Read Around Europe Challenge
Read at least one book by an author from each country in Europe.
Best books from Europe (2666)
251.
BulgariaDescription:
Published in 1986, three years before the fall of the Berlin Wall, Wolf Hunt was the first novel to portray the human cost of Communist policies on Bulgarian villagers, forced by the government to abandon their land and traditional way of life. Darkly comic and tragic, the novel centers on an ill-fated winter hunting expedition of six neighbors whose history together is long and interwoven. The ensuing story takes the reader on a voyage of shifting perspectives that places the calamitous history of twentieth-century Bulgaria into a human context of helplessness and desperation.
252.
Geography for the lost by Kapka kassabova EN
Description:
The voices speaking here - from a Roman housewife to a Chinese bar-owner in Berlin or an Argentine DJ - are the voices of the heart-sick, the culturally jet-lagged, people from photographs, the 'tenants' of lives, cities, and destinies.
253.
The Physics of Sorrow by Georgi Gospodinov EN
Description:
Using the myth of the Minotaur as its organising image, the narrator of Gospodinov's long-awaited novel constructs a labyrinth of stories about his family, jumping from era to era and viewpoint to viewpoint, exploring the mind-set and trappings of Eastern Europeans. Shortlisted for prizes around the world, Georgi Gospodinov's thrilling new novel will appeal to fans of Dave Eggers, Tom McCarthy and Dubravka Ugresic for its unique structure, humanitarian concerns and stunning storytelling.
254.
East of the West : A Country in Stories by Miroslav Penkov EN
Description:
Collects stories inspired by the author's native Bulgaria, including the tales of a grandson who tries to buy Lenin's corpse on eBay for his grandfather and a boy who meets a cousin every five years on the river that divides their village.
255.
The Voices of Marrakesh by Elias Canetti, James Amery Underwood EN
Description:
Marrakesh through the eyes and ears of one of Europe's major writers.
256.
Natural Novel by Georgi Gospodinov EN
Description:
Resembling the complex and fragmented way a fly's eye works, Natural Novel contains a myriad of storylines, reflections, and digressions, including a history of toilets and the graffiti found there, a meditation on the relationship between bees and language, and an attempt to write a book using only verbs. Incredibly funny at times, this novel is driven by the narrator's need to come to terms with his dissolving marriage and his wife's infidelity with their close friend. Gospodinov's first novel is both broad in scope and intensely personal, illustrating the impossibility of presenting life tr... continue
257.
Border : A Journey to the Edge of Europe by Kapka Kassabova EN
Description:
Kapka Kassabova returns to Bulgaria, from where she emigrated as a girl twenty-five years previously, to explore the border it shares with Turkey and Greece. When she was a child, the border zone was rumored to be an easier crossing point into the West than the Berlin Wall, and it swarmed with soldiers and spies
258.
Stork Mountain : A Novel by Miroslav Penkov EN
Description:
"A young Bulgarian immigrant returns to the country of his birth in search of his grandfather, who suddenly and unexpectedly cut all contact with the family three years ago. The trail leads him to a village on the border with Turkey, a stone's throw away from Greece, high up in the Strandja Mountains--a place of pagan mysteries and black storks nesting in giant oaks; a place where every spring, possessed by Christian saints, men and women dance barefoot across live coals in search of rebirth. Here in the mountains, he gets drawn by his grandfather into a maze of half-truths"--Amazon.com.
259.
The Collector of Worlds by Ilija Trojanow EN
Description:
A stunning fictionalized account of the infamous life of british colonial officer and translator sir richard francis burton A nineteenth-century British colonial officer with a rare ability to assim-ilate into indigenous cultures, Sir Richard Francis Burton was an obses-sive traveler whose journeys took him from England to British India, Arabia, and on a quest for the source of the Nile River in Africa. He learned more than twenty languages, translated The Arabian Nights and the Kama Sutra, and took part in the pilgrimage to Mecca, in addition to writing several travel books. This elegant nove... continue
260.
Time Shelter : A Novel by Georgi Gospodinov EN
Description:
An award-winning international sensation—with a second-act dystopian twist—Time Shelter is a tour de force set in a world clamoring for the past before it forgets. “At one point they tried to calculate when time began, when exactly the earth had been created,” begins Time Shelter’s enigmatic narrator, who will go unnamed. “In the mid–seventeenth century, the Irish bishop Ussher calculated not only the exact year, but also a starting date: October 22, 4,004 years before Christ.” But for our narrator, time as he knows it begins when he meets Gaustine, a “vagrant in time” who has distanced his li... continue