South Korean literature is among the most beloved in the world, and immersing yourself in some fantastic Korean books is sure to enrich your travel experience.

South Korea is one of the most popular countries to visit, move to, and work in right now. A lot of that is down to K-pop and K-dramas, but there is such an amazing wealth of beautiful literature and a long and fascinating history beyond all of that.

Korean Books to Read Before You Visit South Korea

This list of fiction and non-fiction books about Korea is designed to introduce readers to South Korea from a variety of perspectives.

It includes books on Korean history and the Korean war, culture, and literature. Some of the books are written by Korean authors, while others are written by those who have lived in or studied in South Korea.

Let’s jump in.

Korea: A New History of South and North by Victor Cha and Ramon Pacheco Pardo

In one of the newer books about Korean history, authors Victor Cha and Ramon Pacheco Pardo draw on decades of research to explore the complex story of this divided nation. They examine Korea’s unique common history, as well as the sharp differences between North and South that have emerged since the Cold War division.

The book also sheds light on the evolving identities of the two Koreas, and the prospects for unification. It is an essential read for anyone who wants to understand Korea’s past, present, and what possibilities there are in the future.

Buy a copy of Korea: A New History of South and North

Human Acts by Han Kang

Translated by Deborah Smith

Han Kang made waves in the world of literature a few years back when her novel The Vegetarian was awarded the Booker International Prize 2016 (also translated by Deborah Smith). Her book, Human Acts, however, is arguably a more raw and political story.

Human Acts sheds light on the criminally lesser-known political suppression of South Korea that lasted until the Gwangju Uprising of 1980.

From multiple perspectives, including that of the ghost of a boy killed during the uprising, we get to see the turmoil, tears, and bloodshed that led to the vibrant and prosperous nation we have today.

Read More: If you’re looking for Korean short stories then check out the Yeoyu series.

Buy a copy of Human Acts here.

At Dusk by Hwang Sok-yong

Translated by Sora Kim-Russell

One of South Korea’s most prestigious novelists brought us this work in translation recently, in 2018.

It tells two stories: that of a rags-to-riches architect looking back on his life and childhood in a kind of Citizen Kane way, and that of a young woman struggling to forge herself a career in theatre.

At Dusk is a fantastic mirror held up to the disparate classes, artists, and businessmen of Korea today, and it’s a real tear-jerker to boot. Read our review of At Dusk right here.

Buy a copy of At Dusk

Our Korean Kitchen

Written by married couple Jordan Bourke and Jejina Pyo. Bourke is a renowned chef and, working together with his wife and her cultural expertise, they have welded together a fun and engaging cookbook that teaches us all the ins and outs of Korean home cooking.

Our Korean Kitchen is easy to follow and the tantalising pictures are a wonderful motivation, we had great success with the kimchi recipe! Before you head to Korea, it’s good to know what to expect, food-wise.

Maybe even cook some for yourself. You’re certain to fall in love with Korean food, so best to get a head-start. Here are six of the recipes from the book for free.

Buy a copy of Our Korean Kitchen

Read More: 12 Best Korean Cookbooks Available Now

A History of Korea by Kyung Moon Hwang

If you want an introduction to Korean history before you visit South Korea, this is the best book to pick up. A History of Korea concisely covers every major change and event that has led Korea to where it is today. It avoids being dry by favouring brevity and clarity.

Everything you need to know about Korean history can be found and enjoyed here, covering a whopping 1.5 millennia of Korean history (both North and South).

Important themes that define Korean culture are explored with detail and enthusiasm, giving you not only a lesson in Korean history but an insight into Korean social and political behaviour. A really enlightening read and an essential book to read before you visit South Korea.

Buy a copy of History of Korea

The New Koreans by Michael Breen

Written by a man who has spent many years living in and studying the world of South Korea. The New Koreans is a fascinating exploration of the economics, history, and politics of Korea today.

The country is now rich and prosperous. It builds some of the best tech money can buy. And it has the biggest pop music industry. How did it get here? Read this book to find out.

The New Koreans by Michael Breen

Love in the Big City by Sang Young Park

translated by Anton Hur

Love in the Big City is a queer Korean love story. It is a tale of hedonism and friendship; a book about looking at life from all angles: with love and hate and anger and fear in our eyes.

Translated elegantly and beautifully by Anton Hur, Love in the Big City considers how we live our lives when time is ticking, when there is fun to be had and things to be seen; when there are things to fear and people who want to hurt us.

Love in the Big City paints a raw and honest but ultimately kind picture of love and life in the modern day, and for that, it is one of the finest modern Korean novels.

Buy a copy of Love in the Big City

The Korean War by Max Hastings

I don’t know about you but the Korean War was not covered at all when I was in school. Hastings’ book is not an easy read, but it is an essential one for anyone who wants to understand the Korean War and its impact on the world.

His writing is clear and concise, and he does an excellent job of explaining the complex military and political issues that were at stake. We found a traumatic, bloody, and captivating story of civil unrest, political divides, and Western interference.

The Korean War by Max Hastings will teach you everything you need to know about the story of the Korean War. Everyone should know more about what divided the North and South and the lasting legacy of that decision.

Buy a copy of The Korea War

Read More: Here are some useful travel articles to check out before you visit South Korea.

The Court Dancer by Kyung-sook Shin

Translated by Anton Hur

Based on a true story — set in the final years of 19^th century Korea as China, Russia, and Japan are threatening the nation trapped between them — The Court Dancer is being described as a love story first and foremost: the romantic tale of a man and a woman from two different worlds, colliding in a moment of beauty.

This is the tale of a woman born without a family, adopted into the courts of the Joseon Dynasty, romanced by a French diplomat, whisked away across the waves to foreign shores, and all the while trying to find the time to understand who she is, what she is, and what she wants out of a life that has never really been hers.

If you want to understand pre-Korean War history and see what European globalisation looks like from an Eastern perspective, this book will prove illuminating.

Visiting Korea’s beautiful palaces after reading this book is a real treat. Read our review of The Court Dancer right here or learn more about Anton Hur.

Buy a copy of The Court Dancer

Hello, South Korea: Meet the Country Behind Hallyu

In a sea of books about Korean culture, this one is an easily accessible and colourful exploration of the country and culture that has captivated the world. From its rich history and unique customs to its vibrant pop culture and global exports, this book has something to offer everyone.

Go beyond the surface of Hallyu and discover the real Korea. Learn about the country’s long and fascinating history, from its days as the Hermit Kingdom to its modern-day status as a global powerhouse. Meet the people who have shaped the country and its culture, from the incredible haenyeo divers of Jeju Island to the K-pop stars who have taken the world by storm.

Of course, no book about Korea would be complete without a discussion of its food and fashion. From the diverse varieties of kimchi to the popular glass skin beauty trend, you’ll learn all about the culinary and fashion delights that Korea has to offer.

Buy a copy of Hello, South Korea

Read More: Best Korean Snacks and Where to Buy Them

Drifting House by Krys Lee

Written by a woman born in Seoul but raised in the US, this is a gripping and desperately sorrowful collection of short stories which shine a light on the darker side of Korean society over the past hundred years.

Drifting House looks at the salarymen of Seoul, the starving children of North Korea, and the alienated immigrants attempting to settle in the US.

It is Korea and Koreans as viewed from every angle, and a truly wondrous book that teaches us empathy, history, politics, and humanity. An absolute must-read.

Buy a copy of Drifting House

Flowers of Fire by Hawon Jung

Flowers of Fire is a must-read for anyone interested in feminism, gender equality, and the #MeToo movement. Jung, the former Seoul correspondent for the AFP, draws on her on-the-ground reporting and interviews with many women who became activists and leaders to tell the story of the South Korean #MeToo movement.

The book highlights the courage and resilience of South Korean women in the face of threats, defamation lawsuits, and a criminal justice system that often sides with abusers. Jung’s writing is both informative and inspiring, and she does an excellent job of explaining the complex issues at stake.

Flowers of Fire is an essential read for anyone who wants to understand the #MeToo movement in South Korea and its impact on the global conversation about feminism and gender equality.

Buy a copy of Flowers of Fire

Read More: Thinking of taking a trip to Japan or China? Here’s what to read before you go

Japan’s literature and culture are so rich and the best way to learn more is to tuck into a few Japanese novels by some of the best Japanese authors, as well as some fantastic travel and history books. With that said, here are seven books to read before you visit Japan, land of the rising sun.

You think ancient Japan, you picture samurai, geisha, and ninja. You think modern Japan, you picture anime, robots, and neon-lit streets.

More than any other nation, Japan is famous in equal parts for its history and its modern culture. It has done such a good job of both separating and marrying the two together. As such, its tourism grows every single year.

Before you visit Japan, you can also get in the mood with our custom playlist of songs inspired by Japan!

Beautiful Books to Read Before you Visit Japan

We visit Japan from all over to see the Kinkaku-ji of Kyoto, to climb Mt. Fuji, to shop for anime merchandise in Akihabara. But before we do any of this, we should really get a better understanding of what makes Japan special.

What is it that the Japanese value? How does their country work with so much harmony and peace? Why is their art as unique and beautiful as it is?

To help answer these questions, here are the best Japanese books — Japanese novels, history books, and culture guides — to read before you visit Japan.

Pure Invention by Matt Alt

Pure Invention — or, to give the book its full title, How Japan’s Pop Culture Conquered the World — is an essential and captivating history lesson for anyone curious about how such things as anime and manga, video games, karaoke, kawaii culture, and Hello Kitty came to dominate global pop culture.

If you grew up on Japanese anime and video games, if you’ve ever owned a Walkman or a karaoke machine, or if you were ever curious about the economic boom of Japan in the second half of the 20th Century, Pure Invention is for you.

Matt Alt, a Japan-based writer and translator, begins this book with World War II and the man who created the toy car: a little metal Jeep with a working axel and rolling wheels; the kind that countless children have owned over the decades. From here he looks at how this led to anime and Hello Kitty.

The journey that Pure Invention takes us on really is a captivating one. It explores politics and economics, design and aesthetics, and even Japanese philosophy and ethics to look at how toys, games, and cartoons from Japan ended up, as the book’s title rightly says, conquering the world.

If you’ve always wanted to visit Japan because you have found yourself fascinated by the nation’s pop culture, or because you grew up on it and love it to this day, Pure Invention is essential reading for you before you visit Japan.

Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton

Polly Barton is the Japanese-to-English translator of such books as Aoko Matsuda’s Where the Wild Ladies Are and Kikuko Tsumura’s There’s No Such Thing as an Easy Job. She cut her teeth on Japanese culture as a teacher on the JET programme, and this is her memoir/essays on life and language in Japan.

This is an essential read before you visit Japan, and for people intrigued by Japanese language and culture. It tells of one British woman’s journey to discovering, appreciating, and living the Japanese language while living on a quiet, remote Japanese island.

Fifty Sounds is a wonderful introduction to the unique beauty of the Japanese language. It follows the life of a writer (and future translator) as she learns the language through experiencing love and work. It paints a unique picture of discovering Japanese language and culture; there is nothing quite like it.

The essays in Fifty Sounds are philosophical, funny, intimate, and eye-opening. These expose the unique quirks and mechanics of the Japanese language while providing readers with a uniquely linguistic lens, through which to view the culture of modern Japan.

Hokkaido Highway Blues by Will Ferguson

We’re not starting with one of the best Japanese novels, nor even one of the great Japanese authors. Instead, we’re starting with a grump Canadian man.

Story time: Before I lived in Japan (the first time), I was gifted this book by a friend. What I thought would be a fun book that would familiarise me with the roads and trains and cities of Japan turned out to be an illuminating story about living as a foreigner in Japan, the post-war growth of Japanese society and infrastructure, and a journey filled with as many laughs as tears.

Hokkaido Highway Blues treats you to fascinating anecdotes about Japanese folklore, language, history, fashion, food, everything. It’s such a great place to start when getting used to modern Japan. In other words, and quite surprisingly, it is one of the best books on Japanese culture.

A Brief History of Japan: Samurai, Shogun, and Zen by Jonathan Clements

Speaking of the best books on Japanese culture, this book is a fantastic place to start before you visit Japan. We’ve read a few books on the history of Japan, but none hit the mark quite like this one.

Clements is an expert on both Chinese and Japanese language and culture, and his unwavering adoration for Japanese culture — both ancient and modern — shines through in this fun, fluid, vibrant book.

If you want to learn the truth about Zen, how the Samurai truly worked and behaved, and how exactly Japan paved its own road through Asian history, this is the book you need to dig into. It’s written with wit, wisdom, and playfulness, but packs a real knowledge punch.

While Clements is an expert and someone with a clear and intense adoration for Japanese history and culture, he’s also someone capable of coming at certain topics from a different angle.

The way that he explores the religious history of Japan, for example, is truly eye-opening. When you see how thin this book is, you’ll wonder how he packs so much in, but Clements finds a way. This us truly one of the best books on Japanese culture right now.

How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart by Florentyna Leow

How Kyoto Breaks Your Heart is a short collection of personal essays bound together to make one moving memoir about the personal and professional life of a woman living in Japan’s old capital. Florentyna is a Malaysian woman who studied in London before moving to Tokyo, and then Kyoto. In this book, we learn about how the city and its people challenge and change her.

