We’re well into our blog series now with sixty countries covered to date as we read around the world, featuring a book from every country in the world. We’ll work alphabetically through all the countries in the world and add in some smaller countries and islands too, from Afghanistan to Zimbabwe!
We’ll work alphabetically and the last list ended at Greece, so today we’re covering ten countries from Grenada to Hungary.
Join us on our literary world trip as we read around the world in more than 200 books.
Grenada
October All Over – Maria Roberts Squires
Set in the aftermath of the Grenadian revolution, “October All Over” tracks the parallel lives of two generations of Grenadians: Ramona Duprey and Fabian Ferguson, the young lovers; and Norris Duprey and Leila Ferguson – old sweethearts who had separated, but are brought back together by their children’s romance.
Guadeloupe
Crossing the Mangrove – Maryse Conde
In this beautifully crafted novel, Maryse Conde has written a gripping story imbued with all the nuances and traditions of Caribbean culture. Francis Sancher–a handsome outsider, loved by some and reviled by others–is found dead, face down in the mud on a path outside Riviere au Sel, a small village in Guadeloupe. None of the villagers are particularly surprised, since Sancher, a secretive and melancholy man, had often predicted an unnatural death for himself.
Guatemala
Tree Girl – Ben Mikaelsen
They call Gabriela Tree Girl. Gabi climbs trees to be within reach of the eagles and watch the sun rise into an empty sky. She is at home among the outstretched branches of the Guatemalan forests.Then one day from the safety of a tree, Gabi witnesses the sights and sounds of an unspeakable massacre. She vows to be Tree Girl no more and joins the hordes of refugees struggling to reach the Mexican border.
Guinea
The King of Kahel – Tierno Monénembo
Loosely based on the life of Olivier de Sanderval, a man who journeyed to Guinea to build an empire by conquering the hostile region of Fouta Djallon, the King of Kahel exposes how Sanderval braves all dangers to build a railway that will bring modern civilization to Africa.
Guinea Bissau
Claim No Easy Victories – Manji Firoze
Full of essays celebrating the life of Amilcar Cabral, revolutionary, poet, liberation philosopher, and leader of the independence movement of Guinea Bissau and Cape Verde. Cabral’s influence stretched well beyond the shores of West Africa. He had a profound influence on the pan-Africanist movement and the black liberation movement in the US.
Guyana
The Sly Company of People Who Care – Rahul Bhattacharya
In flight from the tame familiarity of home in Bombay, a twenty-six-year-old cricket journalist chucks his job and arrives in Guyana, a forgotten colonial society of raw, mesmerizing beauty. Amid beautiful, decaying wooden houses in Georgetown, on coastal sugarcane plantations, and in the dark rainforest interior scavenged by diamond hunters, he grows absorbed with the fantastic possibilities of this new place where descendants of the enslaved and indentured have made a new world.
Haiti
In Darkness – Nick Lake
“Shorty” is a Haitian boy trapped in the ruins of a hospital when the earth explodes around him in a devastating earthquake. Surrounded by lifeless bodies and growing desperately weak from lack of food and water, death seems imminent. Yet as Shorty waits in darkness for a rescue that may never come, he becomes aware of another presence, one reaching out to him across two hundred years of history.
Honduras
The Mosquito Coast – Paul Theroux
In a breathtaking adventure story, the paranoid and brilliant inventor Allie Fox takes his family to live in the Honduran jungle, determined to build a civilization better than the one they’ve left. Fleeing from an America he sees as mired in materialism and conformity, he hopes to rediscover a purer life. But his utopian experiment takes a dark turn when his obsessions lead the family toward unimaginable danger.
Hong Kong
White Ghost Girls – Alice Greenway
Summer 1967. The turmoil of the Maoist revolution is spilling over into Hong Kong and causing unrest as war rages in neighboring Vietnam. White Ghost Girls is the story of Frankie and Kate, two American sisters living in a foreign land in a chaotic time.
Hungary
The Door – Magda Szabo
The Door is an unsettling exploration of the relationship between two very different women. Magda is a writer, educated, married to an academic, public-spirited, with an on-again-off-again relationship to Hungary’s Communist authorities. Emerence is a peasant, illiterate, impassive, abrupt, seemingly ageless. She lives alone in a house that no one else may enter, not even her closest relatives.
We hope you’re enjoying this new blog series, we’ll be back with the next journey through literature in a few days, starting with Grenada
As the series continues, you can try this search to find the rest of the blogs in this series. Alternatively if you’re looking for a specific country so far we have covered:
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