Read Around Europe Challenge
Read at least one book by an author from each country in Europe.
Best books from Europe (2878)
1721.
PolandDescription:
During the Holocaust years, many Jews struggled alone or with others against the terrors of the Nazis, risking their lives against overwhelming odds for the slimmest chance of survival. In Defiance, Nechama Tec offers a riveting history of one such group, a forest community in western Belorussia that would number more than 1,200 Jews by 1944 - including the elderly, women, and children. Tec recounts the astonishing details of how this Jewish partisan unit - hungry, exposed to the harsh winter weather, always on the lookout for German patrols - took on the duel role of fighters and rescuers. Fo... continue
1722.
The Pianist by Władysław Szpilman PL
Description:
The bestselling memoir of a Jewish pianist who survived the war in Warsaw against all odds. 'We are drawn in to share his surprise and then disbelief at the horrifying progress of events, all conveyed with an understated intimacy and dailiness that render them painfully close... riveting' OBSERVER On September 23, 1939, Wladyslaw Szpilman played Chopin's Nocturne in C-sharp minor live on the radio as shells exploded outside - so loudly that he couldn't hear his piano. It was the last live music broadcast from Warsaw: That day, a German bomb hit the station, and Polish Radio went off the air. T... continue
1723.
Description:
Kassandra, die äSeherinä, ist die schillerndste Frauenfigur der griechischen Mythologie. Sie sagte dem übermächtigen Troja den Untergang voraus und musste ihre Prophezeiung mit dem Leben bezahlen.
1725.
White Shroud by Antanas Škėma EN
Description:
Considered by many to be Lithuania's most important work of modernist fiction, this novel tells the story of Antanas Garsva, an emigre poet working as an elevator operator in a large New York hotel in the 1950s.
1726.
The Invincible by Stanislaw Lem EN
Description:
A space cruiser, in search of its sister ship, encounters beings descended from self-replicating machines. In the grand tradition of H. G. Wells and Jules Verne, Stanisław Lem's The Invincible tells the story of a space cruiser sent to an obscure planet to determine the fate of a sister spaceship whose communication with Earth has abruptly ceased. Landing on the planet Regis III, navigator Rohan and his crew discover a form of life that has apparently evolved from autonomous, self-replicating machines—perhaps the survivors of a “robot war.” Rohan and his men are forced to confront the classic ... continue
1727.
Description:
Boleslaw Prus is often compared to Chekhov, and Prus’s masterpiece might be described as an intimate epic, a beautifully detailed, utterly absorbing exploration of life in late-nineteenth-century Warsaw, which is also a prophetic reckoning with some of the social forces—imperialism, nationalism, anti-Semitism among them—that would soon convulse Europe as never before. But The Doll is above all a brilliant novel of character, dramatizing conflicting ideas through the various convictions, ambitions, confusions, and frustrations of an extensive and varied cast. At the center of the book are three... continue
1728.
The Empusium: A Health Resort Horror Story by Olga Tokarczuk EN
Description:
AN INSTANT NATIONAL BESTSELLER! “A folk horror story with a deceptively light and knowing tone … elegant and genuinely unsettling.” –The New York Times Book Review The Nobel Prize winner’s latest masterwork, set in a sanitarium on the eve of World War I, probes the horrors that lie beneath our most hallowed ideas September 1913. A young Pole suffering from tuberculosis arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen in the village of Görbersdorf, a health resort in the Silesian mountains. Every evening the residents gather to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur and debate the great iss... continue
1730.
Politiek zonder partijen by Alicja Gescinska NL
Description:
Zijn politieke partijen de oplossing, of eerder een oorzaak van het democratisch deficit en de vele problemen van het politieke theater? De Franse filosofe Simone Weil pleitte in een visionair, postuum gepubliceerd essay voor een radicale afschaffing van alle politieke partijen. Het is een messcherpe analyse, geschreven na het Europese democratische debacle aan de vooravond van de Tweede Wereldoorlog, waarin ze het vaak gewetenloze cynisme van het partijensysteem aanklaagt. Weil gaat op zoek naar alternatieven en een andere manier van politiek voeren.00Filosofe Alicja Gescinska pleitte in vers... continue