We learn about her work as a tour guide, what its like seeing the tourist hotspots of Kyoto through the eyes of someone who has visited them all dozens of times. We read touching and humorous anecdotes about locals, tourists, famous places, and hidden gems. We learn about her favourite spots; places that make her feel at home, like she belongs in Kyoto.

We also read about her friendships, her heartbreak, her personal struggles and crises. This is a touching personal tale that paints a vibrant and vivid picture of Kyoto, its citizens, what makes it so unique and beautiful, and what it’s really like to live and work there as a foreigner trying desperately to belong.

Before you visit Japan, and Kyoto specifically, this is a very touching little memoir to enjoy.

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

One of the best Japanese novels to come out of the country in years was 2018’s Konbini Ningen (or Convenience Store Woman). It’s a short novel that tells the story of a woman who has worked in a convenience store for 18 years.

This is the peak of modern Japanese novels, and it holds the state of modern-day Japanese life under a lens by force. It brings to light the fragility of Japanese society, how it behaves like clockwork so long as all the cogs are greased. And the job of a convenience store person is very much one of these cogs.

If you want to really dig into the psychology of Japan’s culture before you visit Japan, this book is also a wonderful look at how your average Japanese person observes mental health, strangeness, and the ladder of work and family that we all must be on because of reasons. Sayaka Murata is one of the best Japanese authors writing today.

Read More: Our full review of Convenience Store Woman

Bending Adversity by David Pilling

This book was a huge success that went beyond Japan, striking a nerve with journalists, economists, politicians, and writers across the world. It’s an informative and infinitely well-researched book that examines the post-war Japanese economy.

Bending Adversity discusses the bubble burst at the start of the ‘90s; it touches on issues of feminism and inequality. It interviews Japans most famous writers and artists to get an insider perspective.

If you want to know how Japan’s modern-day infrastructure, economics, and politics work (but you also don’t want to be bogged down with jargon and numbers).

This book is overflowing with heart, making it a must-read before you visit Japan as well as one of the best books on Japanese culture, especially in the modern day.

Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri

Translated by Morgan Giles

Newly released in 2019, this phenomenal novel is a chilling indictment of the invisible class system that plagues modern-day Japan.

Yu Miri, a Korean-born Japanese citizen presents us with a tragic protagonist who worked his entire life, barely surviving (until he no longer can) under the weight of Japanese bureaucracy, class, and government.

Most tragic of all is the fact that he is born on the same day as the emperor. And yet the emperor will be remembered while our protagonist dies alone and nameless.

Tokyo Ueno Station is not a friendly novel in many respects, but it is a truthful and transparent one, and it would be valuable in the hands of anyone who puts too much faith in capitalism and the actions of the government.

It’s always good to be up-to-date on the latest literature before you visit Japan, and this is one of the very best Japanese novels of the 21st century, proving Yu Miri to be one of the best Japanese authors around.

Read More: Our full review of Tokyo Ueno Station

Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami

Translated by Allison Markin Powell

This novel, by one of the best and most beloved Japanese authors, is a delight. The story of a young woman who meets one of her old teachers in a bar, forms a tight friendship with him which steadily and awkwardly grows and grows, and struggles to reconcile her adoration for him with her frustration at his archaic ways.

Strange Weather in Tokyo very much a clash of old and new. The old Japan that now exists in temples and museums is alive in Tsukiko’s sensei, but doesn’t really have a place in the world she is now thriving in. So what you have here is a very vivid show of how Japan has changed and evolved in such a small space of time, personified as two wholly likeable and hilarious characters.

Of all the Japanese novels I’ve ever read, this has stayed with me as one of the best. It’s also one of the few Japanese novels that doubles as one of the best books on Japanese culture.

Read more: Our full review of Strange Weather in Tokyo

Lost Japan by Alex Kerr

Alex Kerr has a thing for traditional Japan, as such he has here produced one of the very best books on Japanese culture. He has studied its tea ceremonies, kabuki and bunraku theatres, and is a master calligrapher.

In Lost Japan, Kerr takes us on a personal and intimate journey through a life spent uncovering the parts of Japan that are vanishing. He decries pachinko and the crushing existence of sad salarymen, and he romanticises the arts of Japan which are unparalleled across most of the world.

To truly peer into the heart of Japanese art, architecture, and history, you need to read this beautiful book. Kerr cares, and he’ll have you caring, too. Before you visit Japan, let Kerr teach you about its deep artistic and cultural history.

Read more: Our full review of Lost Japan

The Bells of Old Tokyo by Anna Sherman

The Bells of Old Tokyo begins with a scene-setting: “The Five O’Clock Chime sounded, its notes drifting across Shiba Park.” Shiba Park sits at the edge of the iconic Tokyo Tower, and houses the Buddhist Zōzō-ji Temple. Herein we can immediately see the book’s greatest strength.

Sherman has chosen a human approach to historical exploration: she weaves together a journey through Tokyo’s greatest and darkest moments, changes, people, and parts with a stunning narrative that often paints a vivid, vibrant picture.

It sets a calming tone and makes Tokyo feel tangibly alive and breathable on the page.

The Bells of Old Tokyo is a love letter to Japanese culture – both antique and modern. It’s at once celebratory and mournful.

It’s driven by a personal story and peppered with cultural and historic facts that light up the brain like a plasma lamp. It is the answer to all the questions we have when we visit Tokyo

Read More: Our Full Review of The Bells of Old Tokyo.

The Only Gaijin in the Village by Iain Maloney

As the title suggests, Iain is the only gaijin in the village.

He is a native Scot who moved to Japan back in 2005, found love, built a life, and eventually decided to move out into the countryside, since both he and his wife grew up rural in their respective countries and were itching for a return to green hills and wide views of the horizon.

His organic method of storytelling almost makes The Only Gaijin in the Village a hard book to define. It’s certainly a personal memoir, but it’s also a book that enlightens us about aspects of Japanese tradition, history, language, and politics that we had never even considered until now.

Read More: Our Full Review of The Only Gaijin in the Village.

An Artist of the Floating World by Kazuo Ishiguro

Ishiguro is also, as I’ve already mentioned, my favourite author, and An Artist of the Floating World is my favourite Ishiguro novel. It’s a complex piece of historical fiction set after the events of World War II.

Our protagonist, Ono, was once a great painter, but during the events of WWII he began making right-wing propaganda art which, after the war ended, discredited him as a traitor to the ideals and morals of Japan.

This novel is an intense exploration of personal politics, moral duty, and betrayal. It follows Ono closely and allows us time to live with him and his decisions, as well as how his family and friends now treat him. An absolute masterpiece of Japanese historical fiction.

Japanese Ghost Stories by Lafcadio Hearn

Japanese Ghost Stories is the perfect place to start if you’re looking for some Japanese folklore books to read all about the ghosts, fantastical beasts, and yokai of Japanese history.

It’s a beautiful collection of eerie, strange, romantic, unsettling ghost stories from across Japan’s history, recorded here in English for us to enjoy.

Read More: Books on Japanese Mythology

The Tale of Genji by Murasaki Shikibu

The Tale of Genji has quite the legacy. Not only is it the first Japanese novel, but it is widely considered to be the first novel ever written. Written by the Kyoto noblewoman Murasaki Shikibu in the 11^th century CE, The Tale of Genji takes us on a journey alongside the son of an emperor: Hikaru Genji.

Genji is no longer in the line of succession, and spends much of the novel’s story forming and then ruining relationships with various women in Kyoto.

The novel is a fascinating insight into the lives of Japan’s nobility back when Kyoto was the capital of Japan. It’s also a witty and smart novel that still holds up as one of the great works of classic Japanese fiction.

If you’re interested in more wonderful Japanese literature and non-fiction then check our archives for a wealth of goodies.

Related:

Books to Read Before Travelling to China

Books to Read Before Travelling to Southeast Asia

Books to Read before Travelling to South Korea

It’s also a pre-war town of narrow yokocho alleyways lined with ramen joints and izakaya. And it’s a modern metropolis of kawaii cafes, shopping districts, underground music, and a Robot Restaurant.

Each of these books set in Tokyo captures the essence of a different part of Tokyo life (and, often, more than one).

These are books that celebrate Tokyo, dig into the city’s dark underbelly, explore the marriage of traditional and modern.

Each of them (with one exception) is a Japanese novel in translation that offers readers an intimate and dynamic view of Tokyo from the ground level.

Some are dark, some funny, some romantic, all beautiful in their own way. Reading these wonderful books set in Tokyo will enamour you to Japan’s magnificent capital like few things can.

Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri

Translated by Morgan Giles

A short, angry, politically charge novel by one of Japan’s most talented and sharp modern writers. Tokyo Ueno Station paints a darkly honest picture of the realities of class divides and the unfairness of modern capitalism.

It is proof that meritocracy is a farce, and that unfairness is the truth of modern life, even in a city as peaceful as Tokyo.

Set predominantly in Ueno Park, the novel’s protagonist is the ghost of a homeless man who died in that same park but gave his life to build the modern metropolis we know and love today.

Kazu was born in the same year as Japan’s emperor, and both men’s sons were born on the same day. While the emperor was born into the height of privilege, Kazu was born in rural Fukushima, a place that would later be ravaged by destruction in 2011.

While the emperor’s son would go on to lead a healthy life, Kazu’s son’s life would be cut short, and Kazu himself would live out his final days as one of the many homeless barely surviving in a village of tents in Ueno Park.

Tokyo Ueno Station serves as a reminder that every human is just that: human. It is a tragically honest heart-on-sleeve examination and declaration of the sorrows of modern capitalist life.

Read our review of Tokyo Ueno Station

Fault Lines by Emily Itami

UK-based author Emily Itami grew up in Tokyo and cut her teeth as a travel writer. Fault Lines, her debut novel, is one of the most charming and delightful books set in Tokyo you’re likely to read any time soon.

Fault Lines follows Mizuki, a bored-to-tears housewife and mother of two. Mizuki spent years living in New York City, learning English, and almost becoming a successful singer. Now, back home in Tokyo, she has been married for many years and has two young children.

Mizuki’s husband, a zombie-like salaryman, pays her little attention. Her life is stagnant and grey. One day, however, while out with some French friends, she meets and quickly befriends Kiyoshi, a restauranteur.

Mizuki tries to convince herself that Kiyoshi is simply a new friend, but she cannot deny the love and lust for him that she feels. Kiyoshi has brought the world back into colour for her; he has reminded her of what passion feels like; he gives her a reason to talk and express herself.

All the while, Mizuki must continue on being a wife and mother; her responsibilities slip but she does her best to hold her life together.

Fault Lines is a relatable, lively, charming, and witty novel about how the blandness of ordinary life can lead us to crisis, and how it doesn’t take much to knock us off balance entirely.

How Do You Live? by Genzaburo Yoshino

Translated by Bruno Navasky

How Do You Live? opens with a teenage boy and his uncle standing on the roof of a Tokyo department store, looking down on all the people below as they walk the streets, drive their cars, and live their lives. As he watches Tokyo move and breathe beneath him, the boy considers the connections between all of us.

The boy, Copper, is a sweet and considerate teenager who spends the novel learning lessons and steadily growing. This is partly due to the guidance of his uncle and mother, but mostly down to his own strong moral compass.

How Do You Live? is a Japanese novel for young readers, designed to teach kindness, sympathy, and empathy, and it does a splendid job of that.

Written and set in the 1930s, How Do You Live? depicts a pre-war Tokyo that doesn’t really exist anymore, making it a very precious and important read amongst books set in Tokyo.

The Cat and the City by Nick Bradley

The only book on this list written by a Western author, The Cat in the City is a love letter to Tokyo and its people by a writer who spent ten years living, learning, and working in Tokyo.

The Cat and the City is a collection of short tales, all tightly interwoven together. Each one intimately ties the reader to a Tokyo resident who takes us on a journey down the city’s streets, along its metro lines, into its whisky bars and karaoke joints.

Nick Bradley’s Tokyo is an enormous and vivid tapestry, with each thread revealing the life of a person who has lived and worked there, who has shed tears and blood for Tokyo, who struggled through their darkest days and celebrated their greatest victories in Japan’s great metropolis.

The Cat and the City offers us its hand and, if we dare to take it, we are led like Alice through this wonderland of a concrete jungle.

Along the way we will ride in taxis along neon-soaked streets, sit in okonomiyaki joints listening to the ramblings of drunken old men, and sing karaoke with young lovebirds.

Tokyo opens its heart to us in this collection of cleverly interwoven stories, and what we find when we venture inside is so much joy, misery, pain, beauty, everything.

When it comes to books set in Tokyo, nothing gives as well-rounded a perspective on Tokyo life as Nick Bradley’s The Cat and the City.

Read our review of The Cat and the City

Convenience Store Woman by Sayaka Murata

Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori

One of our favourite books of all time, Japanese or otherwise, Convenience Store Woman offers us a rare and unusual glimpse into a world that is seen by everyone in Tokyo but not always lived or even considered. It is par for the course for students and young Tokyo residents to work part-time at a convenience store, but Murata’s protagonist is a little different.

Keiko Furukura is thirty-six and has worked part-time in the same convenience store for eighteen years (as, in fact, has her creator). She has seen eight managers — whom she refers to only by their numbers — and more co-workers than she could count.

She is entirely content with her life, and has never asked for anything more; not a better job, more money, nor even a partner to share her life with.

