By Alex, founder of Highstreett
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Around the world in 20 books: one novel from each of 20 countries, in reading order
Twenty books, twenty countries, read as a journey east from France and round to Chile. Each is by a writer from the country, or one who grew up there, and every one came back from one of five Highstreett book searches run for this page; we added none of our own. Save it as a reading project and work through it in order, or dip in. Last verified 16 October 2026.
Edition and source checks: 16 October 2026.
What Highstreett returned for “around the world in books: one great novel from each country in Africa and the Middle East, written by an author from that country, such as Nigeria, Kenya, Senegal, Egypt, South Africa, Iran or Lebanon; translated fiction welcome”
- Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2006)
- The Map of Love, Ahdaf Soueif (1999)
- So Long a Letter, Mariama Bâ (2024)
- The Pickup, Nadine Gordimer (2001)
- The Yacoubian Building, Alaa Al Aswany (2004)
- The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street, Naguib Mahfouz (1993)
See this result · Run 16 October 2026. One request, without re-prompting.
Editor’s verdict: Five searches, one per region, built this project. Between them they returned 27 different books from 20 countries, and one book from each country is on the page. Each search's own result is shown unedited below with what it got right and wrong. Six real, correctly credited novels, but only four countries: three of the six are Egyptian, and it found nothing from Kenya, Iran or Lebanon, though they were named. It dates So Long a Letter to 2024, the year of the current British reissue; the novel is from 1979. Four of its six are on this page.
How this list was made: it starts from the Highstreett book search results above, run 16 October 2026 and shown as they came back. Alex, founder of Highstreett, chose the final list.
The route runs from Europe through Turkey, Egypt and West Africa to South Africa, then across India, China and Japan to Australia, and from Canada down through the Americas to Chile. Most of the books were written in a language other than English; each entry names its translator.
This page was built from five searches on 16 October 2026, each asking for one novel per country from a different part of the world. Between them they returned 27 different books from 20 countries, and this project takes one book from each country.
Europe
Five countries, from postwar France to revolutionary Russia.
1. The Years, Annie Ernaux (2008)
France · memoir written as a novel · translated from French by Alison L. Strayer · short
A history of French society from just after the Second World War to the early 2000s, told through one woman's life, with Ernaux writing about herself in the third person. Differs: not quite a novel; a collective memoir made of photographs, songs and remembered phrases.
Edition source: Fitzcarraldo Editions paperback, 2022; listed at Blackwell's on 16 October 2026. ISBN 9781804270523.
2. The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1958)
Italy · translated from Italian by Archibald Colquhoun · medium
Sicily from May 1860, as Garibaldi lands and the old order begins to give way, seen through the aristocratic Salina family. Differs: slow and elegiac; it was published after its author's death.
Edition source: Vintage Classics paperback; listed at Foyles on 16 October 2026. ISBN 9780099512158.
3. Buddenbrooks, Thomas Mann (1901)
Germany · translated from German by H. T. Lowe-Porter · very long
Four generations of a grain-merchant family in a Hanseatic city modelled on Lübeck, from 1835 to 1877, rising and then falling. Differs: long, and this translation is an older one; a new Penguin translation by John E. Woods is due in the UK in 2027.
Edition source: Vintage Classics paperback, 864 pages, £14.99; listed at Foyles on 16 October 2026. ISBN 9780749386474.
4. The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera (1979)
Czech Republic · translated from French by Aaron Asher · medium
A novel in seven parts set in Czechoslovakia, about forgetting in history, politics and private life. Differs: playful and fragmentary rather than a single story; Kundera wrote it in Czech, but it was first published in French.
Edition source: Faber paperback, £9.99; listed at Waterstones on 16 October 2026. ISBN 9780571174379.
5. Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak (1957)
Russia · translated from Russian by Richard Pevear and Larissa Volokhonsky · long
Yuri Zhivago, a doctor and poet, lives through the Russian Revolution and the civil war, and his love for Lara shapes his life. Differs: long, and first published in Italy rather than in the Soviet Union.
Edition source: Vintage Classics paperback, 544 pages; listed by Penguin on 16 October 2026. ISBN 9780099541240.
Turkey, the Middle East and Africa
From Istanbul and Cairo to Dakar, Nigeria and South Africa.
6. The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk (2008)
Turkey · translated from Turkish by Maureen Freely · very long
An Istanbul businessman's obsessive love for a poorer distant relative, set against the city between 1975 and 1984. Differs: long and deliberately obsessive, told by the lover himself.
