic older woman. Suddenly she
disappears only to reappear years later as a defendant in a trial related to
Germany’s Nazi past.
GREECE
Louis De Bernieres
Birds Without Wings
Birds Without Wings and
Corelli’s Mandolin share the same theme--- a peaceful, sun-drenched
community shattered by the horrors of war, only this time it’s set in the small
Anatolian town of Eskibahce.
Jeffrey Eugenides
Middlesex
While telling the story of a 41
hermaphrodite, Eugenides weaves a narrative spanning 80 years of a Greek family
who starts out in Greece and then settles in Detroit during Prohibition. He
continues tracing them moving through the early days of Ford Motors to the 1967
race riots and beyond.
Tracy Chevalier
Girl with a Pearl Earring
This novel centers on Vermeer’s
prosperous household during the 1960s.
Sandor Marai
Ember
Two old men Konrad and Henrik,
“the General”, once the best of friends, meet after a 41-year break in their
relationship in the fading splendor of the General’s Hungarian castle to ponder
the events that divided them.
Roddy Doyle
Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha
Roddy Doyle’s novel offers a
ten-year-old boy’s impressions of friends, parents and school through colorful
sketches and vivid images of Ireland in 1968.
William Trevor
The Story of Lucy Gault
Trevor, one of the finest prose
stylists writing today, recounts the tale of a young girl whose Protestant
family is driven from its rural Irish home in 1921.
Giuseppe di Lampedusa
The Leopard
A classic of modern fiction, set
in the 1860s, The Leopard is the spellbinding account of a decadent,
dying Sicilian aristocracy threatened by the approach of democracy and
revolution.
Dava Sobel
Galileo’s Daughter: A Historical Memoir of Science, Faith, and Love
Basing her book on 124 surviving
letters, Dava Sobel tells the story of the famous scientist and his illegitimate
daughter Sister Maria Celeste.
Sally Vickers
Miss Garnet’s Angel
After the death of her longtime
friend and flat-mate, retired British history teacher Julia Garnet does
something completely out of character: She takes a flat rental on a modest
appartamento in Venice.
LATVIA
Henning Mankell
The Dogs of Riga
Set against the chaotic backdrop
of eastern Europe after the fall of the Berlin Wall, Mankell’s intense,
accomplished mystery, explores one man’s struggle to find truth and justice in a
society increasingly bereft of either.
POLAND
Helen Fremont
After Long Silence
Fremont’s discovery that her
parents were not Catholics, but Jews who escaped the Holocaust, sends her on a
pilgrimage to Poland, Israel and Italy in search of her family’s history.
Wladyslaw Szpilman
The Pianist
Szpilman’s memoir of life in the
Warsaw ghetto is remarkable not only for the heroism of its protagonists but for
the author’s lack of bitterness recounting the events.
ROMANIA
Isabel Fonseca
Bury Me Standing
A candid and unromantic account
of the Gypsies---or Roma--- by Fonseca who lived and traveled with the Gypsies
of Bulgaria, Poland, the Czech Republic and Slovakia.
Stuart Kaminsky
Cold Red Sunrise
At an icebound naval weather
station in far Siberia, the young daughter of an ex-official dies under
suspicious circumstances.
Andrei Makine
Dreams of My Russian Summers
A coming of age story told by
Andrei who describes his summers with his French grandmother Charlotte in a
remote Russian village of Saranza.
SLOVAKIA
Winfried Georg Sebald
Austerlitz
Jacques Austerlitz, an
architectural historian, tells his life story to the unnamed narrator over the
course of 30 years.
Marina Lewycka
A Short History of Tractors in Ukrainian
A wise, tender, deeply funny
novel about an eccentric elderly Ukrainian widower in England and the struggles
of his two feuding daughters to thwart the voluptuous young gold digger from the
old country who sweeps him off his feet.