Keiko is pressured by those around her to make something of herself, and the person who understands her best is a raucous and barbaric moron who serves as the typically hyper-aggressive masculine counterpart to her.

Convenience Store Woman shows us the world of the convenience store. These small shops, known as konbini in Japan, are on every street in Tokyo.

They are an indispensable part of modern Japanese life. And Convenience Store Woman celebrates their workers while also showing us a different way to live in this modern world.

Read our review of Convenience Store Woman

The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida by Clarissa Goenawan

The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida is a subtly fantastical story, driven by themes of love, loss, and grief. It toes the line between YA and literary fiction, and it does so effortlessly.

Set during the shift from 80s to 90s Tokyo, as Japan’s great economic bubble is getting ready to burst, The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida traces the lives of a handful of lovable but flawed young women and men.

The titular Miwako Sumida is the axel around which this wheel of complex characters spins, each one taking a turn to narrate the story and impress upon us the kind of person Miwako Sumida was.

Sumida herself is dead. While working at a mountain retreat, she took a ladder into the forest and hanged herself from a large tree. Our three protagonists – Ryusei, Chie, and Fumi – are left to pick up the pieces of their own lives, recently shattered by the death of their friend.

Split into three parts, The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida is a three-dimensional story that moves seamlessly from the distant past to the recent past to the present, painting a colourful image of Miwako Sumida that grows in detail as the story gains momentum.

Despite not having been written by a Japanese novelist, The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida strongly and elegantly echoes (as I’ve already mentioned) the style and tone of manga like Erased and Orange, and most vividly the novels of Haruki Murakami.

Read our review of The Perfect World of Miwako Sumida

Out by Natsuo Kirino

Translated by Stephen Snyder

Out follows the story of a woman who works a dead-end job in a factory in Tokyo, exhausted by also having to be a mother and support her useless and unfaithful husband.

When our protagonist snaps and murders her husband, she turns to her fellow female factory worker for help covering her tracks. Soon enough they will need to fend off not only the police but the local yakuza crime family. Out is an angry, exhilarating Japanese crime novel and a masterpiece of Japanese feminist literature.

This is a powerful piece of feminist Japanese literature, but it is also an enlightening lifting of the veil between the bright, clean Tokyo streets we all understand, and the dark and difficult working class world of Tokyo that we rarely give a thought to.

The Last Children of Tokyo by Yoko Tawada

Translated by Margaret Mitsutani

As The Last Children of Tokyo begins, Yoshiro, a retired author, has passed his hundredth birthday and still spends every morning out jogging with his rent-a-dog (there are few animals left in Japan, and certainly no wild ones).

His great-grandson Mumei, however, was born, like every member of his generation, with grey hair and failing health. His life expectancy is poor, and his bones will likely fail him before he exits his teens.

Yoshiro and Mumei exist in the book as fascinating examples of their society: a dystopian Japan in which the cities have mostly been abandoned, ties with the outside world have been cut, all other languages are no longer taught or spoken.

The book paints a very dystopian view of Tokyo, but one that feels not all that far away. Meanwhile, some time and consideration is given to the southern reaches of Japan: the tropical reaches of Okinawa and Fukuoka.

Comparing how the people there live with the frightening future world of Tokyo encourages some dark considerations of the world we’re walking closer towards every day.

Read our review of The Last Children of Tokyo

The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle by Haruki Murakami

Translated by Jay Rubin

Set in the peaceful, middle-class suburban residential district of Setagaya, The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle begins by showing us the absolute ordinariness of Tokyo life for your average adult salaryman.

The quiet, comfortable life of a normal man, albeit one suffering an existential crisis who is about to fall down a rabbit hole of surreal and impossible experiences. But, such is the world of Haruki Murakami.

In The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle we are lost in the life of Toru Okada, a thirty-year-old suburban Tokyo husband.

Having recently left his job with a positive attitude toward change and a fresh start, it is jarring and contradictory to see that Toru’s attitude towards life is entirely passive and apathetic. This novel is an enormously abstract journey, taking place in a dry and still world.

Toru Okada, our unsuccessful and futureless protagonist, is constantly at odds with his brother-in-law, the obviously psychopathic and hugely successful intellectual, Noboru Wataya.

When Toru’s cat, and then his wife, go missing, his feeling of disconnect reaches its boiling point and, in order to claw his way out, he must sink to the bottom of a well.

Read our review of The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle

Strange Weather in Tokyo by Hiromi Kawakami

Translated by Allison Markin Powell

Of all the books set in Tokyo, this is the one that best understands and explores the near impossible relationship between the old Edo world of Japan and the modern metropolitan life of today’s Tokyo.

That relationship is embodied by our two protagonists: an unlikely pair of lovers who must learn to understand their differences in order to make their love work.

Strange Weather in Tokyo is a clash of modern and classic Japanese culture and customs, and of modern and weathered dating methods. The writing is clean, to the point, and surprisingly fast-paced. A bizarre and engrossing love story set in the small bars, side streets, and cafes of Tokyo.

This is one of our favourite Japanese novels; a book we find ourselves returning to often. Tsukiko, a modern office worker, and her sensei, a man almost out of time, make for two of the sweetest lovers ever penned in a Japanese novel.

Read our review of Strange Weather in Tokyo

The Nakano Thrift Shop by Hiromi Kawakami

Translated by Allison Markin Powell

Two Kawakami books in a row? This is nothing more and nothing less than a sign of just how vibrant a picture she paints of modern Tokyo life.

While Strange Weather in Tokyo is a vivid metaphor of old-vs-new Tokyo, The Nakano Thrift Shop is a slice-of-life drama about a group of young residents of Tokyo, all working and spending time in a quirky thrift shop.

The characters who populate this book are a sweet and varied bunch of young people, representing the typical millenial picture of 21st century Japan.

Of all the books set in Tokyo, The Nakano Thrift Shop gives a very specific street-level perspective of the city’s ordinary young people and the quiet but unique loves they live.

Kokoro by Natsume Soseki

Translated by Meredith McKinney

Natsume Soseki is considered, by most modern Japanese readers, to be the nation’s most vital, wonderful, and influential writer. He is cherished in Japan even a hundred years after the time in which he was writing.

His novel, Kokoro (meaning ‘heart’) is a coming-of-age story in three parts, exploring the relationship between a young man during his formative years, and his relationship with the man he calls sensei.

Beginning in the historic and beautiful town of Kamakura, a short day-trip from Tokyo, the book then takes us to pre-war Tokyo and offers readers a view of the capital which no longer exists.

While many of the books set in Tokyo on this list give us a dynamic and rounded view of the capital today, Kokoro shows us the Tokyo that once was, neither Edo nor modern, hanging in that changing pre-war early 20th century moment.

Moshi Moshi by Banana Yoshimoto

Translated by Asa Yoneda

Banana Yoshimoto is one of Japan’s finest modern novelists. She is a deeply philosophical, considered, liberal, and explorative author who demonstrates an intimate relationship with love, life, and death. Moshi Moshi (named after the Japanese word spoken when picking up the phone) is one of Yoshimoto’s most beloved novels.

Like The Nakano Thrift Shop and The Wind-Up Bird Chronicle, this is one of the books set in Tokyo which captures a very specific neighbourhood. In Moshi Moshi, that neighbourhood is Shimokitazawa — south of Nakano, East of Setagaya, West of Shibuya.

This district combines modern hipster life with a retro and traditional vibe, and it fits perfectly with the protagonists of Yoshimoto’s novel.

After Yoshie loses her father to a strange suicide pact, she and her mother move to Shimokitazawa to start a fresh, but soon enough Yoshie is troubled by nightmares of herself trying to call her father as he searches for the phone he left behind the day he took his own life.

Like all Yoshimoto’s books, this is a Japanese novel about the relationship between love and death, and one of the finest modern Japanese books available.

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The Best Chinese Novels in Translation

The politics of literature in China is fascinating. For example, Chinese science fiction novels are pushing boundaries and standing head-and-shoulders above all other sci-fi right now, and yet there’s a law in China that forbids time travel in any Chinese fiction.

Time travel movies don’t even make it to Chinese cinemas. Beyond that, several of the authors on this list of Chinese novels are actually in exile, living in the UK or US.

Politics aside, Chinese novels in translation are having something of a golden age right now, with some incredible wuxia novels (martial arts fantasy books), Chinese sci-fi, and earth-shattering Chinese literary fiction for readers to lose themselves in and be forever changed by. Here are some of the very best Chinese novels in translation right now.

The Wedding Party by Liu Xinwu

Translated by Jeremy Tiang

Originally published in China in 1985, Liu Xinwu’s The Wedding Party is a delightful novel set at a moment in time that hung in the air for post-revolution China. Not yet a global powerhouse, but now open for trade and travel, 1980s China was an interesting place not often captured in film or fiction.

It is 1982 and Auntie Xue’s son is getting married. Set on across that single wedding day, from dawn to dusk, The Wedding Party paints a vivid and moving picture of ordinary life amongst the working class of Beijing in the early ’80s. This is an ensemble story that gives multiple perspectives, with Jiyue and his bride’s wedding acting as the fulcrum for these disparate narratives.

As the day passes, we learn more and more about the colourful characters who inhabit Auntie Xue’s neighbourhood. We learn the story of the caterer, the guests, and the two families. We have wedding crashers and plans gone awry.

The Wedding Party is an incredibly human and relatable story, full of detail and backstory that fleshes out every character, giving them all equal weight and attention. While the titular wedding party is central to the plot, this Chinese novel is really about ordinary people’s ordinary lives: their families, their pasts, their dreams, their loves and losses. It is human and grounded by never sombre.

One of the most sweet, charming, and warming Chinese novels in translation you’ll ever read.

Aftershock by Zhang Ling

Translated by Shelly Bryant

Written by celebrated Canada-based Chinese author Zhang Ling, Aftershock traces the life and experiences of a woman who survived the 1976 earthquake in Tangshan — an earthquake which took the lives of 242,000 people. Xiaodeng is now in her thirties; a successful author and mother living in Toronto with her husband. But her mental health is in tatters, and her doctor is helping her retrace the steps of her early life.

Aftershock is presented in a fragmented timeline, jumping back and forth between times and places, and between perspectives. We spend time with Xiaodeng’s mother before Xiaodeng and her brother were born. We witness the earthquake and how it shatters their family into pieces. And we see what has become of Xiaodeng’s life, marriage, and career since moving to Canada.

While Aftershock is a relatively short novel, it masterfully covers several different lives across entire decades, and we are able to pieces all of these fragments of time and space back together as we hope that Xiaodeng will find a way to heal herself. This is a heartbreaking and beautiful Chinese novel.

Buy a copy of Aftershock here!

Strange Beasts of China by Yan Ge

Translated by Jeremy Tiang

Strange Beasts of China is a wonderfully imaginative and surreal work of fiction by a writer who, at the time it was originally published in China, was only twenty-one years old. This is one of the most exciting Chinese novels in translation you can read right now.

While Yan Ge now has several other books available in English (White Horse and The Chili Bean Paste Clan), this is a book that showcases the strengths of her imagination, as well as her roots as an author. Strange Beasts of China is set in the city of Yong’an. Here, many races of humanoid ‘beasts’ live amongst the humans, in a similar fashion to Tolkien’s elves and dwarves.

These beasts all have aesthetic and behavioural characteristics which identify them as part of the Sacrificial Beasts, Flourishing Beasts, Sorrowful Beasts etc. And, in each chapter, our protagonist — a novelist and former student of zoology — spends time building a relationship with, and learning the truth about, a member of a group of beasts.

The book was originally a series of short stories, but there is a slowly-moving arc that pushes the greater narrative further. It’s our narrator’s relationship to herself, her own past, and her former professor that keeps us invested in her journey.

Though, perhaps not as much as Yan’s imagination itself does. The titular strange beasts of China are such wildly and creatively devised characters, with their origin stories, powers, and behaviour patterns being so wonderfully alluring.

For example, there is one group of all-female beasts who reside in a temple complex and remind us a little of the wood nymphs of Greek mythology. There is another group who latch onto humans who are low and depressed, before drawing out and feeding off their life energy.

This is a book that celebrates the power of imagination and characterisation. It is also an experiment, in a way, that puts humans in the centre and investigates how we think and act when given an imaginary situation/relationship to handle. Strange Beasts of China is a fun, sometimes bleak, endlessly fascinating work of fiction, and one of the best Chinese novels in translation that you can pick up and read right now.

Ninth Building by Zou Jingzhi

Translated by Jeremy Tiang

Ninth Building is a unique kind of Chinese literature, toeing the line between fiction and nonfiction. Zou Jingzhi is a lauded poet, playwright, and screenwriter in China. He also grew up through Mao’s Cultural Revolution, and it’s that personal narrative which you’ll find in Ninth Building.

While everything found in Ninth Building is true, each vignette is written in a prosaic style, thus reading like a novel. Ninth Building is split into two parts. Part One covers the author’s childhood in Beijing, a childhood spent confused and obsessed with the prevalent habit of tattling on one’s neighbours.

Zou learned as a child to be on the lookout for bourgeois intelligentsia; it was an obsession for everyone in Beijing at that time. In Part Two, Zou’s father has been captured and imprisoned, and so young Zou is cast out into the wastelands of northern China to work hard labour. The vignettes here offer us snippets of daily life in that world.

