GenevaBookClub: An Inquiry into the Nature and Causes of the Wealth of Nations, generally referred to by its shortened title The Wealth of Nations, is the magnum opus of the Scottish economist and moral philosopher Adam Smith. First published in 1776, the book offers one of the world's first collected descriptions of what builds nations' wealth, and is today a fundamental work in classical economics. By reflecting upon the economics at the beginning of the Industrial Revolution, the book touches upon such broad topics as the division of labour, productivity, and free markets.

GenevaBookClub: Anderson's brilliant book on nationalism forged a new field of study when it first appeared in 1983. It is widely considered the most important book on the subject. Anderson examines the creation and global spread of the "imagined communities" of nationality, and explores the processes that created these communities: the territorialization of religious faiths, the decline of antique kingship, the interaction between capitalism and print, the development of secular languages-of-state, and changing conceptions of time and space.

GenevaBookClub: Mathematical structure. Series of dreamy meditations about metropolises that has intrigued generations of writers, architects, urban planners and philosophers. The book is framed as a conversation between the explorer Marco Polo and the emperor Kublai Khan, who constantly has merchants coming to describe the state of his expanding and vast empire. The majority of the book consists of brief prose poems describing 55 fictitious cities that are narrated by Polo. “In Chloe, a great city, the people who move through the street are all strangers. At each encounter they imagine a thousand things about one another; meetings  which could take place between them, conversations, surprises, caresses, bites. But no-one greets anyone; eyes lock for a second, then dart away, seeking other eyes, never stopping”. Cities as meditations on culture, language, time, memory, death, the nature of human experience Imagination and perception, truth and deception, and the inevitable passage of time – and therefore, inevitable decay.

GenevaBookClub: A strong and irresistible window into Iran, a novel about the 1979 revolution and its violent aftermath. The five children of the title character, an officer in the shah’s army, have all taken different political paths and paid a heavy price. The story unfolds on one rainy night as the colonel is trying to retrieve and bury the body of his youngest daughter, who has been tortured to death for handing out leaflets criticizing the new regime. A must-read for everyone remotely interested in Iran and its turbulent 20th century history. The Colonel is a novel about nation, history, and family, beginning on a rainy night when two policemen summon the Colonel to collect the tortured body of his daughter, a victim of the Islamic Revolution. Dowlatabadi wrote the novel in the 1980s, when intellectuals were in danger of execution. "I hid it in a drawer when I finished it," he said. Though it is published abroad in English, the novel is not available in Iran, in Persian. "I did not even want to have this on their radar," he said. "Either they would take me to prison or prevent me from working. They would have their ways." The novel was first published in Germany, later in the UK and United States.