GenevaBookClub: In this dizzyingly rich novel of ideas, Mann uses a sanatorium in the Swiss Alps, a community devoted exclusively to sickness, as a microcosm for Europe, which in the years before 1914 was already exhibiting the first symptoms of its own terminal irrationality. The Magic Mountain is a monumental work of erudition and irony, sexual tension and intellectual ferment, a book that pulses with life in the midst of death.

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.

GenevaBookClub: Provocative, romantic, and restlessly exploratory, Peter Handke is one of the great writers of our time. Slow Homecoming, originally published in the late 1970s, is central to his achievement and to the powerful influence he has exercised on other writers, chief among them W.G. Sebald. A novel of self-questioning and self-discovery, Slow Homecoming is a singular odyssey, an escape from the distractions of the modern world and the unhappy consciousness, a voyage that is fraught and fearful but ultimately restorative, ending on an unexpected note of joy.

GenevaBookClub: Forty-five-year-old Donna Koczynski is an ex-punk rocker, a recovering alcoholic, and the mother of two teenagers whose suburban existence detonates when she comes home early from a sales conference in Las Vegas to the surprise of a lifetime. As her world implodes, she sets off on an epic road trip to reclaim everything she believes she's sacrificed since her wild youth: Great friendship, passionate love, and her art. But as she careens across the U.S. from Detroit to New York to Memphis to Nashville, nothing turns out as she imagines. Ultimately, she finds herself resurrected on the other side of the globe, on a remote island embroiled in a crisis far bigger than her own. Irresistibly funny, whip-smart, and surprisingly moving, DONNA HAS LEFT THE BUILDING spins an unforgettable tale about what it means to be brave -- and to truly love -- in a tumultuous world

GenevaBookClub: Emerence is a domestic servant - strong, fierce, eccentric, and with a reputation for being a first-rate housekeeper. When Magda, a young Hungarian writer, takes her on she never imagines how important this woman will become to her. It takes twenty years for a complex trust between them to be slowly, carefully built. But Emerence has secrets and vulnerabilities beneath her indomitable exterior which will test Magda's friendship and change the complexion of both their lives irreversibly.

GenevaBookClub: Inexperienced and ill prepared, Eric Newby and a friend embark on a month of adventure and hardship in one of the most beautiful wildernesses on earth - the mountains of the Hindu Kush, north-east of Kabul. With good humour, sharp wit and keen observation, the charming narrative style of ‘A Short Walk in the Hindu Kush’ would soon crystallise Newby's reputation as one of the greatest travel writers of all time.

GenevaBookClub: Perhaps the greatest Turkish novel of the twentieth century, being discovered around the world only now, more than fifty years after its first publication, The Time Regulation Institute is an antic, freewheeling send-up of the modern bureaucratic state. At its center is Hayri Irdal, an infectiously charming antihero who becomes entangled with an eccentric cast of characters—a television mystic, a pharmacist who dabbles in alchemy, a dignitary from the lost Ottoman Empire, a “clock whisperer”—at the Time Regulation Institute, a vast organization that employs a hilariously intricate system of fines for the purpose of changing all the clocks in Turkey to Western time. Recounted in sessions with his psychoanalyst, the story of Hayri Irdal’s absurdist misadventures plays out as a brilliant allegory of the collision of tradition and modernity, of East and West, infused with a poignant blend of hope for the promise of modernity and nostalgia for a simpler time.

GenevaBookClub: Britain has lost the Falklands war, Margaret Thatcher battles Tony Benn for power and Alan Turing achieves a breakthrough in artificial intelligence. In a world not quite like this one, two lovers will be tested beyond their understanding. Machines Like Me occurs in an alternative 1980s London. Charlie, drifting through life and dodging full-time employment, is in love with Miranda, a bright student who lives with a terrible secret. When Charlie comes into money, he buys Adam, one of the first batch of synthetic humans. With Miranda’s assistance, he co-designs Adam’s personality. This near-perfect human is beautiful, strong and clever – a love triangle soon forms. These three beings will confront a profound moral dilemma. Ian McEwan’s subversive and entertaining novel (2019) poses fundamental questions: what makes us human? Our outward deeds or our inner lives? Could a machine understand the human heart? This provocative and thrilling tale warns of the power to invent things beyond our control.

GenevaBookClub: Set in the sweltering summer of 1938 in Portugal, a country under the Fascist shadow of Spain, PEREIRA MAINTAINS tells a tale of reluctant heroism. Dr. Pereira, an editor at a second-rate Lisbon newspaper, wants nothing to do with European politics. He's happy to translate 19th-century French stories. His closest confidante is a photograph of his late wife. All this changes when he meets Francesco Monteiro Rossi, an oddly charismatic young man. Pereira gives Rossi work, and continues to pay him, even after discovering that he is using the money to recruit for the anti-Franco International Brigade. PEREIRA MAINTAINS chronicles Pereira's ascent to consciousness, culminating in a devastating and reckless act of rebellion.