Many vignettes end with a moral; a final statement that sums up what young Zou learned in that particular encounter. We are watching the making of a poet, an artist, under harsh conditions, and how exactly those conditions forged the man who exists today.

As Chinese novels in translation go, Ninth Building is a truly unique piece of literature that gives us a series of glimpses into the mind and experiences of a young man before he grew into one of China’s most celebrated aritsts.

Watch my full review of Ninth Building

Cocoon by Zhang Yueran

Translated by Jeremy Tiang

Jeremy Tiang’s translator’s note at the front of this gorgeous piece of Chinese literary fiction works as a valuable foreword which contextualises these characters and the world they grew up in. Much like the author herself, the pair of protagonists in Cocoon were born and raised in a moment of economic boom.

As a result, Tiang explains, they feel alienated from the generations that came before. They are also products of the One Child Policy. What this means is that Cocoon is a Chinese novel that explores the largest generational gap that has ever existed.

But it’s also a novel about the pain of family bonds; the sheer misery of it. As early as page 2, Zhang remarks, “Blood ties are a form of violence, the way they yoke together people who feel nothing for each other.” Our protagonists are a pair of old childhood friends who reconnect by chance, and reminisce over their youth and the legacies of their parents and grandparents.

But this is also a kind of thriller. Mysteries and confusion hide amongst these memories. Cleverly constructed as a dual-narrative that flits back and forth like a conversation, this is a novel that explores generational trauma and anguish in a very raw and original way; one that is unique to the modern Chinese experience but also remains relatable.

Fu Ping by Wang Anyi

Translated by Howard Goldblatt

Fu Ping is set in Shanghai, at a moment in time that is neither modern nor ancient, as the Cultural Revolution of Mao Zedong and the Communist Party has forever changed the landscape of China. Beyond World War II, this long moment is the most exciting, chilling, and fascinating era of global history in the 20^th century.

The titular Fu Ping has been brought to Shanghai from the countryside to be wed to the adopted grandson of Nainai, a long-time nanny who also once hailed from the countryside but now works for a wealthy family in the heart of Shanghai’s Puxi District.

The nameless Grandson is very much a plot device, and the real focus of the plot is in the characters of Fu Ping and Nainai, as well as the street on which they live and work – which is, in many ways, a character in and of itself. Many of the book’s chapters each focuses on a character in the district, telling a story which sums up their lot in life and also works to slot them into the larger narrative of Fu Ping.

It’s fun to see every home and every life illuminated, and there’s a lot to be learned about work life, school life, and family life in 20^th century Shanghai through the lens of Fu Ping – both the book and the character. The set-up of the novel, Fu Ping being brought to Shanghai to marry, is not the story’s true concern. Instead, we spend far more time getting to know Nainai, adoptive grandmother of Fu Ping’s betrothed.

Nainai herself is an intriguing woman, born in rural China but having lived for so long in Shanghai as to have developed political biases about what the ‘true Shanghai’ is. Fu Ping is a novel of ideas. It has a wonderful setting, intriguing characters, a world that captivates and inspires. It has cinched, snipped, pacey dialogue that keeps the story barrelling along.

Monkey King by Wu Cheng’en

Translated by Julia Lovell

Also commonly known as Journey to the West, Monkey King is perhaps the most beloved and iconic Chinese novel ever written. As Chinese novels in translation go, they don’t get more essential than Monkey King. A 16th Century classic of Chinese literature, Monkey King has been adapted countless times, most notably into Japan’s most successful manga/anime series: Dragon Ball.

Monkey King by Wu Cheng’en is a wild and rollicking adventure story that begins like a Greek myth with the hilarious and ridiculous antics of the powerful titular ruler Sun Wukong the Monkey King. Sun Wukong travels and studies and gets ever stronger until he has mastered death itself and ends up picking a fight with every angel in heaven. He is then sealed beneath a mountain for 500 years by Buddha himself.

The rest of the novel follows the fabled journey to the West, as a young monk is tasked by heaven to deliver some scriptures from China to India. Early on his travels, he stumbles across the sealed Monkey King, frees him, and takes him on as an apprentice in an attempt to reform the wild Sun Wukong.

Julia Lovell’s new translation of this book is a laugh a minute. It is a wise and witty story of insane events and ridiculous wonders. There is so much raw energy and hilarious banter poured into every line, making this new abridged translation of Monkey King a must-read, and one of the best Chinese novels in translation you can read right now.

The Day the Sun Died by Yan Lianke

Translated by Carlos Rojas

One of the newest Chinese novels in translation to feature on this list is also one of Yan Lianke’s best. If you’ve never read Yan Lianke before, he’s considered by many (myself included) to be China’s best living novelist. Originally from Henan in central China and now living in Beijing, Yan has been often cited as a contender for the Nobel Prize in Literature.

Yan’s novels are heavily political and satirical in theme, meaning that many of them are officially banned in his home country. This makes those of us reading these Chinese novels in translation very lucky indeed!

The Day the Sun Died is, like his other books, a political stab at the rhetoric of the Chinese government. In it, residents of a small village begin to rise from their beds after dark and return to their daily duties, all of them in a state of sleepwalking.

Young Li Niannian watches on in horror as his family and neighbours all work mindlessly through the night before everything descents into chaos.

This fantastic Chinese novel cynically pulls apart the philosophy and of the ‘Chinese Dream’ and takes it to both a logical and an absurd extreme. Despite how new it is, The Day the Sun Died is still one of the best Chinese novels on the shelves today.

Read More: Our full review of The Day the Sun Died

The Shadow Book of Ji Yun

Translated by Yi Izzy Yu and John Yu Branscum

While not a novel — and technically not even fiction — The Shadow Book of Ji Yun remains one of the most spectacular and riveting Chinese books in translation available to English language readers. As the book’s introduction explains, Ji Yun was an 18th Century Chinese philosopher and politician who wrote a frankly obscene number of short accounts concerning supernatural phenomena and spiritual experiences.

The Shadow Book of Ji Yun is a collection of dozens upon dozens of these incredible accounts. Some are first-person encounters with ghosts and spirits, while others are secondhand stories he has been told by friends, colleagues, and those he has met on the road.

Ji Yun has been compared to H.P. Lovecraft, and that is a very apt comparison. The main difference being that Ji Yun (a respected politician and philosopher) claimed his stories to be true. The tales in The Shadow Book of Ji Yun come from the mouths of traders, fellow politicians, family members, Buddhist monks, and more.

They range from the beautiful and inspiring to the eerie and frightening; from the feasible to the impossible. And every single one of them is incredible.

The Vagrants by Yiyun Li

I’ve talked at length about the power of Yiyun Li’s command over language. Her two most recent books, Dear Friend, From My Life I Write to You in Your Life and Where Reasons End are some of the most affecting and truly life-changing books I’ve ever touched.

What’s unique about Li isn’t just her sheer command over language but also the fact that she actually writes exclusively in English, her second language. Li is a writer in exile, living permanently in the US.

As she explains in Dear Friend, she has abandoned the Chinese language completely and so all of her fiction and non-fiction is written in English. Despite this, Li is still a Chinese writer and so, of course, her most famous work is on this list of Chinese novels.

The Vagrants is based on a true story from 1970s China. In this tragic Chinese novel, a 28-year-old woman who has just survived ten years of a prison sentence has now been sentenced to death for her loss of faith in Chinese Communism. Following her death, we see the ripples it causes within her local community.

Read More: 5 Books to Read Before you Visit China

Legends of the Condor Heroes by Jin Yong

Translated by Anna Holmwood and Gigi Chang

Wuxia novels are a very special, very unique kind of book. If you don’t know what wuxia novels are, they’re kind of China’s answer to high fantasy novels. In fact, this series of wuxia novels, Legends of the Condor Heroes, was called by many the Chinese Lord of the Rings.

Wuxia literally means martial heroes, and wuxia novels are epic stories of martial arts heroes heading out on grand adventures across the endless landscape of China and fighting with near mystical martial arts strength. These Chinese novels inspired films like House of Flying Daggers and Crouching Tiger, Hidden Dragon.

Legends of the Condor Heroes isn’t yet finished. As of right now, two volumes are out in English, with a third to be released imminently.

The first and third volumes of this enormous epic series of Chinese novels are translated by Anna Holmwood, with the second translated by Gigi Chang. Both translators expertly capture the campy, thrilling, adventurous scope and atmosphere of this pinnacle series of wuxia novels.

Read More: Our review of Legends of the Condor Heroes (Book 2)

The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu

Translated by Ken Liu

If there’s one specific genre of Chinese novels in translation that is exploding right now, it’s Chinese science fiction. Sci-fi authors in China approach the concept of speculative fiction in a near revolutionary way. If you’d rather a short story collection to prove this point, rather than a novel, check out Broken Stars, edited by the mighty translator and novelist Ken Liu.

In this space of Chinese sci-fi, the author most revered is unquestionably Cixin Liu, whose books are also translated by Ken Liu. Cixin Liu wrote the short story Wandering Earth which was recently adapted into a sweeping epic of a Netflix movie. The Three Body Problem is the first in a trilogy of Chinese novels, followed by The Dark Forest and Death’s End.

It became one of the best-selling Chinese novels in translation after it was praised by Barrack Obama, is an alternative history novel that begins in 1967 before jumping to the present day and a strange but wonderfully realised virtual world.

Read More: Our review of The Three Body Problem

Red Sorghum by Mo Yan

Translated by Howard Goldblatt

Mo Yan is a fascinating writer with an incredible career. Winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature back in 2012, his pen name (now also his legal name) Mo Yan literally means ‘Don’t Speak’, which was inspired by a repeated warning from his parents about the dangers of speaking out.

Red Sorghum is not only Mo Yan’s most famous novel but also one of the most successful Chinese novels in translation. Similar to Jung Chang’s historical biography Wild Swans, this Chinese novel spans three generations and begins during the Japanese invasion of China in the 1930s, the most famous incident of which was the Rape of Nanjing.

Soul Mountain by Gao Xingjian

Translated by Mabel Lee

While many of the Chinese novels on this list are political, satirical, and often tragic, Soul Mountain is different. It isn’t a transformative sci-fi novel or another of the adventurous wuxia novels. Rather, Soul Mountain is one of the most ambitious and life-affirming stories ever bound.

Gao Xingjian was diagnosed with terminal lung cancer, at first, but this was soon to revealed to be a false alarm. The relief and the thirst for life that a pseudo second chance offered him, Gao travelled across the vast landscape of China and, in the end, Soul Mountain was born.

It’s an epic journey of a novel that’s as much about the landscape of people in China as it is about the nation’s geography and majesty.

Chronicle of a Blood Merchant by Yu Hua

Translated by Andrew Jones

Yu Hua, like Yan Lianke, is one of the most prominent and daring Chinese authors writing today. Based in Beijing and crafting stories through a satirical, critical lens, writing for Yu Hua is a dangerous and defiant act. In his book China in Ten Words, Yu discusses how lax slander and libel laws in China mean his words can be co-opted and manipulated with terrifying ease.

Yu’s Chinese novel Chronicle of a Blood Merchant tells a heart-wrenching tale of a man simply trying to survive during Mao’s Cultural Revolution, a period of Chinese history where a famine led to the deaths of countless millions.

Our protagonist relies on selling his own blood to the local blood chief in order to find the money to support his family. This becomes increasingly dangerous and is further complicated by the shame that comes from learning that one of his children is not actually his. This is a moving and desperate novel that captures a life and a moment in time where simply living a life was at its most difficult.

Love in the New Millennium by Can Xue

Translated by Annelise Finegan Wasmoen

In this list of Chinese novels, we’ve featured nine authors and only two of them are women. This is not fair, and I’m aware of that. Being aware of it doesn’t excuse anything but, unfortunately, the Chinese novels of male authors are still far more in abundance than those of women, at least for now.

Before we discuss Can Xue’s book, one way to level this gender playing field is to read a book I’ve already mentioned: the sci-fi short story collection Broken Stars. Many of the writers in this collection are women, and theirs are the best stories in the collection.

As for Can Xue, her novel Love in the New Millennium is a treasured and celebrated Chinese novel the world over. The author herself is considered by many to stand shoulder-to-shoulder with Yan Lianke as the pinnacle of Chinese authors today.

This novel, her newest, is an experimental and often comical piece of surrealism featuring fractured narratives that, despite how strange and abstract it often seems to be, proves to be a wholly addicting and thrilling Chinese novel.

The Four Books by Yan Lianke

Translated by Carlos Rojas

Yan Lianke is the only author to feature on this list twice, and that’s simply because, as previously mentioned, he is the best Chinese author writing today. Reading more Yan Lianke is vital on the road to enlightenment (or something like that).

Perhaps what’s most remarkable about Yan Lianke is the remarkable ability of his boundless imagination to constantly create new and clever ways to critique and satirise the ethics, methods, and philosophy of the Chinese government.

In The Four Books, perhaps Yan’s most celebrated and daring Chinese novel, academics, experts, and intellectuals are sent to “re-education camps” overseen by the Child. The satire is very much on the nose here – how many times have we referred to fascist leaders and their followers as children? – but the content is very much grounded in real and recent Chinese history.

The Four Books is a blistering and intense read, and one of the most vital must-read Chinese books you’ll ever find.