Edition source: Faber paperback, 2010. ISBN 9780571237029.
7. The Yacoubian Building, Alaa Al Aswany (2002)
Egypt · translated from Arabic by Humphrey Davies · short
The residents of one downtown Cairo apartment block around 1990, used to take apart Egyptian society after the 1952 revolution. Differs: a panorama of many characters rather than one story.
Edition source: Fourth Estate paperback, 256 pages, £9.99; listed at Waterstones on 16 October 2026. ISBN 9780007243624.
8. So Long a Letter, Mariama Bâ (1979)
Senegal · translated from French by Modupé Bodé-Thomas · very short
Ramatoulaye, newly widowed in Senegal, writes to her friend Aissatou about her husband's death and the second marriage he made before it. Differs: a short novel in letters, and the shortest book here.
Edition source: Bloomsbury paperback, 2023, 144 pages, £12.99; listed at Waterstones on 16 October 2026. ISBN 9781803289120.
9. Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2006)
Nigeria · written in English · long
Nigeria in the 1960s, where a houseboy, a professor and a young woman have their lives overturned by the civil war. Differs: a war novel as well as a family one, and harrowing in places.
Edition source: Fourth Estate paperback; listed at Foyles on 16 October 2026. ISBN 9780007200283.
10. The Pickup, Nadine Gordimer (2001)
South Africa · written in English · medium
A white South African woman falls for an undocumented Arab immigrant and, when his visa is refused, goes with him to his homeland. Differs: only the first half is set in South Africa, and we could not confirm that this edition is still in print.
Edition source: Bloomsbury paperback, 2002; listed at Blackwell's on 16 October 2026. ISBN 9780747557951.
Asia
India, China and Japan.
11. The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga (2008)
India · written in English · medium
Balram Halwai, the son of a village rickshaw-puller, tells in letters to the Chinese premier how he became a driver for a rich family and then an entrepreneur in Bangalore. Differs: darkly comic and angry; it won the Booker Prize in 2008.
Edition source: Atlantic Books paperback, 336 pages, £9.99; listed at Foyles on 16 October 2026. ISBN 9781848878082.
12. The Story of the Stone, Volume I: The Golden Days, Cao Xueqin (1791)
China · translated from Chinese by David Hawkes · first of five volumes
The decline of a great aristocratic family in the Qing-era capital, told around its young heir, Jia Baoyu. It was written in the eighteenth century and first printed in 1791. Differs: five volumes in all; this project counts the first.
Edition source: Penguin Classics paperback, 544 pages, £14.99; listed by Penguin on 16 October 2026. ISBN 9780140442939.
13. The Makioka Sisters, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki (1948)
Japan · translated from Japanese by Edward G. Seidensticker · long
A declining Osaka family between 1936 and 1941 tries to find a husband for the third of four sisters, Yukiko, as war approaches. Differs: quiet and leisurely, and long; it first appeared in instalments from 1943.
Edition source: Vintage Classics paperback, 2019. ISBN 9781784875435.
Australia and the Americas
Sydney, then from Canada down to Chile.
14. The Harp in the South, Ruth Park (1948)
Australia · written in English · short
A Catholic Irish-Australian family in Surry Hills, then an inner-Sydney slum. Differs: the first of a trilogy, and Park was born in New Zealand; we found it new only in an Australian edition.
Edition source: Penguin Australia paperback, 240 pages; no UK stockist found on 16 October 2026. ISBN 9780143202752.
15. The Back of the Turtle, Thomas King (2014)
Canada · written in English · long
An Indigenous scientist returns to the reserve in British Columbia that a defoliant he helped develop has devastated. Differs: it won Canada's Governor General's Award in 2014, but it is hard to find new in the UK.
Edition source: HarperCollins Canada paperback, 2017; no UK bookshop listing found on 16 October 2026. ISBN 9781443431637.
16. Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo (1955)
Mexico · translated from Spanish by Douglas J. Weatherford · very short
Juan Preciado travels to the ghost town of Comala to find his father and finds it full of the voices of the dead. Differs: very short, fragmentary and strange; this edition has an introduction by Gabriel García Márquez.
Edition source: Serpent's Tail paperback, 2023, 144 pages, £9.99; listed at Foyles on 16 October 2026. ISBN 9781800812871.
