Author: Oliver Sacks
Date: 2007
Genre: Neurology, Psychology
Country: USA
It explores a range of psychological and physiological ailments and their connections to music. It is divided into four parts, each with a distinctive theme: Haunted by Music examines mysterious onsets of musicality and musicophilia (and musicophobia); A Range of Musicality looks at musical oddities musical synesthesia; parts three and four are entitled Memory, Movement, and Music and Emotion, Identity, and Music.
Author: various
Date: 2001
Genre: Poetry
Country: various
Nearly 1,000 poems with commentary on the lives and works of poets dating from the 10th century to the present.
Author: Milan Kundera
Date: 2000
Genre:
Country: Czech Republic
Czech expatriate Irena has been living in France since fleeing Czechoslovakia after the 1968 Warsaw Pact invasion. In 1989, when the Velvet Revolution overthrows the governing Communist Party of Czechoslovakia, Irena decides to return to her home after twenty years of living as an exiled immigrant. During the trip she meets, by chance, Josef, a fellow émigré who was briefly her lover in Prague.
Author: Michael Chabon
Date: 2000
Genre: Historical Fiction
Country: USA
A historical fiction novel, it follows the lives of two Jewish cousins, Josef “Joe” Kavalier, a Czech artist and magician who escapes Nazi-occupied Prague, and Sammy Clay, a Brooklyn-born writer. Together, they create The Escapist, a fictional superhero inspired by Joe’s desire to fight fascism and his struggle to rescue his family from Europe. In the story, Kavalier and Clay become major figures in the comics industry during its Golden Age.
Author: Salmon Rushdie
Date: 2001
Genre:
Country: UK
Rushdie depicts contemporary New York City as the epicenter of globalization and all of its tragic flaws.
Author: Philip Roth
Date: 2000
Genre:
Country: USA
The Human Stain is a novel that explores the life of Coleman Silk, a classics professor in a small New England town who is forced to retire after accusations of racism. The story delves into Silk’s personal history, revealing that he is a light-skinned African American who has been passing as a Jewish man for most of his adult life. His affair with a much younger, illiterate janitor further scandalizes the community. The novel examines themes of identity, race, and the destructive power of public shaming.
Author: Roberto Bolaño
Date: 2004
Genre: Postmodern, Surrealism, Metafiction
Country: Spain
The novel is a sprawling, ambitious work that spans continents and time periods, centering around an elusive, reclusive German author. It intertwines five different narratives: a group of European academics searching for the author, a professor in Mexico dealing with his own personal crises, a New York reporter sent to cover a boxing match in Mexico, an African-American journalist in Detroit, and the horrifying and unsolved murders of hundreds of women in a Mexican border town. The narratives are linked by themes of violence, mystery, and the search for meaning in a chaotic world.
Author: Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie
Date: 2006
Genre: Bildungsroman
Country: UK
Set in Nigeria in the 1960s, the story follows Ugwu, a teenage houseboy who has moved from his village to work in a university town; his master Odenigbo, a mathematics professor with revolutionary views; and Olanna, with whom Odenigbo is in love, the beautiful daughter of a wealthy Nigerian man. When the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970) breaks out, their lives are thrown into anarchy.
Author: Hilary Mantel
Date: 2009
Genre: Historical Novel
Country: UK
England in the 1520s is a heartbeat from disaster. If the king dies without a male heir, the country could be destroyed by civil war. Henry VIII wants to annul his marriage of twenty years and marry Anne Boleyn. The pope and most of Europe opposes him. Into this impasse steps Thomas Cromwell: a wholly original man, a charmer and a bully, both idealist and opportunist, astute in reading people, and implacable in his ambition. But Henry is volatile: one day tender, one day murderous. Cromwell helps him break the opposition, but what will be the price of his triumph?