China Dream by Ma Jian

Translated by Flora Drew

The first and most important thing to know about Ma Jian, one of the most prolific Chinese writers around, is that he, like Yiyun Li, is a writer in exile. While she settled in New York, Ma Jian has been living in London for decades, where he loudly and frequently uses rights that were not afforded to him in China to protest the human rights violations of the Chinese government.

The first book of Ma Jian’s that I ever read, Red Dust, is a travelogue that documents Ma’s own journey from Beijing into the rugged landscape of China as a young bohemian artist in the ‘80s. While this book is a fascinating time capsule, it certainly reads like something written by a restless bohemian artist.

China Dream, published at the end of 2018, is a far more ambitious, scathing, and impassioned book. Rather than a travelogue, this is a Chinese novel that is full of piss and vinegar. A venomous attack on the ‘Chinese Dream’ that blends reality with fantasy to create a nightmarish dystopia that, at its core, doesn’t seem all that surreal.

Ghost Music by An Yu

Ghost Music is a wild card on this list simply because, though its author was born and raised in Beijing and now lives in Hong Kong, she writes her novels in English and so there is no translator. An Yu’s debut novel, Braised Pork was a bold and adventurous novel, heavily tinged with surrealism in a way reminiscent of Haruki Murakami.

Her second novel, Ghost Music, retains that feverish surrealism but refines it, cuts away the fat, and leaves us with something beautifully and tightly-crafted. Ghost Music follows a motherless married woman in Beijing whose mother-in-law has moved in with her. At the same time, our protagonist begins receiving strange packages: boxes of mushrooms.

While her husband is absorbed in his job at a car company and her mother-in-law reveals secrets about her son’s childhood (such as the fact that he is, in fact, not an only child), our protagonist must somehow maintain her grip on reality.

Our protagonist is also a piano teacher and daughter of a once-renowned pianist. The fact that an internationally celebrated pianist went missing years ago also factors into this tale. There are several moving pieces here, and surrealism seeps into all of it. There are strange dreams and talking mushrooms and a village drowning in pollen-like orange dust.

But it’s all deceptively simply, and at its heart this is a novel about family, and and about self-love and self-acceptance.

In fact, news from Bhutan rarely features in many newspapers. As a result, people know very little about Bhutan. Did you know Thimphu, the capital city, hosts a literary festival Mountain Echoes every August? The festival gives a big push towards inculcating reading habits in the younger and older generations and exposes readers to authors from around the world.

There have also been several other productive efforts (from public libraries to bookstores, from Read Bhutan to street library projects) to generate a greater interest in reading. Today, a large number of Bhutanese youngsters are also keen on pursuing writing as a career. 

Most of the country’s fictional work is written in English and captures a variety of themes from love to traditions, from folktales to the different facets of Bhutanese culture. Here’s a chance to brush up on our literary knowledge of Bhutan by reading these novels to get a glimpse of the country’s distinct and unique stories!

The Circle Of Karma by Kunzang Choden

Tsomo grows up in Bumthang, a dzongkhag or district in Bhutan, but leaves due to her troubled family situation. In doing so, she treads an uncertain path that eventually allows her to become a self-aware, strong and independent person.

Her travels take her to Bhutan’s capital, Thimphu, to the bordering town, Phuntsholing, and then, to Kalimpong and Pema Tso in India.

She even undertakes pilgrimages to Bodh Gaya, India and Nepal. The novel traces her interlinked travels and travails, while also giving a peek into Bhutanese culture and beliefs.

Most importantly, the novel acts as a critique of gender expectations and norms of Bhutanese society. The Circle Of Karma is the first novel to be published in English in Bhutan.

History In A Pebble  by Sonam Choden Dorji

The 90 poems of this collection are divided on the basis of three colours: jade, coral and turquoise. Each colour signifies a specific theme.

Jade poems are infused with spirituality while the coral and turquoise poems are deeply personal and speak of relationships with nature and the self.

The poems are simple and carry relatable metaphors that one connects with instantly. Written in free verse, each poem evokes a spirit of tranquillity in the reader. 

Lomba by Pema Euden

Pema Euden is one of Bhutan’s youngest authors. Lomba is the story of Seday, who moves from Thimphu to the district of Haa, away from her school and her friends.

However, even though she is initially a little disoriented, she is soon involved with the Lomba celebrations happening at that time. Lomba is the New Year festival celebrated in the Haa and Paro districts of Bhutan.

Several rituals are associated with the festival such as making hoentey (momos made from buckwheat flour with a filling of turnip leaves) and lu (small figures made out of flour to resemble spirits dwelling in water and on earth).

Seday is sceptical about the belief that one must eat a heavy dinner on the night of the Lomba to avoid being kidnapped by these spirits or lus.

She does not heed people’s advice and gets taken on a fantastical adventure into the world of lus. Not only does the novel provide detailed information about the different rituals carried out during Lomba, it also takes the reader on a dangerous yet fun-filled adventure with Seday.  

Read More: 13 Must-Read Indian Books in English

Bhutanese Folktales From The South And The East by Gopilal Acharya

The 20 folktales featured in this collection present universal Buddhist values such as the repercussions of good and bad deeds and cultural traditions such as the importance of hard work and of family. These values form an integral part of the daily lives of the people in southern and eastern Bhutan even today 

Tales In Colour And Other Stories by Kunzang Choden

Kunzang Choden is one of the most widely read and respected authors in Bhutan. This book is a beautiful collection of short stories that are both idyllic and empowering. All of the 13 stories narrate the ordinary yet remarkable lives of the women in Bhutan and how they navigate ideas of identity and femininity.  

The Ballad Of Pemi Tshewang Tashi

Translated by Karma Ura

This ballad or lozey (a Bhutanese form of oral storytelling that captures historical incidents in an epic format) has been translated to English by Karma Ura.

It recounts the true story of the chamberlain, Pemi Tshewang Tashi, who was ordered by his superior, Wangdue Dzongpon, to assist Dungkar Gyeltshen (the ruler of the Trongsa region) in the war against Choje Pem Tenzin of Bumthang.

The ballad portrays the conflict that Pemi faces between his desire to remain at home with his family and his duty to his superior.

The events mentioned in the ballad occurred in the late 1800s when many power struggles led to battles between the various chiefs of the region. An animated film based on this ballad was produced by iBest Studios in 2018.

Born In Jangbi by Damber S. Mongar

The novel is set in Jangbi village in the Trongsa district and talks about the ethnic community of the Monpas. Specifically, it focuses on one Monpa, Sangayla, who, through his hard work and education, is able to become the Education Minister in Bhutan.

It is a poignant rags-to-riches story that inspires people to always be committed to their goals and to know that, slowly and steadily, their dedication and efforts will pay off.

Butter Tea At Sunrise by Britta Das

The only book featured in this list to be written by a non-Bhutanese, Butter Tea At Sunrise is a memoir by Britta Das who had, in 1997, come from Canada to serve as a physiotherapist in Mongar, a district in eastern Bhutan. The novel narrates her experiences with her patients, the local people and how she adjusts to the cold and to the food.

It is an outsider’s view of Mongar, but one that is not tainted by prejudice. Her novel allows readers to also vicariously travel and experience Bhutan: from drinking the titular butter tea or suja to going on treks through high mountainous passes and rhododendron forests.

Within The Realm Of Happiness by Kinley Dorji

This collection of 13 stories merges fiction and creative nonfiction and offers witty commentary on various contemporary facets of Bhutan and its people from the growing urbanisation of the country to the importance of storytelling.

Kinley Dorji also chronicles his own whimsical travels to Japan, Paddington station in London and The Royal Highland Festival in Laya in the Gasa district of northern Bhutan. These stories are a great way to know more about a changing Bhutan and its constant conflict between its culture and increasing modernity.

Dawa: The Story Of A Stray Dog In Bhutan by Kunzang Choden

Dawa is a much-loved fictional dog of Bhutan, particularly among the students, since the novel is a part of the school curriculum across the country.

Dawa, the dog, travels through cold valleys and passes to reach Thimphu. His journey is fraught with difficulties but, on reaching Thimphu, he settles down to the mundane routine of city life and even becomes a leader of howling!

The novel, thus, becomes the perfect allegory through which school children can question their own society. 

Khakey by Yeshi Tsheyang Zam

Khakey was launched at Mountain Echoes in 2017. Written by Yeshi Zam, who was only 11 at that time, and illustrated by Chand Bhattarai, it is a lovely story of a disappearing tradition called ‘khakey’. It is observed in Paro on the first day of snowfall when neighbours secretly try to deliver a big ball of snow to each other.

The ball is filled with an assortment of goodies, especially food items. If the neighbour succeeds in doing so, then the losing family has to prepare dinner for them. The beautiful, bright illustrations make this short tale much more engaging, while also trying to put the spotlight on a ritual that is vanishing from the cultural ethos of the people.

Bhutanese Tales Of The Yeti by Kunzang Choden

Yeti, the abominable snowman, is known as migoe in Bhutan. Kunzang Choden brings together 22 oral stories centred on the migoe from four different regions of the country. The stories are entertaining and give us a glimpse into the beliefs that people hold toward this gigantic mythical creature.

Read More: 10 Burmese Books to Read Before Visiting Myanmar

Eat, Pray Love by Elizabeth Gilbert

Many are familiar with Gilbert’s popular novel/memoir, Eat, Pray, Love. One of the best books about Rome depicts a woman who travels around the world after filing for divorce from her husband. Her first pitstop is Italy, where both Rome and Naples are explored.

Her travels are all about rediscovering herself while trying to pull herself out of depression. And what better place to do that than Rome?

Liz wanders around the labyrinth of beautiful architecture, cobbled streets, and monuments dotted around the city, including the notorious breathtaking view of Tiber River from the top of Castel Saint’Angelo. While also making  the food that Rome has to offer, of course.

Pictures From Italy by Charles Dickens

Jumping back in time to the Victorian era, Pictures From Italy is a travelogue documenting Dickens’ travels in 1844. This classic text makes a beautiful read before travelling to Rome as it helps paint a picture of Rome during a more recent era than the Ancient and Medieval times with which the city is usually associated, making it one of the very best books about Rome. 

Dickens is known for his literary descriptions and social commentary of Victorian England. In this book, he applies the same novelist eye to Rome and the rest of Italy, placing the stark contrast to industrial Britain in the spotlight. It’s worth reading as Dickens portrays Rome’s modernisation during a different time, the effects of which are still visible today. 

SPQR by Mary Beard

This one is for the non-fiction lovers: Mary Beard takes us on a journey through Rome’s vibrant history using the voices of people often overlooked throughout Italian history – women, children and the poor. Similar to Dickens, Beard exposes Rome in a new way in SPQR, using the above demographics she chose to depict a different side to the popular stories and legends that we all know today.

Rome Tales by Hugh Shankland & Helen Constantine

This collection of stories span hundreds of years and create a vivid image of Rome through the works of well-known Italian authors, such as Boccaccio and Casanova.

What’s interesting about this book is that the stories are not in chronological order. Instead, they’re ordered in a way that reflects Rome’s current state: a modern city that continues to thrive, placed between ancient tales told by breathtaking monuments standing strong over the cobbled streets.

Each story adds a different layer to the city, which resonates with you as you explore Rome yourself.

Read More: the Italian literature masterpiece A Devil Comes to Town

A Literary Companion To Rome by John Varriano

This book is a spectacular addition to your suitcase. A Literary Companion To Rome provides ten different walking tours around Rome guided by the words of many beloved writers, including Dante, Dickens, and Wilde – all of which have documented their adoration for the city in one way or another.

Rome has many literary hotspots for bookworms alike, but for those who still can’t get enough, this book allows you to walk through the steps of literary legends and discover parts of Rome that you may not have found before.

Angels And Demons by Dan Brown

Dan Brown’s Robert Langdon series needs no introduction – it’s praised all over the world. In Angels And Demons, we explore the labyrinth of the grand, stately rooms of The Vatican, where a canister guards the buildings waiting to explode.

The religious history of the city is explored, including the Vatican’s archives, Santa Maria Della Victoria Basilica, and the Pope’s tunnel that connects Castel Saint’ Angelo to his library in The Vatican. Paintings by Baroque artist Gian Lorenzo Bernini also play a significant role.

While there are many proven inaccuracies in the plot of this novel, it’s certainly still enjoyable. And it’s nice to read a story that’s so involved in the Vatican itself, providing us with another type of entry into the museums.

Italian Hours by Henry James

The final sentence of this book is ‘the luxury of loving Italy,’ which captures the feeling of living life to the fullest Rome – it’s undoubtedly one unlike any other. James wrote his travelogue Italian Hours in the late 19^th century and is composed of essays of praise and evaluation of the Italian culture that he witnessed.

However, what I like about this collection is that it juxtaposes the luxury of Rome with that of the poor and more disadvantageous. This opens our eyes to the diversity of Rome’s population and the voices that come together, telling the stories of Italy. Of course, this idea is applicable today.

Conclave by Robert Harris

Conclave has been described as ‘unputdownable’ by The Guardian; this novel is about the Cardinals of The Vatican deciding the next successor of the Pope now that he is dead. Of course, it’s not that simple, as many holes are discovered while tracing his death, and more secrets are revealed –  not only concerning the Pope, but the cardinals and the Vatican itself as the story goes on.

This novel takes us further into The Vatican than we can ever possibly go – into the debates of the cardinals as they try to decide on the next Pope. While the book is obviously fictitious, it’s interesting to look at The Vatican from the perspective of someone who’s inspired by the people who work within the museums themselves.

