5 Books you need to read from around the world

So you’ve impressed your friends with your knowledge of classic literature, and now you want them to know how (metaphorically) well-traveled you are. But where do you start, when the world is so full of brilliant books?

Here are a few to get you going, taking you from the outskirts of Buenos Aires to streets of Seoul, and even as far as outer space. What’s more, most of these books are under 200 pages, so you can get through them in just a day or two.

Winner of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian is a disquieting tale about Yeong-hye, a woman who experiences a series of bloody dreams of animal slaughter and subsequently gives up eating meat. Told in three parts, The Vegetarian traces the effects of Yeong-hye’s decision on her relationships to those around her as her marriage crumbles, her family loses patience with her and her own mental state deteriorates in her quest to become more plant-like. 

Despite the novel’s name and basic premise, it doesn’t particularly concern itself with the morality of eating meat; Kang identifies the main themes as “questioning human violence and the (im)possibility of innocence; defining sanity and madness; the (im)possibility of understanding others, body as the last refuge or the last determination”. You may be left with more questions than answers at the end, but they will be very interesting questions indeed!

Swedish-Kurdish writer Balsam Karam’s The Singularity opens with a quietly harrowing scene in which a mother wanders through a city filled with refugees searching for her missing daughter, before throwing herself off a cliff. This act is witnessed by a Swedish woman in the city on a business trip, who later loses her own unborn child. 

It is clear from the first pages that this is going to be a poignant read; beautifully-written, the prologue is told in the second person so that you feel as though you yourself are witnessing this terrible and painful scene against an indifferent backdrop of tourists sipping house wine, eating marinated olives and enjoying the ocean view. 

What follows is a lyrical and heartbreaking exploration of war, displacement, loss and trauma. Karam takes an experimental approach to the novel’s form, weaving together different narrative threads, and her writing will haunt you long after you finish the book.

A strange piece of fiction indeed, Argentinian writer Aurora Venturini’s Cousins is darkly comic and daring, both in content and in style. In fact, you may find the sparsely punctuated, almost stream-of-consciousness narrative jarring at first, but it is worth persevering.

Our narrator is Yuna, a young artist observing the colourful cast of women in her family as they deal with abortion, sexual abuse, ableism and murder. She herself navigates disability, exploitative relationships and her desire to become a successful artist in a world that does not seem to take her seriously.

This book is bleak, depressing and even cruel at times—Yuna is not kind about her relatives or herself. But Venturini holds it together with an undercurrent of humour and although you may flinch at it, you will appreciate her grim honesty.

Sorry, even in space you can’t get away from HR. In The Employees (shortlisted for the 2021 International Booker Prize), Olga Ravn invites us aboard the Six-Thousand Ship, home to a mixed crew of humans and humanoids who have discovered strange objects on an alien planet that provoke strange responses. 

The story is told through a series of statements collected from crew members by a committee sent by the corporation that manages the ship. The statements reveal a visceral, at times unnerving emotional response to these new objects among humans and humanoids alike, and the line between the two groups becomes increasingly blurred as they all begin to question what a person can be beyond the work they do.

Infused with existential dread, The Employees is less a book and more a piece of art, inspired by artist Lea Guldditte Hestelund’s exhibition Consumed Future Spewed Up as Present, and Ravn’s own dissatisfaction with her office job. Ravn’s background as a poet is apparent in her haunting and dreamlike meditation on what it means to live a life governed by notions of productivity.

Another story that explores loss and displacement, Zülfü Livaneli’s The Fisherman and His Son follows a Turkish couple who lose their son and then find a baby boy, presumably a refugee, who they take in as their own. Their joy is soon soured, however, when a woman turns up claiming to be his mother.

Told with the air of a fable about it, The Fisherman and His Son blends narrative seamlessly with reflections on political, social and environmental issues as Livaneli deftly explores the hardships faced by refugees—especially powerful when you remember that today there are more than 110 million forcibly displaced people worldwide.