Author: Azar Nafisi
Date: 2003
Genre: Memoir
Country: USA
Every Thursday morning for two years in the Islamic Republic of Iran, a bold and inspired teacher named Azar Nafisi secretly gathered seven of her most committed female students to read forbidden Western classics. As Islamic morality squads staged arbitrary raids in Tehran, fundamentalists seized hold of the universities, and a blind censor stifled artistic expression, the girls in Azar Nafisi’s living room risked removing their veils and immersed themselves in the worlds of Jane Austen, F. Scott Fitzgerald, Henry James, and Vladimir Nabokov. In this extraordinary memoir, their stories become intertwined with the ones they are reading. Reading Lolita in Tehran is a remarkable exploration of resilience in the face of tyranny and a celebration of the liberating power of literature.
Author: Geraldine Brooks
Date: 2001
Genre: Historical Fiction
Country: UK
The novel is written in the point of view of a housemaid named Anna Frith, on what she lives through when the plague hits her village. It is based on the history of the small Derbyshire village of Eyam that, when beset by the plague in 1666, quarantines itself in order to prevent the disease from spreading further. The plague that hit Eyam and other parts of Britain in 1665 and ’66 was one of many recurrences that had taken place since the Black Death of the 14th century.
Author: Mark Z. Danielewski
Date: 2000
Genre: Horror, Metafiction, Postmodern
Country: USA
The novel is written as a work of epistolary fiction and metafiction focusing on a fictional documentary film titled The Navidson Record, presented as a story within a story discussed in a handwritten monograph recovered by the primary narrator, Johnny Truant. The narrative makes heavy use of multiperspectivity as Truant’s footnotes chronicle his efforts to transcribe the manuscript, which itself reveals The Navidson Record‘s supposed narrative through transcriptions and analysis depicting a story of a family who discovers a larger-on-the-inside labyrinth in their house.
Author: Jhumpa Lahiri
Date: 2003
Genre: Magical Realism
Country: USA
In The Namesake, Lahiri enriches the themes that made her collection an international bestseller: the immigrant experience, the clash of cultures, the conflicts of assimilation, and, most poignantly, the tangled ties between generations. Here again Lahiri displays her deft touch for the perfect detail — the fleeting moment, the turn of phrase — that opens whole worlds of emotion.
The Namesake takes the Ganguli family from their tradition-bound life in Calcutta through their fraught transformation into Americans. On the heels of their arranged wedding, Ashoke and Ashima Ganguli settle together in Cambridge, Massachusetts. An engineer by training, Ashoke adapts far less warily than his wife, who resists all things American and pines for her family. When their son is born, the task of naming him betrays the vexed results of bringing old ways to the new world. Named for a Russian writer by his Indian parents in memory of a catastrophe years before, Gogol Ganguli knows only that he suffers the burden of his heritage as well as his odd, antic name.
Lahiri brings great empathy to Gogol as he stumbles along the first-generation path, strewn with conflicting loyalties, comic detours, and wrenching love affairs. With penetrating insight, she reveals not only the defining power of the names and expectations bestowed upon us by our parents, but also the means by which we slowly, sometimes painfully, come to define ourselves.
Author: Haruki Murakami
Date: 2002
Genre: Magical Realism
Country: USA
The book tells the stories of the young Kafka Tamura, a bookish 15-year-old boy who runs away from his Oedipal curse, and Satoru Nakata, an old, mentally disabled man with the uncanny ability to talk to cats. The book incorporates themes of music as a communicative conduit, metaphysics, dreams, fate, and the subconscious.
Author: Susanna Clarke
Date: 2004
Genre: Alternative History
Country: UK
It is an alternative history set in 19th-century England around the time of the Napoleonic Wars. Its premise is that magic once existed in England and has returned with two men: Gilbert Norrell and Jonathan Strange. Centred on the relationship between these two men, the novel investigates the nature of “Englishness” and the boundaries between reason and unreason, Anglo-Saxon and Anglo-Dane, and Northern and Southern English cultural tropes. It has been described as a fantasy novel, an alternative history, and a historical novel.