Conclusion

These books add different layers to Rome, and when combined, we see a clear picture of what the city looks like from the many aspects of Roman society – past and present, which is what makes these eight books some of the very best books about Rome.

The writers of these books were captivated by their explorations of the Eternal City – and it’s not hard to see why. Rome is full of history that’s surrounded by vibrant culture, unlike any other, formed from its well-known, varied history. These writers appreciated this when they visited Rome, and after reading them, you certainly will, too.

If you loved these books about Italy, check out some of our other book lists from cities around the world.

Despite these long literary traditions, the Khmer literature available in English is almost exclusively about the Khmer Rouge. For those unaware, the Khmer Rouge was the name given to the Communist Party of Kampuchea (CPK).

Although the name originated in the 1950s as a general term for the Cambodia left, it was popularised in 1975 by the genocidal Pol Pot regime. Pol Pot was a cruel and vile dictator who ruled Cambodia between 1975 to 1979. He and the Khmer Rouge party are responsible for upwards of 1 million deaths (the exact number is unknown).

Millions of Cambodians were rounded up, imprisoned and tortured. Many were brought to the “killing fields,” a phrase coined by Cambodian journalist Dith Pran for the 20,00 sites across Cambodia where people were executed.

Pol Pot initially targeted members of the royal family, those in government positions and anyone well educated, including French speakers (although he and many of his high ranking officials spoke French). However, these were not the only people killed during his reign of terror.

When I moved to Cambodia in 2015, I sought to read as many books as possible on the country, and am always on the lookout for more.

Essential Books to Read Before Visiting Cambodia

There are many excellent books about the Khmer Rouge atrocities (some of which are listed below), and I could easily just write a list about the best books on the subject. Instead, I have included books about a range of topics to give a better overall picture of Cambodia. But I won’t lie, the Khmer Rouge’s legacy is hard to avoid.

When Broken Glass Floats: Growing Up Under the Khmer Rouge by Chanrithy Him

The most famous memoir of the Khmer Rouge genocide is First They Killed My Father by Loung Ung, and it’s a fine book, but I want to highlight another fantastic account of a childhood lost and family destroyed by the Khmer Rouge.

Him’s writing is poetic and raw. Amidst the horror and tragedy, she also shares stories of Khmer Rouge members who show her moments of kindness.

I personally prefer Him’s book to Loung’s, but they are both worth reading. If you are also interested in reading a fictional account about a young girl growing up under the Khmer Rouge, I highly recommend In the Shadow of the Banyan by Vaddey Ratner, which is potentially my favourite of the three

Read More: Books to Read Before Travelling Southeast Asia

Survival in the Killing Fields by Haing Ngor

Haing Ngor became famous for his portrayal as Dith Pran in the 1984 film The Killing Fields.It is partially because of the incredible support he received for his role that he was encouraged to write his own story down. In Survival in the Killing Fields Haing, who was a doctor, paints a terrifying picture of life under the Khmer Rouge for someone with education.

Haing is unflinchingly honest, even when it is incredibly painful. In one of the book’s most heartbreaking scenes, he recounts his internal struggle as he is forced to watch his wife bleed out during childbirth in a crowded room. As a doctor — a gynaecologist and obstetrician, no less — Haing knew exactly how to save her and the baby, but also knew doing so would result in all three of them being murdered.

The Lost Executioner: A Journey to the Heart of the Killing Fields by Nic Dunlop

In 1999, Kang Kek Iew (or Comrade Duch) was apprehended for his role in the Khmer Rouge. He was the head of the S-21 Tuol Sleng prison, notorious for its horrific torture. Of the nearly 20,000 people interred within, there are only twelve known survivors (seven adults and five children).

Duch was convicted for crimes against humanity in 2010 after several years of trial. For many years he was the only member of the Khmer Rouge to be tried – let alone convicted. He is also the only one to ever apologise for what he did.

Nic Dunlop was haunted by a photo he saw of Duch and needed to know why. The Lost Executioner attempts to answer that question by not only delving into Duch’s past and examining his motivations, but questioning why and how the world could turn a blind eye.

Following the fall of Pol Pot and the Khmer Rouge, almost no members of the party were apprehended or tried, despite pressure from many Cambodians and human rights groups.

There are many reasons for this, including rampant corruption at state level and the fact that many still in power have ties to the former Khmer Rouge party.

Although there have been a handful of convictions, including the two remaining living senior officials in 2018, the tribunals have been fraught delays and interference.

River of Time by Jon Swain

This feels a bit like a cheat because it’s not entirely about Cambodia. River of Time is Swain’s memoir of his time as a journalist war correspondent in Indochina (especially modern day Vietnam). However, the book does cover the rise of the Khmer Rouge and the evacuation of Phnom Penh, as Swain was there when it happened.

River of Time is an excellent book and provides insight into the escalating tensions throughout the entire region leading up to the Khmer war.

This is one of the rare instances where an outsider — due to his ability to travel more freely around the region — is able to provide a better understanding of what is happening in Cambodia and why. Jon Swain is played by Julian Sands in the film The Killing Fields.

Read More: Exploring Cambodia’s History with Jon Swain’s River of Time

Holiday in Cambodia by Laura Jean McKay

If you prefer short stories, Holiday in Cambodia is the book for you. These stories are all intimate slices of life in Cambodia, some about foreigners, some about Cambodians. They range in time from the 1950s to the 1990s.

Don’t go into this thinking that short stories will be easier to read than a book about the Khmer Rouge. For one, many of the stories confront the realities of the aftermath war. But many of these stories are also disturbing and poignant.

From the brothels of Phnom Penh and forced marriage under the Khmer Rouge to vampires, landmines and aid agencies, there’s a story here for everyone.

Temple of a Thousand Faces by John Shors

Cambodia’s most popular attraction is the ancient city of Angkor, and the giant Hindu temple of Angkor Wat its most visited site (and the largest religious site in the world).

Temple of a Thousand Faces takes us back in time to the construction of Angkor Wat, which is the backdrop to the warring Cham and Khmer nations.

Although a lot of the book is dedicated to battle (and fair warning, it can get quite bloody), there is also a great deal about the food, the clothing, the tools and other aspects of everyday ancient Khmer life. Many of these can still be seen in modern Khmer life.

It is obvious Shors loves the subject matter, and for anyone visiting Angkor Wat and looking to read more about it, this is a must.

Read More: Books to Read Before you Visit Myanmar (Burma)

The Ramayana by Valmiki

Now this may seem like a weird choice for a book list about Cambodia seeing as it is an Indian classic, but hear me out. One of the most unique cultural experiences to have in Cambodia is going to a shadow puppet show. These cool plays use flat cut-outs with intricate designs held up and moved against the light to tell a story.

Many of the stories used in shadow puppet plays come from the Cambodian version of the Ramayana, the Reamker, and they are, naturally, in Khmer, not English. However, the Reamker is quite difficult to find, so I recommend familiarising yourself with the Ramayana instead so you can follow along while you’re in Cambodia.

If you’re keen to read distinctly Cambodian folklore instead, check out Cambodian Folk Stories from the Gatiloke by Kong Chhean. These stories are unlikely to pop up in a shadow play, though.

The Baltic states refer to the countries of Estonia, Latvia and Lithuania, all of which were once part of the Soviet Union. This is pretty monumental in understanding Baltic literature as a lot of it — at least what is available in English – has to do with WWII, communism, and the Soviet occupation.

That isn’t to say that Baltic literature didn’t exist pre-1940s, but once again, what is available in English is limited. Indeed, the Baltics actually have a rich literary history, especially when it comes to folklore. Myths and legends remain incredibly important in the region.

This is evident in Estonia, considered to be one of the least religious countries in the world, where most of the population don’t consider themselves religious or atheist, but celebrate the old pagan beliefs of their ancestors such as the solstices. In fact, neopaganism is on the rise in Estonia.

Additionally, Lithuania continues to celebrate its mythical heroes with several sculpture parks, such as the Hill of Witches on the Curonian Spit or the fairy tale park in Palanga. Luckily, as interest in the Baltic region grows, more and more literature is being translated, including contemporary literature. Some of which beautifully pays homage to this particular tradition of storytelling.

Great Works of Baltic Literature

It’s safe to say I could have made this entire list of baltic literature about the region’s tragic past. But there are some fantastic titles coming out of the region that wouldn’t have made it were that the case, and that seems almost criminal. Still, it was incredibly difficult to narrow down this list!

While this is a list of fiction, there’s some great non-fiction to read if you’re looking to learn more about Baltic history or about the current geopolitical climate, a great example is an upcoming work The Shadow in the East: Vladimir Putin and the New Baltic Front by Aliide Naylor.

Books Set in Estonia

Right, let’s dive into some of the best Baltic literature of all time. Starting at the top of the Baltics, here are some books set in Estonia for you to dig into first, before you visit the Baltics yourself.

The Man Who Spoke Snakish by Andrus Kivirähk

Translated by Christopher Moseley

It seems appropriate to start off with a book that is rooted in Estonian mythology. The Man Who Spoke Snakish is set in Medieval Estonia and explores the age old conflict of modernisation using magical realism and fairytales.

The Man Who Spoke Snakish is set in Medieval Estonia and explores the age old conflict of modernisation using magical realism and fairytales. The book follows Leemet, a young Estonian boy, who grew up in the forest in isolation with his mother and sister following the death of his father. But Leemet speaks snakish so able is to converse with all animals.

The conflict arises as Leetmet grapples with the crumbling of his forest home and his family’s traditional as more and more of the near villagers opt for city life, causing the forest to be cleared for housing. Amidst Leemet coming to terms with the transformation of his way of life are the stories of the animals he shares the forest with, many of whom possess their own magical abilities.

When the Doves Disappeared by Sofi Oksanen

Translated by Lola Rogers

When the Doves Disappeared follows three Estonians: freedom fighter, Roland, his opportunistic cousin, Edgar, and Juudit, the wife that Edgar has abandoned in order to save himself. We see Roland, Edgar and Juudit’s endure first in 1940 Nazi-occupied Estonia and then watch as they wrestle with past demons as their country falls under the watchful eye of Communist USSR.

This book adeptly explores the intricacies of war and oppression and the lengths people will go to in order to survive. If you’re curious about life in Estonia under both these regimes, including the transition between them, this should be top of your reading list. As an added bonus, you’ll also learn about the long standing relationship between Estonia and Finland.

Everything is Wonderful: Memories of a Collective Farm in Estonia by Sigrid Rausing

From 1993-94 Sigrid Rausing lived in Pürksi, a rural village in Noarootsi Parish on the peninsula of Estonia, carrying out anthropological fieldwork for her PhD. Despite what the title may suggest, she does not live on a farm, but in a post-collectivism society. Collectivism being the strict agrarian rules laid out by the Soviets that enabled them to take control over farms and rural production.

Until a few years prior when Estonia regained independence, Noarootsi had been a protected zone under Soviet rule. When Rausing moved there, it felt considerably dreary and derelict. Nevertheless, she sets out getting to know the locals and learn their stories. She is particularly interested in exploring memory in Estonia and how the repression of history had effected local perception of events.

Although the book is quite bleak at times, Rausing offers wonderful insight into post-Soviet and post-Collectivism life in rural Estonia, and the poverty of those left behind in smaller areas.

If you’re looking for a non-fiction book set in Estonia – or the Baltics – that explores life for the average Estonian after Soviet rule, I highly recommend giving this one a go. It is rather heartbreaking at times, but shows a side of the country that tourists rarely see.

Everything is Wonderful is based on her anthropological research, but it is a memoir and reads without an academic lens.

Estonian Life Stories

Edited and translated by Tiina Kirss; compiled by Rutt Hinrikus

This book brings together 25 stories from Estonians who survived the 20th century. Although all three Baltic countries recently celebrated 100 years of independence in 2018, the truth is that following their brief independence in 1920 from Russia (following the War of Independence which began in 1918), they were then occupied by Germany, and again by the Soviets.

Following the Depression, Estonia was under authoritarian rule from 1934 to 1938. This period is known as the Era of Silence. Sadly, their troubles were only just beginning, and in 1939, both Germany and the Soviet Union tried to annex Estonia.

For awhile, Germany did gain the greater foothold. As was happening all across, Estonia’s Jews were thrown into camps and massacred. The Estonian Jews were almost completely wiped out. Following WWII, the Soviet Union absorbed Estonia back into its embrace and began a reign of terror.

These wonderful stories of everyday Estonians doing what they can to get by provide great insight into life under foreign rule, as well as life in the Baltic states in general.

Books Set in Latvia

Latvia, and especially its capital city of Riga, is a place of stunning history and architecture, wonderful food, and some very vibrant and exciting literary history. You can find out lots more on the Latvian Literature website where you can also discover Latvian translators, illustrators, history, and more. Here are some to get you started.

DOOM 94 by Jānis Joņevs

Translated by Kaija Straumanis

Doom 94 is a coming of age novel set in the Latvian town of Jelgava (the book was originally called Jelgava 94 in Latvian) that gives us an insight into the Latvia’s youth of the 1990s.

The book explores the question of identity as the protagonist, Joņevs, his friends and family adjust to living in a newly independent nation following the collapse of the Soviet Union. And what better way to express their frustrations and individualism than through heavy metal music.