GenevaBookClub: A memoir that traces the early travels of Marxist revolutionary Ernesto "Che" Guevara, then a 23-year-old medical student, and his friend Alberto Granado, a 29-year-old biochemist. Leaving Buenos Aires, Argentina, in January 1952 on the back of a sputtering single cylinder 1939 Norton 500cc dubbed La Poderosa ("The Mighty One"), they desired to explore the South America they only knew from books. During the formative odyssey Guevara is transformed by witnessing the social injustices of exploited mine workers, persecuted communists, ostracized lepers, and the tattered descendants of a once-great Inca civilization. By journey's end, they had travelled for a symbolic nine months by motorcycle, steamship, raft, horse, bus, and hitchhiking, covering more than 8,000 kilometres.

GenevaBookClub: Generations of readers young and old, male and female, have fallen in love with the March sisters of Louisa May Alcott’s most popular and enduring novel, Little Women. Here are talented tomboy and author-to-be Jo, tragically frail Beth, beautiful Meg, and romantic, spoiled Amy, united in their devotion to each other and their struggles to survive in New England during the Civil War. It is no secret that Alcott based Little Women on her own early life. While her father, the freethinking reformer and abolitionist Bronson Alcott, hobnobbed with such eminent male authors as Emerson, Thoreau, and Hawthorne, Louisa supported herself and her sisters with "woman’s work,” including sewing, doing laundry, and acting as a domestic servant. But she soon discovered she could make more money writing. Little Women brought her lasting fame and fortune, and far from being the "girl’s book” her publisher requested, it explores such timeless themes as love and death, war and peace, the conflict between personal ambition and family responsibilities, and the clash of cultures between Europe and America.

GenevaBookClub: A powerful cultural touchstone of modern American literature, The Color Purple depicts the lives of African American women in early twentieth-century rural Georgia. Separated as girls, sisters Celie and Nettie sustain their loyalty to and hope in each other across time, distance and silence. Through a series of letters spanning twenty years, first from Celie to God, then the sisters to each other despite the unknown, the novel draws readers into its rich and memorable portrayals of Celie, Nettie, Shug Avery and Sofia and their experience. The Color Purple broke the silence around domestic and sexual abuse, narrating the lives of women through their pain and struggle, companionship and growth, resilience and bravery. Deeply compassionate and beautifully imagined, Alice Walker's epic carries readers on a spirit-affirming journey towards redemption and love.

GenevaBookClub: Of all Jane Austen’s great and delightful novels, Persuasion is widely regarded as the most moving. It is the story of a second chance. Anne Elliot, daughter of the snobbish Sir Walter Elliot, is woman of quiet charm and deep feelings. When she was nineteen she fell in love with—and was engaged to—a naval officer, the fearless and headstrong Captain Wentworth. But the young man had no fortune, and Anne allowed herself to be persuaded to give him up. Now, eight years later, Wentworth has returned to the neighborhood, a rich man and still unwed. Anne’s never-diminished love is muffled by her pride, and he seems cold and unforgiving. What happens as the two are thrown together in the social world of Bath—and as an eager new suitor appears for Anne—is touchingly and wittily told in a masterpiece that is also one of the most entrancing novels in the English language.

GenevaBookClub: The complex story of a notorious law-suit in which love and inheritance are set against the classic urban background of 19th-century London, where fog on the river, seeping into the very bones of the characters, symbolizes the corruption of the legal system and the society which supports it. “Jarndyce and Jarndyce” is an infamous lawsuit that has been in process for generations. Nobody can remember exactly how the case started but many different individuals have found their fortunes caught up in it. Esther Summerson watches as her friends and neighbours are consumed by their hopes and disappointments with the proceedings. But while the intricate puzzles of the lawsuit are being debated by lawyers, other more dramatic mysteries are unfolding that involve heartbreak, lost children, blackmail and murder. The fog and cold that permeate Bleak House mirror a Victorian England mired in spiritual insolvency. Dickens brought all his passion, brilliance, and narrative verve to this huge novel of lives entangled in a multi-generational lawsuit—and through it, he achieved, at age 41, a stature almost Shakespearean.

