 | The Beastly Beatitudes of Balthazar B by J.P. Donleavy
Buy used from: £1.68 America - Forget the daft title, this novel is both hauntingly elegaic and profoundly funny.
|
 | The Red Horse: A Novel by Eugenio Corti
Buy used from: £13.84 Italy - The Italian 'War and Peace'. Epic. Don't let yourself be put off by the clumsy translation.
|
 | The Best Short Stories (Wordsworth Classics) by Guy de Maupassant
Buy new: £1.99 / Used from: £0.01 France - Punchy and timeless. Vignettes of endless charm.
|
 | Zorba the Greek (Faber Fiction Classics) by Nikos Kazantzakis
Buy used from: £0.90 Greece - Philosophy and adventure, both delivered with gusto.
|
 | Life and Fate by Vasily Grossman
Buy new: £11.19 / Used from: £3.15 Russia - Panoramic and deeply moving War epic.
|
 | Foucault's Pendulum by Umberto Eco
Buy new: £6.73 / Used from: £1.78 Italy - A 'Da Vinci Code' for grown ups.
|
 | The Dumas Club by Arturo Perez-Reverte
Buy new: £5.98 / Used from: £0.01 Spain - More literary occult conspiracy.
|
 | The Discovery of Heaven by Harry Mulisch
Buy new: £9.09 / Used from: £1.28 Holland - And if you enjoyed the above two...
|
 | The Damned (Penguin Classics) by Joris-Karl Huysmans
Buy new: £5.48 / Used from: £5.70 France - Group of blokes swilling calvados and gorging on mussels, as they discuss black magic. What a way to spend a winter's evening!
|
 | The Sorrow of Belgium (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) by Hugo Claus
Buy used from: £34.99 Belgium - Excellent bildungsroman set in occupied Belgium.
|
 | A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry
Buy used from: £0.75 India - Deeply affecting. Seldom have I cared so much about a novel's characters.
|
 | The Little World of Don Camillo by Giovanni Guareschi
Buy used from: £9.38 Italy - To have missed out on these tales from Emilia-Romagna, when growing up was indeed a deprived childhood.
|
 | Maria by Jorge Isaacs
Buy used from: £13.70 Colombia - This romantic novel/social document is legendary throughout Latin America. It cries out for an English translation!
|
| Inferno from an Occult Diary (Penguin Classics) by August Strindberg
Sweden - a chilling insight into a man's mental and physical collapse in the garrets of Stockholm.
|
 | Nadja (Penguin Twentieth Century Classics) by Andre Breton
Buy new: £6.46 / Used from: £4.15 France - Fascinating period piece. Surrealist Andre Breton's hallucinatory high jinx in 20s Paris.
|
 | Paris Peasant by Louis Aragon
Buy new: £7.91 / Used from: £5.84 France - If anything, a Surrealist literary document more mesmerising and barmy than 'Nadja'.
|
 | Christ Stopped at Eboli (Penguin Modern Classics) by Carlo Levi
Buy new: £6.42 / Used from: £0.55 Italy - Marvellous account of an intellectual's 1930s political exile in the 'Deep South' of the Italian peninsula.
|
 | Barabbas (Vintage International) by Lagerkvist
Buy new: £7.50 / Used from: £0.49 Sweden - Fascinating examination of the nature of religious faith by one of the princes of Scandinavian existential angst.
|
 | The Tailor and Ansty by Eric Cross
Buy new: £6.18 / Used from: £1.25 Ireland - Condemned at the time for being insufficiently dour, this 40s piece of garrulity is both comic biography and fascinating insight into Ireland's rural culture of that era.
|
 | Jeppe Of The Hill by Ludvig Holberg
Buy new: £10.95 / Used from: £8.06 Denmark - The classic Danish comedy. They show it on TV at every Christmas I gather.
|
 | Narcissus and Goldmund by Hermann Hesse
Buy used from: £7.25 Germany - Lovely piece, simply and elegantly told. Two chaps take diverging paths in life: One the Dionysian, the other the Apollonian.
|
Listmania!