The book is a wonderful exploration of the Latvian subculture scene and everyday Latvian life during the 1990s. It’s also a must read for music lovers.

The Book of Riga

edited by Becca Parkinson & Eva Eglaja-Kristsone

This is a short little book comprised of ten short stories by Latvian authors. The book is put out by Comma Press, who had also published similar collections for several other cities.

The Book of Riga opens with a forward by former Latvian president, Vaira Vike-Freiberga, detailing a brief history of Latvia. So even those completely unfamiliar with the history, will be able to put the stories into context once reading.

Not all of the stories will be for everyone but that’s the beauty of this collection, it brings together various styles and narratives to tell the story of Riga – a city over 800 years old! The stories range from supernatural (‘The Night Shift’) to the seemingly mundane (‘The Girl Who Cut My Hair’) as we see everyday Rigans living their lives. Baltic literature at its finest.

Among The Living And The Dead: A Tale of Exile and Homecoming on the War Roads of Europe by Inara Verzemnieks

Inara Verzemniek’s grandmother, Livija, fled Latvia during WWII as the Nazis fought the Soviets over the Baltics. But Livija was separated from her sister, Ausma. Livija winds up as a refugee in America, while Ausma, and many members of their family, are exiled to Siberia.

Wanting to meet her family still living in Latvia, Inara travels to Latvia to stay with Ausma. There, she begins to unearth stories not only of Ausma’s life, but of her grandmother’s struggle, as well. This exquisite memoir about family, love and hardship deftly recounts the stories of Inara’s grandmother and grand-aunt during WWII and after as they try to piece back together their lives.

But the book also weaves in slices of Latvian life both before and during the war as Inara begins to better understand her family’s history. If you’re looking for a good non-fiction read set in Latvia and the Baltics, this is the one!

The Dogs of Riga by Henning Mankell

Translated by Laurie Thompson

I love a good murder mystery set abroad. I actually think they there an excellent way to delve into some of seedier aspects of a country’s history and culture. Which is to say this particular murder mystery, set predominantly in Riga, explores an immediately post-Soviet Latvia as it tries to heal from over 50 years of oppression.

It’s 1991 and Inspector Kurt Wallander is trying to unravel the mystery of two dead bodies washed ashore in Sweden. Wallander unexpectedly finds himself travelling to Riga – just across the Baltic Sea – as he continues to investigate the deaths.

The harder Wallander digs, the more frustrated he becomes, caught up in the never ending bureaucracy of a country trying to rebuild itself while still falling back into familiar territory. He will have to get past police surveillance, corruption and secrecy if he’s going to find out what happened!

Although it is second in the Wallender series, The Dogs of Riga reads fine as a standalone if you’re only looking for books set in the Baltics, rather than an entirely new series to dig into. I haven’t read the first one, and there there were only a handful of references to what I assume happens in the first book, but nothing that terribly distracted from the story.

Read More: Find great things to do in Riga (including our favourite bookshops) in our Riga City Guide

Books Set in Lithuania

Lithuania is a peaceful, friendly, and beautiful place of jaw-dropping Communist history waiting to be explored. Before you set out, though, here are some of the very best books set in Lithuania.

White Shroud by Antanas Škėma

Translated by Karla Gruodis

White Shroud, one of the great works of Baltic literature, is often considered required reading for Lithuanians, and for good reason. Initially the book follows protagonist Antanas Garšva as he adjusts to emigre life in 1950s New York City. There he works as an elevator operator for a popular hotel, and he struggles to fit into his new life.

As the book progresses we begin to catch glimpses of his life in Lithuania both before and after WWII and what brought him to America in the first place. White Shroud is written as a stream of consciousness, but it is never difficult to follow or engage with the narrator as he navigates between lives.

Tūla by Jurgis Kunčinas

Translated by Elizabeth Novickas

If you ever go to Vilnius, the capital of Lithuania, one of the places you will inevitably find yourself visiting is Užupis, an [unofficial] independent nation within the city. Today Užupis is a popular destination for tourists with a good quality of life — and as such prices have increased considerably. But that wasn’t always the case.

In 1993, when Tūla was first published, Užupis was a Bohemian enclave stuffed full of starving artists and those who were merely starving. Tūla follows an unnamed narrator as he navigates life in Užupis. The reader is introduced to a whole host of strange and mysterious residents of the city within a city. However, none grab the narrators attention so much as the beautiful Tūla, a fellow misfit of Užupis.

Vilnius Poker by Ričardas Gavelis

Translated Elizabeth Novickas

Delve into the paranoid world of Soviet-occupied Lithuania. Vytautas Vargalys is paranoid. And why shouldn’t he be after years spent in a labour camp? Now he does his best to keep to himself by working at a library – a place no one visits since knowledge is dangerous.

All around Vytautas people are dying – both physically and mentally. So he sets out to find who is destroying the people around him.

Set in Lithuania during the 1970s and 80s, Vilnius Poker perfectly embodies the rage, frustration and impotence of a people trapped under the thumb of Communism and Soviet rule. It is truly a miracle this book was even allowed to be published in 1989, even if the USSR was beginning to crumble.

The Last Book Smuggler by Birute Putrius

It seems fitting to finish this list with a book that captures the importance of books and literature to the Baltic people. This beautiful book tells the story of Ada and her grandfather, Viktoras. It is 1902, and Viktoras is a book smuggler. He risks his life to smuggle books in and around Lithuania under the watchful eye of Russia’s Red Army.

He does this because he understands the significance of keeping his language alive, despite the Russian Empire’s attempts to erase it from memory. The Last Book Smuggler demonstrates the lengths some will go to in order to protect the sanctity of language for future generations. But it is also a book about love, loss, struggle, and resistance.

This piece of Baltic literature is based on Birute Putrius’ real grandfather, who was, in fact, a book smuggler.

From World War II to today, via the rise of industry, animation, and video game culture. From the rise of Buddhism in the 7th century to the Meiji Restoration 150 years ago, and all the art, culture, war, and change that came and went along the way. All of that and more can be found here in these ten best books on Japan (both history and culture).

Best Books on Japanese Culture

Japanese culture is often romanticized by people all around the world, and this isn’t for no good reason. There are a lot of aspects of Japanese culture to be impressed by and to learn from. This stretches from technological innovation to social manners and graces to shared philosophies.

If you’re looking for the best books on Japan which explore the cultural side of Japanese history — from anime and video games to more abstract philosophical concepts — here are five of the best books on Japanese culture. These books on Japan can help you you to enjoy and, broaden your understanding of, Japanese culture, both past and present.

Pure Invention by Matt Alt

Pure Invention is, to put it bluntly, one of the most powerful books on Japanese culture you will ever read. Whether you’re interested in Japanese culture because you grew up on anime, manga, video games, and Hello Kitty, or you’re interested from an economic, political, and industrial perspective, both interests are met here. This is a very new book, but it will go down as one of the best books on Japan, period.

In Pure Invention, Matt Alt tackles the modern history of Japan (World War II to today) through the lens of its popular culture and how that pop culture (anime, fashion, karaoke and Walkmans, toys and games, kawaii culture etc) quite literally conquered the 20th century.

This book is written with elegance and passion, with a phenomenal amount of research behind it. We learn so much about the people who led the charge: the designers, toymakers, artists, animators, and businessmen who forged modern Japan. There are few books on Japan as influential and inspiring as Pure Invention.

Lost Japan by Alex Kerr

Alex Kerr is a fascinating individual. An American who moved to Japan in the early years of his adulthood, he very quickly mastered the language. From here, Kerr built a house in the countryside, and wasted no time in researching and forming an obsession with the traditional arts culture of Japan. And that’s what Lost Japan is all about.

In this fantastic book on Japanese culture, Alex Kerr looks at famous traditions and arts from across Japanese history (tea ceremonies, bunraku and noh theatre, calligraphy, and so much more). He explores the history and traditions, the dedication and mastery, the origins and legacies of these various arts and crafts from Japan.

If you’re looking for the best books on Japan because you’re fascinated by the traditional arts and crafts — theatre, design, painting, writing — then Lost Japan is the book on Japanese culture that you’re looking for.

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Fifty Sounds by Polly Barton

Fifty Sounds is an exploration and experience of Japanese culture through immersion and language learning. At the age of twenty-one, Polly Barton took the JET programme and found herself on a small Japanese island.

During her time working as a teacher, Barton fell into a deep love affair with the Japanese language. She became enamoured with its sounds, its onomatopoeia, its unique quirks, and its way of distilling life experiences.

In Fifty Sounds, we see how the Japanese language led Barton to experience new feelings and see the world differently. It took her life down a unique path that eventually led to her becoming a Japanese-to-English translator.

If you’re looking for one of the best books on Japan to really hone in on the Japanese language, this is it. Fifty Sounds explores modern Japanese culture through a linguistic and philosophical lens. It is also laugh-out-loud funny, full of tragic moments, love, sex, and frustration. Deeply philosophical and hilarious in equal measure.

Japanese Tattoos: History, Culture, Design by Brian Ashcraft and Hori Benny

Brian Ashcraft has spent twenty years living  in Osaka and writing for publications such as Kotaku and The Japan Times. He has also published multiple books on Japan, from the history of whisky to the cultural revolution led by the Japanese schoolgirl.

In Japanese Tattoos: History, Culture, Design, Ashcraft explores exactly that. After all, Japanese tattoos are famous the world over. Tattoo lovers with no real interest in Japanese culture still enjoy tattoos depicting dragons, koi fish, phoenixs, and cranes. But where does all of this come from, culturally speaking?

This photo-heavy book explores the craft of tebori (the traditional act of tattooing in Japan), as well as interviews with prominent Japanese tattoo artists working today. If you’ve ever wanted to better understand the imagery and background of Japanese tattoos, and how tattoos have historically been such an integral part of Japanese culture, this is the book for you.

Forest Bathing by Hector Garcia and Francesc Miralles

Hector Garcia found international fame with his book A Geek in Japan but his newest book in collaboration with Francesc Miralles explores a more specific philosophy of Japanese culture. Forest Bathing examines the practice and the benefits of what the Japanese call shinrin yoku.

In an increasingly busy world of exhausting work culture, rising levels of pollution, and exponential urban population growth, it is more vital than ever before for us to find a way to switch off, escape to nature, and reconnect with the Earth.

The Japanese practice of shinrin yoku has countless physical, emotional, and mental health benefits, and they are all explored here in this book.

As the best books on Japan go, this one is both very specific and very broad. Though it tackles on concept within popular Japanese philosophy, it also spans the globe and examines how other cultures have traditionally done similar things. Forest Bathing ties Japanese culture to the world while simultaneously showing us what is so unique about Japanese philosophy.

Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life by Hector Garcia and Francesc Miralles

Before Garcia and Miralles released Forest Bathing, they exploded onto the scene as a revelatory writing pair with their book Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life.

Similar to the Danish concept of hygge, ikigai has become a very popular word in recent years, but there truly are some really fascinating lessons to be learned here, as well as some eye-opening historical and cultural facts and details to be found.

This is not a light and fluffy self-help book, by any means, Ikigai: The Japanese Secret to a Long and Happy Life looks at the philosophy of finding one’s purpose or meaning in life. The book explores how that idea has been approached by different peoples across Japan — both geographically and historically.

The best books on Japan all look at some seemingly enigmatic aspect of Japanese history, culture, or philosophy and attempt to offer us a better understanding of that subject. In Ikigai, Garcia and Miralles absolutely manage this. There are revelations to be found in this, easily one of the best books on Japanese culture.

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Best Japanese History Books

With Japan having such a rich and fascinating history, and elements of its history so famous around the world, there is an undeniable allure for people wanting to read the best books on Japan, especially Japanese history.

Many of us want to better understand the samurai and shogun, Shinto and Buddhism, the post-war transformation of modern Japan, the history of Japanese writing systems, art, literature, and aesthetics, here are five Japanese history books to answer all of those questions and more.

Stranger in the Shogun’s City: A Woman’s Life in Nineteenth Century Japan by Amy Stanley

This is a book that manages to do a lot of things very, very well. Stanley should perhaps be most praised for her ability to take the all but unknown story of a woman who lived two hundred years ago and uncover enough of her story to then transform it into something as compelling and narrative as a novel.

Not only does Stranger in the Shogun’s City read like a beautiful historical novel set in Edo period Japan; it also works as a gripping and enlightening Japanese history book, painting a vivid and detailed image of both city and rural life.

Beginning in Japan’s snow country, Stranger in the Shogun’s City follows the early life of Tsuneno, daughter of a local monk, as she grows up in a world similar to that of Belle, hoping for more than this provincial life. She is married and divorced three times before the age of thirty, only to then leave for Edo (the city we now call Tokyo).

At the time, Edo was a growing, expanding military and commercial capital of Japan, and Tsuneno travels there to discover the beating heart of her nation. She must learn and adapt and understand. All of what we read is true, built around astonishing and diligent research from Amy Stanley.

Stranger in the Shogun’s City is an outstanding Japanese history book, as enticing and fluid as any novel. It brings to life a fascinating period of Japanese history and shines a light on the life of a woman from a place nobody knows, a woman who swims against the current to do something different with her life.

Japan Story: In Search of a Nation by Christopher Harding

Everything changed in the middle of the 19th century. Until this point, Japan had been living for more than 200 years in a time known as the Edo period: an era of national peace after centuries of civil war. With the opening of Japan’s borders came a period of westernisation, in fashion, architecture, law, and economics.