Author: David Mitchell
Date: 2004
Genre: Historical Fiction, Metafiction, Science Fiction
Country: UK
The book combines metafiction, historical fiction, contemporary fiction and science fiction, with interconnected nested stories in different writing styles that take the reader from the remote South Pacific in the 19th century to the island of Hawaii in a distant post-apocalyptic future. Its title references a piece of music by Toshi Ichiyanagi.
The book consists of six nested stories; each is read or observed by the protagonist of the next, progressing in time through the central sixth story. The first five stories are each interrupted at a pivotal moment. After the sixth story, the others are resolved in reverse chronological order.
Author: Jeannette Walls
Date: 2005
Genre: Memoir
Country: USA
Walls recounts her dysfunctional and nomadic yet vibrant upbringing, emphasizing her resilience and her father’s attempts toward redemption. Despite her family’s flaws, their love for each other and her unique perspective on life allowed her to create a successful life of her own, culminating in a career in journalism in New York City. The book’s title refers to her father’s ultimate unfulfilled promise, to build his dream home for the family: a glass castle.
Author: Jeffrey Eugenides
Date: 2002
Genre: Family Saga, Bildungsroman
Country: USA
The astonishing tale of a gene that passes down through three generations of a Greek-American family and flowers in the body of a teenage girl.
In the spring of 1974, Calliope Stephanides, a student at a girls’ school in Grosse Pointe, finds herself drawn to a chain-smoking, strawberry blond classmate with a gift for acting. The passion that furtively develops between them–along with Callie’s failure to develop–leads Callie to suspect that she is not like other girls. In fact, she is not really a girl at all.
The explanation for this shocking state of affairs takes us out of suburbia- back before the Detroit race riots of 1967, before the rise of the Motor City and Prohibition, to 1922, when the Turks sacked Smyrna and Callie’s grandparents fled for their lives. Back to a tiny village in Asia Minor where two lovers, and one rare genetic mutation, set in motion the metamorphosis that will turn Callie into a being both mythical and perfectly a hermaphrodite.
Spanning eight decades–and one unusually awkward adolescence- Jeffrey Eugenides’s long-awaited second novel is a grand, utterly original fable of crossed bloodlines, the intricacies of gender, and the deep, untidy promptings of desire.
Author: Zadie Smith
Date: 2000
Genre: Postcolonial
Country: UK
Focuses on the later lives of two wartime friends—the Bangladeshi Samad Iqbal and the Englishman Archie Jones—and their families in London. The novel centres on Britain’s relationship with immigrants from the British Commonwealth.
Author: Ian McEwan
Date: 2001
Genre: Metafiction
Country: UK
Set in three time periods, 1935 England, Second World War England and France, and present-day England, it covers an upper-class girl’s half-innocent mistake that ruins lives, her adulthood in the shadow of that mistake, and a reflection on the nature of writing.
Author: W.G. Sebald
Date: 2001
Genre: Historical Novel
Country: Germany
The discursive, dreamlike recollections of Jacques Austerlitz, a man who was once a small refugee of the kindertransport in wartime Prague, raised by strangers in Wales. Like the namesake Paris train station of its protagonist, the book is a marvel of elegant construction, haunted by memory and motion.
Author: Junot Díaz
Date: 2007
Genre:
Country: USA
This novel tells the story of Oscar de Leon, an overweight Dominican boy growing up in New Jersey who is obsessed with science fiction, fantasy novels, and falling in love, but is perpetually unlucky in his romantic endeavors. The narrative not only explores Oscar’s life but also delves into the lives of his family members, each affected by the curse that has plagued their family for generations. The book is a blend of magical realism and historical fiction, providing a detailed account of the brutal Trujillo regime in the Dominican Republic and its impact on the country’s people and diaspora.
Author: Khaled Hosseini
Date: 2003
Genre: Tragedy, Coming of Age, Historical Fiction
Country: USA
In Romeo and Juliet, Shakespeare creates a violent world, in which two young people fall in love. It is not simply that their families disapprove; the Montagues and the Capulets are engaged in a blood feud.