17. The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Díaz (2007)
Dominican Republic · written in English and Spanish · medium
Oscar de León, a lonely boy in New Jersey, and his family, pursued by a curse rooted in the Trujillo dictatorship in the Dominican Republic. Differs: much of it is set in the United States; Díaz was born in Santo Domingo. It won the Pulitzer Prize in 2008.
Edition source: Faber paperback, £9.99; listed at Waterstones on 16 October 2026. ISBN 9780571239733.
18. One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez (1967)
Colombia · translated from Spanish by Gregory Rabassa · long
Seven generations of the Buendía family in Macondo, an invented town that stands for much of Colombia and Latin America. Differs: the most famous book here, and the one most readers will have been given before.
Edition source: Penguin Modern Classics paperback, £10.99; listed at Waterstones on 16 October 2026. ISBN 9780141184999.
19. The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector (1964)
Brazil · translated from Portuguese by Idra Novey · short
A wealthy woman in a Rio de Janeiro penthouse recalls the crisis that began when she crushed a cockroach in a wardrobe door. Differs: an interior monologue with almost no plot; Lispector was born in Ukraine and grew up in Brazil.
Edition source: Penguin Modern Classics paperback, 208 pages; listed by Penguin on 16 October 2026. ISBN 9780141197357.
20. The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende (1982)
Chile · translated from Spanish by Magda Bogin · long
Four generations of the Trueba family carry Chile's upheavals from the 1910s to the 1970s. Differs: the closest book here to One Hundred Years of Solitude in style.
Edition source: Vintage Classics paperback; listed at Blackwell's on 16 October 2026. ISBN 9780099528562.
The editions behind these choices
The ISBN beside each book is a current paperback, and the source link is the page we read on 16 October 2026: Foyles, Waterstones, Blackwell's or the publisher. Several bookshop pages turn away automated readers, so some availability comes from their listings rather than their stock pages. Years are the original publication in the original language, not the date of the translation; the searches gave several English-edition dates instead, which the verdicts below correct.
The honest bit
The five searches did not cover the world evenly, and this list shows it. Nothing came back from Iran, Lebanon, Israel, the Nordic countries, Poland, Portugal, Ireland, Argentina, Kenya, Vietnam or South Korea, although every one of those was named in a search, and New Zealand's two novels were held back. So the list leans to Europe and the Americas, and to books already well known in English.
A few picks stretch the rule a little, and we say so in each entry: The Pickup and Oscar Wao are partly set outside their countries, Ruth Park and Clarice Lispector were born elsewhere, and The Story of the Stone is the first of five volumes. Two are hard to buy new in the UK: The Harp in the South and The Back of the Turtle. The books the searches returned but this project leaves out were second choices from countries already covered: Mahfouz's Cairo Trilogy, Ahdaf Soueif's The Map of Love, Shusaku Endo's The Sea and Poison, Vikram Seth's A Suitable Boy, Dostoevsky's The House of the Dead and Roberto Bolaño's The Insufferable Gaucho, plus W. G. Sebald's The Emigrants, which the last search itself said did not fit.
Questions
What books should I read to travel the world?
This project's twenty, one per country: from Annie Ernaux's The Years in France to Isabel Allende's The House of the Spirits in Chile, by way of Egypt, Senegal, Nigeria, India, China, Japan, Australia, Mexico, Colombia and Brazil.
How long would it take to read all twenty?
They range from about 140 pages (So Long a Letter, Pedro Páramo) to more than 800 (Buddenbrooks). At one book a fortnight it is a project of about ten months.
Are these books translated?
Fourteen of the twenty were written in another language, and each entry names the translator of the UK edition given. Six were written in English: Half of a Yellow Sun, The Pickup, The White Tiger, The Harp in the South, The Back of the Turtle and Oscar Wao, which mixes in Spanish.
Highstreett's book search found real, correctly credited books for every country it reached, but it did not reach every country it was asked for, and it gave the wrong year for several books. Ask it for a novel from one country you want to visit next, and it will look for you.
Ask for a book from the next country
Best translated fiction books 2026: for this year's new translations, which these older searches do not reach.
How this list was made: the searches
Every Highstreett book search this page was built from, with every book each one returned, exactly as it came back.