From here, Japan went to war with Russia, forged an empire, captured Taiwan and Korea, and became an axis power during World War II. Then, from loss and economic devastation came a new cultural revolution which led to the Japan we know today.

All of this, and so, so much more is explored in rich and fascinating detail in Christopher Harding’s fantastic book, Japan Story: In Search of a Nation (1850 – Present). This book is an almost intimate narrative history of Japan from the street level, and a must-read Japanese history book for anyone curious about the political, economic, and empirical history of Japan.

The Japanese: A History in Twenty Lives by Christopher Harding

The second Christopher Harding book on this list is a fantastic follow-up to Japan Story. While Harding’s first book covered a specific and narrow sliver of Japanese history, The Japanese is much larger in scope, and it handles that scope in a clever way.

The Japanese follows the complete history of Japan, beginning so far back in time as to slip into myth and unconfirmed stories, before taking twenty jumps through time to meet us back in the modern day. The conceit here is that Japan’s history is taught to us through twenty select historical figures: politicians, artists, inventors, samurai, and more. Important and impactful people, famous and forgotten alike.

Each of the twenty people of Japanese history covered here represent their era in some way. They get a chapter focussed on their lives, exploits, and accomplishments, but that chapter will also give plenty of political and cultural background details in order to build the world of Japan that they lived through.

The Japanese is an engaging and dynamic book with a lot to teach us. It’s a clever and addictive way of relaying so much disparate information, chaining it together, tightly contextualising it, and making it easily digestible for any reader interested in finding the best books on Japan.

A Brief History of Japan: Samurai, Shogun and Zen by Jonathan Clements

Jonathan Clements is a favourite writer of mine: an expert in both Chinese and Japanese history, an author of books on both, and a fluent speaker of both languages. An impressive character by any definition. A Brief History of Japan is one of Clements’ newest books, one of his shortest, most accessible, and yet broadest in terms of subject matter.

If you’re looking for a concise history of Japan, you’ll certainly find it here. This book covers more than 1500 years of Japanese history with clarity, simplicity, and no shortage of passion. You’ll come to understand Shinto, samurai, Zen Buddhism, the Sengoku Jidai, and so much more.

You’ll also learn fascinating facts about many of Japanese history’s most infamous people (like how shogun Ashikaga Yoshimitsu was gay and, in 14th century Japan, that just wasn’t a big deal).

A Brief History of Japan is written with whimsy, character, and real passion. Where the best books on Japan (history or culture) are concerned, this is one that I cannot recommend enough. It’s a fun and fascinating time from cover to cover.

The Bells of Old Tokyo by Anna Sherman

Anna Sherman’s approach to writing is poetic and infectious. In The Bells of Old Tokyo, she takes herself on a journey around Japan’s capital, down its narrow yokocho alleyways and up its tallest towers, searching through the history of Tokyo to try and understand the city’s very soul.

This book is very personal and personable, led by Sherman’s own narrative and interwoven with her own discoveries and lessons learned. In my own review of The Bells of Old Tokyo, I remarked that, “This book is full-to-overflowing with little-known facts, fun quips, sorrowful moments, and cultural meditation.

And so, as someone with a deep adoration for Tokyo, its people, its art, and its history, I found myself hungry for more, drying up my highlighters and letting my pens run out, becoming increasingly more drawn in by Sherman’s historic and personal narrative.”

The Bells of Old Tokyo toes the line between Japanese culture and Japanese history, giving us plenty of facts, context, and narratives for both. A life-changing book on Japan, without a doubt.

Bending Adversity by David Pilling

When I first moved to Tokyo, this was a book I read very early on. Bending Adversity is an inspiring look at how Japan’s collective approach to innovation, design, community, and growth has ensured the nation’s survival and flourishing time and again.

The context of Bending Adversity is more specific, however. It is very much a modern history book on Japan, first exploring the effects of the 2011 tsunami and the subsequent Fukushima Daiichi Nuclear Disaster, as well as how Japan responded to the disaster on the community level.

From here, Pilling travels back through time to 20th century post-war Japan, the economic bubble of the 1980s, the bursting of that bubble, and what came next.

In Bending Adversity, David Pilling interviews authors and writers about such topics as democracy in Japan, feminist art and literature, economic trends, and many more enormous concepts. It is a rich and enlightening book from beginning to end. Pairing Bending Adversity with Japan Story and Pure Invention will offer readers a perfectly rounded look at 20th century Japanese history and culture.

A History of the Samurai by Jonathan Lopez-Vera

Translated from the Spanish by Russell Calvert

You can’t rightly dive into a stack of Japanese history books without having at least one of them be dedicated to the samurai. In many ways, as A History of the Samurai proves, for so much of Japanese history the samurai essentially were Japan.

There is a blurring of the lines between the sword-wielding warriors, the political class, and countless historical events which is impossible to avoid.

A History of the Samurai is a very clear and concise Japanese history book. There is very little fluff here, with chapters keeping to the facts and key details in order to paint a vivid and uncluttered timeline of 1000 years of Japanese history.

Each chapter has multiple optional subsections, each one focussing on a specific person or moment. They’re optional but they provide so much fascinating context for readers interested in learning about the intricate details of a certain period, person, or battle.

Jonathan Lopez-Vera has done a stellar job here in essentially painting a broad historical picture of Japan through the context of its samurai class. This is not so much a book on the samurai from a cultural or traditional perspective as it is an entire history of a millennium of Japanese history.

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After all, it’s thanks to a Czech writer that we have the word robot (it’s not on the list as it doesn’t really feature the country, so if you’re interested check out the play R.U.R. by Karel Čapek)! In 2014 the capital city, Prague, was even named as a UNESCO City of Literature.

Although there is a greater amount of Czech writers in translation than from most other Central or Eastern European nations, most Czech literature remains untranslated – at least in English.

Nevertheless, what is available is excellent and diverse. And a lot of it is a little bit weird. But that’s to be expected when one of your literary superstars has a word that means surreal and nightmarish named after them (FYI: that word is Kafkaesque).

However, as is often the case with translated fiction, the Czech books about Prague and the rest of the Czech Republic that are available pertain to the darker parts of Czech history. Because there are so many amazing and unknown Czech authors, I have chosen not to include Franz Kafka or Milan Kundera on this list. You should definitely read them, though.

Although these are books to read before visiting the Czech Republic, they’re mostly books about Prague because that is what is predominantly available in English, However, these will still provide insight into Czech life and culture. 

A quick note: Czechia has been in use as the shortened form of Czech Republic since 1993 and became official in 2013. Some prefer the use of Czech Republic and some Czechia, but both are correct (it is similar to calling the United States of America simply the states or the US).

Read More: Why Should We Read More Translated Literature?

Under A Cruel Star: A Life in Prague 1941-1968 by Heda Margolius Kovaly

Translated by Helen Epstein

I first read Heda Margolius Kovaly’s fictional murder mystery, Innocence; or, Murder on Steep Street, which is a book set in a Prague cinema during the 1950s under Soviet rule. While I think I prefer Innocence as a story, Under a Cruel Star is one of the best Czech books about everyday life in Prague during the time – especially for Jews.

Heda’s life was seeped in tragedy, and her account is raw and brutally honest. Under a Cruel Star begins when the tragedy begins: her whole family is uprooted from Prague and transported to the Łódź ghetto. Heda went on to survive both the Łódź ghetto and Auschwitz-Birkenau before escaping back to Prague during a death march to Bergen-Belsen. Heartbreakingly, this was not the end of her struggle.

The Golem by Gustav Meyrink

Translated by Carlo Mainoldi

One of the most enduring legends of Prague is the Golem of Prague, protector of the Jews. The Golem of Meyrink’s novel is more metaphysical than monster, but still a fierce prescence throughout.

The Golem is as much a book about Prague, as its protagonist, Athanasius Pernath, a resident of the Prague ghetto in the 1910s. Pernath may or may not be hallucinating the Golem, a creature who comes to life every 33 years and embodies the pain and suffering of the ghetto.

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A Bouquet: Of Czech Folktales by Karel Jaromír Erben

Translated by Marcela Malek Sulak

This collection of dark fairy tales is one of the best Czech books for poetry lovers. That’s right, every creepy, twisted tale in this book is written in verse.

A Bouquet was originally published in 1853, this Czech classic is considered one of the best fairy tale collections available in the region. Supposedly it has even been a source of inspiration for many Czech artists, including composer Antonín Dvořák.

The Book of Dirt by Bram Presser

The Book of Dirt is an autobiographical novel based on Bram Presser’s research about his own grandparents (Jakub Rand and Dasa Roubicek) and their lives during WWII. Both of whom were Czech Jews who survived the Czech concentration camp Terezín (also called by the Austrian name Theresienstadt in the book) and the infamous Auschwitz-Birkenau.

While at Theresienstadt Jakub is assigned the task of cataloguing Jewish books for Hitler’s Museum of the Extinct Race. He painstakingly goes through each document and verifies it… until he finds a book with a hollowed-out middle and a pile of dirt. Part memoir, part mystery, part historical fiction, this is a truly unique book.

HHhH by Laurent Binet

Translated by Sam Taylor

I would be remiss if I didn’t include any books about Prague that include the period known as the Heydrich Terror on this list.

Reinhard Heydrich was one of the cruelest Nazi officers, assigned to Prague to eliminate the Czech resistance. But Heyrdrich was assassinated by members of the Czech resistance. It was called Operation Anthropoid and it was the only successful assassination of a high ranking Nazi official and it changed everything.

HHhH is a fictionalised account of Reinhard Heydrich’s assassination by Jozef Gabčík and Jan Kubiš, two members of Operation Anthropoid. But it is also the story of Laurent Binet trying to write about the event and agonising over what liberties he should and shouldn’t take with real people’s lives, emotions and conversations.

In case you’re curious about the title HHhH was a nickname given to Heydrich that stands for for “Himmlers Hirn heisst Heydrich,” and translates to “Himmler’s brain is called Heydrich.”

Bliss Was It in Bohemia by Michal Viewegh

Translated by David Short

Bliss Was It in Bohemia is a surreal romp from the 1960s to the 1990s through the lens of one family. The protagonist Kvido, and his eccentric family are clearly stand-ins for the Vieweghs. Laugh along and bang your head as they navigate life under communism, get approved for an apartment and befriend famous Czech literary figures.

If you want to read what modern day Czechs are reading, czech out (sorry) Michal Viewegh, one of the most popular modern Czech writers.

The Danny Smiřický series by Josef Škvorecký

Translated by Paul Wilson

This is a loose series tied together by a common protagonist: Danny Smiřický. Smiřický is a semi-autobiographical character based on Škvorecký experiences in Czechoslovakia before he fled to Canada in 1968 following the Warsaw Pact invasion.

It’s kind of a cheat to include the whole series, but every story is totally unique and examines a different aspect of life under communism, often in different cities or villages. Škvorecký’s books of are full of delightfully dark humour and harsh disparagement of the current regime with thinly veiled versions of real people. For this reason, most of his books were banned by the communist party.

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I Served the King of England by Bohumil Hrabal

Translated by Paul Wilson

Hrabal is one of Czech Republic’s most famous and beloved authors, so you can’t leave him off of a Czech book list! But he isn’t for everyone, he loves absurdism and ridiculously long sentences (one of his books is just one long sentence).

In I Served the King of England we meet Ditie, a man of small stature and an employee at the Golden Prague Hotel who is instructed by his boss on the first day that he must see nothing and hear nothing, but also see everything and hear everything.

From there, it only escalates as Ditie is called to serve Haile Selassie, Emperor of Ethiopia, falls in love with a Nazi and tries to pass a German purity test. At times this feels like a much darker Grand Budapest Hotel, and that’s why it’s so good.

Prague Noir by Pavel Mandys (Editor)

The stories here delve into the dark side of Prague. Not just Prague’s dark past, like some of the books above, but the side tourists rarely encounter, one more reminiscent of Kafka’s bureaucratic nightmares (minus the paperwork).

Throughout Prague Noir you are transported to a Prague carnival, on the run from the Vietnamese mafia, unsure if you are being stalked or investigated, trying to unravel the mystery of unexplained disappearances on a bridge, and more!

One of the best things about the Akashic Books Noir series is that they tend to feature works by authors who have never been translated [into English] elsewhere. And Prague Noi is no exception!

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All My Cats by Bohumil Hrabal

Translated by Paul Wilson

Hrabal died back in 1997, falling (at the age of 82) from a hospital window whilst apparently trying to feed the pigeons.

This fact, along the Penguin Random House cover of All My Cats, paints an immediately vivid and colourful image of the man: a kind, soothing, and soft soul filled with great compassion for animals and a duty to securing their happiness.

And, while this is revealed to be true very immediately in the book, what the reader will find deeper in is something far darker and more heart-breaking. Across 96 pages and a handful of chapters, readers are invited into the life of an anxiety-riddled man entering into his twilight years; a man who has worked a working man’s life until, at last, finding success as a poet and a writer.

Now, Hrabal divides his time between a home in Prague and one in Kersko, a countryside area where he hopes to have the space to write and have his own peace. That peace is shattered as his and his wife’s home in Kersko becomes overrun with five cats. Five cats who are quickly named and loved by Hrabal. His obsession with these cats, in fact, is all-consuming.

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