If your goal this summer is to read more widely, you're in the right place! In honor of the international spirit of the World Cup tournament, here's a book from each country represented in the top 16 teams of the 2018 World Cup. Whichever soccer team you're rooting for, all of these books are winners.
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The linden tree
by César Aira Argentina In The Linden Tree, the narrator, who could be Aira himself (born the same year, in the same place, a writer who is now also living in Buenos Aires) writes down his childhood memories. |
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Tintin in America
by Hergé Belgium The boy hero comes to the United States and triumphs over gangsters in Chicago of the 1930's and the pitfalls of the wild West. |
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Aleph
by Paulo Coelho Brazil A U.S. release of an internationally best-selling title by the author of The Alchemist follows Paulo's world-spanning effort to achieve spiritual renewal and human connection, a journey during which he reconnects with a woman from an earlier life while transcending time and space. |
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Love in the time of cholera
by Gabriel García Márquez Colombia Set on the Caribbean coast of South America, this love story brings together Fermina Daza, her distinguished husband, and a man who has secretly loved her for more than fifty years. |
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Girl at war : a novel
by Sara Novi Croatia When her happy life in 1991 Croatia is shattered by civil war, 10-year-old Ana Juric is embroiled in a world of guerilla warfare and child soldiers before making a daring escape to America, where years later she struggles to hide her past. |
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Fairy tales from Hans Christian Andersen
by Hans Christian Andersen Denmark A collection of fairy tales by the well-known and beloved writer features such popular tales as "The Emperor's New Clothes," "The Little Mermaid," and "Thumbelina," as well as paintings by turn-of-the-century artists. |
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Swing time
by Zadie Smith England Two dark-skinned dancers with very different talents share a complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in early adulthood in a story that transitions from northwest London to West Africa. By the award-winning author of On Beauty. |
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Blue is the warmest color
by Julie Maroh France Blue is the Warmest Color is a graphic novel about growing up, falling in love, and coming out. Clementine, a high school student, has an average life: she has friends, family, and the romantic attention of the boys in her school. When her openly gay best friend takes her out on the town, she wanders into a lesbian bar where she encounters Emma: a punkish, confident girl with blue hair. Their attraction is instant and electric, and Clementine finds herself in a relationship that will test her friends, parents, and her own ideas about herself and her identity. |
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1Q84
by Haruki Murakami Japan The internationally best-selling and award-winning author of such works as What I Talk About When I Talk About Running presents a psychologically charged tale that draws on Orwellian themes. |
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Signs preceding the end of the world
by Yuri Herrera Mexico Yuri Herrera does not simply write about the border between Mexico and the United States and those who cross it. He explores the crossings and translations people make in their minds and language as they move from one country to another, especially when there's no going back. Traversing this lonely territory is Makina, a young woman who knows only too well how to survive in a violent, macho world. Leaving behind her life in Mexico to search for her brother, she is smuggled into the US carrying a pair of secret messages--one from her mother and one from the Mexican underworld. |
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Blindness
by José Saramago Portugal In a provocative parable of loss, disorientation, and weakness, a city is hit by an epidemic of "white blindness" whose victims are confined to a vacant mental hospital, while a single eyewitness to the nightmare guides seven oddly assorted strangers through the barren urban landscape. |
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The brothers Karamazov
by Fyodor Dostoyevsky Russia The Brothers Karamazov, Dostoevsky's last and greatest novel, published just before his death in 1881, chronicles the bitter love-hate struggle between the outsized Fyodor Karamazov and his three very different sons. It is above all the story of a murder, told with hair-raising intellectual clarity and a feeling for the human condition unsurpassed in world literature. |
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An ambitious tale of feminine friendship, madness, a radically changing city, and the vulnerability that makes us divulge our most shameful secrets. It begins as Elisa transcribes the chaotic testimony of her roommate Susana, acting as part-therapist, part-confessor as Susana reveals the gripping account of her strange sexual urges and the one man who can satisfy them. But is Susana telling the truth? And what to make of the story that follows, where Elisa considers her own life failures, blending her literary ambitions with her deep need for catharsis? |
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Pippi Longstocking
by Astrid Ericsson Lindgren Sweden Escapades of a lucky little girl who lives with a horse and a monkey--but without any parents--at the edge of a Swedish village. |
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Steppenwolf : a novel
by Hermann Hesse Switzerland With its blend of Eastern mysticism and Western culture, Hesse's best-known and most autobiographical work is one of literature's most poetic evocations of the soul's journey to liberation. Harry Haller is a sad and lonely figure, a reclusive intellectual for whom life holds no joy. He struggles to reconcile the wild primeval wolf and the rational man within himself without surrendering to the bourgeois values he despises. His life changes dramatically when he meets a woman who is his opposite, the carefree and elusive Hermine. |
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Soccer in sun and shadow
by Eduardo Galeano Uruguay In this witty and rebellious history of world soccer, award-winning writer Eduardo Galeano searches for the styles of play, players, and goals that express the unique personality of certain times and places. In Soccer in Sun and Shadow, Galeano takes us to ancient China, where engravings from the Ming period show a ball that could have been designed by Adidas to Victorian England, where gentlemen codified the rules that we still play by today and to Latin America, where the "crazy English" spread the game only to find it creolized by the locals. |