Search 1: “around the world in books: one great novel from each country in Africa and the Middle East, written by an author from that country, such as Nigeria, Kenya, Senegal, Egypt, South Africa, Iran or Lebanon; translated fiction welcome”
Run 16 October 2026 at 11:21 BST · See this result
- Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2006)
- The Map of Love, Ahdaf Soueif (1999)
- So Long a Letter, Mariama Bâ (2024)
- The Pickup, Nadine Gordimer (2001)
- The Yacoubian Building, Alaa Al Aswany (2004)
- The Cairo Trilogy: Palace Walk, Palace of Desire, Sugar Street, Naguib Mahfouz (1993)
Editor’s verdict: Six real, correctly credited novels, but only four countries: three of the six are Egyptian, and it found nothing from Kenya, Iran or Lebanon, though they were named. It dates So Long a Letter to 2024, the year of the current British reissue; the novel is from 1979. Four of its six are on this page.
Search 2: “around the world in books: one great novel from each of six different Asian countries, each by an author from that country, for example Japan, India, China, South Korea, Vietnam, Turkey and Pakistan; translated fiction welcome”
Run 16 October 2026 at 11:22 BST · See this result
- The Makioka Sisters, Jun'ichirō Tanizaki
- The White Tiger, Aravind Adiga (2008)
- The Sea and Poison, Shusaku Endo (1972)
- The Story of the Stone, Cao Xueqin (1973)
- The Museum of Innocence, Orhan Pamuk (2009)
- A Suitable Boy, Vikram Seth (1993)
Editor’s verdict: Four countries from six books, two each from Japan and India; it held back novels from South Korea and Vietnam when choosing its final six. It gives The Story of the Stone as 1973, the year of its first English volume; the Chinese novel dates from the eighteenth century. Four of its six are on this page.
Search 3: “around the world in books: one great novel from each of six different European countries, each by an author from that country, for example Italy, Russia, Poland, Norway, Portugal, Greece and Ireland; translated fiction welcome, not British or French”
Run 16 October 2026 at 11:23 BST · See this result
- The Leopard, Giuseppe Tomasi di Lampedusa (1960)
- Doctor Zhivago, Boris Pasternak (1957)
- The Buddenbrooks: The Decline of a Family, Thomas Mann (1930)
- The House of the Dead, Fyodor Dostoevsky (1923)
- The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera (1979)
- The Years, Annie Ernaux (2001)
Editor’s verdict: Five countries, two books from Russia, and one rule broken: it returned Annie Ernaux after being told not to pick French authors, and its own description of the book says it does not fit. It dates Buddenbrooks to 1930 (it is from 1901) and The Years to 2001 (it is from 2008). Four of its six are on this page, The Years among them, because a later search returned it again and no other French book came back.
Search 4: “around the world in books: one great novel from each of six different countries in the Americas and Oceania, each by an author from that country, for example Mexico, Colombia, Brazil, Argentina, Chile, Canada, Australia and New Zealand; translated fiction welcome”
Run 16 October 2026 at 12:16 BST · See this result
- One Hundred Years of Solitude, Gabriel García Márquez (1971)
- The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende (1982)
- The Back of the Turtle, Thomas King (2014)
- The Harp in the South, Ruth Park (1948)
- The Insufferable Gaucho, Roberto Bolaño (2003)
- The Brief Wondrous Life of Oscar Wao, Junot Diaz (2007)
Editor’s verdict: The best of the five searches for spread: five countries from six books, with two from Chile. It dates One Hundred Years of Solitude to 1971; the Spanish original is from 1967. It held back New Zealand's The Bone People and Potiki. Five of its six are on this page.
Search 5: “around the world in books: one great novel from each of six countries, each by an author from that country, chosen only from Mexico, Brazil, Argentina, Iran, Lebanon, Israel, Norway, Sweden, Poland, Portugal, Ireland and New Zealand; translated fiction welcome”
Run 16 October 2026 at 12:18 BST · See this result
- The House of the Spirits, Isabel Allende (1982)
- The Passion According to G.H., Clarice Lispector (1964)
- The Emigrants, W. G. Sebald (1992)
- Pedro Páramo, Juan Rulfo (1955)
- The Years, Annie Ernaux (2001)
- The Book of Laughter and Forgetting, Milan Kundera (1979)
Editor’s verdict: The weakest search: only two of its six, from Brazil and Mexico, met the brief. It repeated two books from earlier searches and returned W. G. Sebald and Annie Ernaux while its own descriptions said they did not fit the list of countries. Three of its six are on this page.
How the comparison was bounded
We did not compare this list with other round-the-world reading lists. The twenty come only from the five Highstreett searches shown below; the page makes no claim about how often these books appear elsewhere.