GenevaBookClub: War and Peace broadly focuses on Napoleon’s invasion of Russia in 1812 and follows three of the most well-known characters in literature: Pierre Bezukhov, the illegitimate son of a count who is fighting for his inheritance and yearning for spiritual fulfillment; Prince Andrei Bolkonsky, who leaves his family behind to fight in the war against Napoleon; and Natasha Rostov, the beautiful young daughter of a nobleman who intrigues both men. A s Napoleon’s army invades, Tolstoy brilliantly follows characters from diverse backgrounds—peasants and nobility, civilians and soldiers—as they struggle with the problems unique to their era, their history, and their culture. And as the novel progresses, these characters transcend their specificity, becoming some of the most moving—and human—figures in world literature.

GenevaBookClub: The story of a Redmond Barry, charming young Anglo-Irishman who transforms into a conniving, manipulative rogue. Is forced to flee Ireland and joins the English army in the 7 years war. Encounters another Irishman and together they cheat and lie their way across Europe. Barry manipulates noble women to increase his standing. Biopic view of life in 18th century Europe Cult 1975 Stanley Kubrick film, famous for it’s use of only natural lighting.

GenevaBookClub: Story of fall and eventual redemption, both material and spiritual, of a lone woman in 17th-century England. Purported to be a true story. Moll Flanders was born to a convict, given a reprieve by “pleading her belly”. Moll has a life of hardship where she has no option by various forms of criminality. Sought to escape poverty by marriage. Set between London and Virginia. An unintentionally proto-feminist novel.

GenevaBookClub: Poor farmer Durbeyfield has been told by the village parson that he has noble relatives: the D'Urbervilles. His wife decides to send their daughter Tess to them in order to make a claim on their family's ancestral home in Wessex. Alec D'Urberville, the son of the squire, rapes Tess and she is pregnant - and becomes a “ruined” woman. Banned because is challenged sexual double standards of the time. Considered Thomas Hardy’s greatest novel.

GenevaBookClub: The longest and most charming love letter in literature’, an homage to Woolf’s friend and lover, Vita Sackville-West. The novel spans across three different setups in three different centuries: 18th century England, where Orlando is a young nobleman, 18th century Constantinople, where Orlando, an ambassador, awakes to find they are a woman, and 1928 England, the year of suffrage for women, when Orlando has married and had children, with new hopes for the future of women. Part satire, part stream-of-consciousness, part adventure novel, part psychoanalysis of a character Virginia Woolf admired. Readers hail it for the beautiful prose, combining old and new forms of aesthetic, the traditional East-West cultural crossings, and its discourse on gender across time. The novel has been adapted numerous times, most famously in a film, with Tilda Swindon taking on the lead role (1992), and most recently, as an opera at the Vienna State Opera, in December 2019.

GenevaBookClub: The book is presented as a manuscript, written by its protagonist, middle-aged Harry, which ends up being published by an acquaintance. It was partially inspired by Hesse’s diaries from the 1920s. It is part plot, part internal monologue of a person who feels divided against themselves: the civilized man and the lone steppe wolf. Set against the backdrop of early 20th century Europe (probably in Zurich, as some urban elements would indicate) it deals with atemporal human issues such as role in society, loneliness, despair at lack of realization of one’s dreams, sensual pleasures, intellectual pursuits, human drive for transcendence, being part of a tribe vs being an individual, the will to live and the despair to die. Has quite a few stylistic elements present, such as Jung’s symbolism, jazz references, bourgeois culture.

GenevaBookClub: Richard Flanagan is a 59 year old novelist and environmental activist from Tasmania. He is rightfully applauded as an exceptional writer with a very diverse body of work. He does not have a style in that his books are all worth reading and all very different. The book is his first novel, a short tale that draws on his experience as a river guide on the Gordon River, Tasmania, who is drowning while reliving his past but also the past of his ancestors and Tasmania. The book is both amusing and affecting. 336 pages, published 2002. He has won the Man Booker Prize and numerous other awards. Aljaz Cosini is leading a group of tourists on a raft tour down Tasmania's wild Franklin River when his greatest fear is realized—a tourist falls overboard. An ordinary man with many regrets, Aljaz rises to an uncharacteristic heroism, and offers his own life in trade. Trapped under a rapid and drowning, Aljaz is beset with visions both horrible and fabulous. He sees Couta Ho, the beautiful, spirited woman he loved, and witnesses his uncle Reg having his teeth pulled and sold to pay for a ripple-iron house. He sees cities grow from the wild rain forest and a tree burst into flower in midwinter over his grandfather's forest grave. As the entirety of Tasmanian life—flora and fauna—sings him home, Aljaz arrives at a world where dreaming reasserts its power over thinking, where his family tree branches into stories of all human families, stories that ground him in the land and reveal the soul history of his country.

GenevaBookClub: In 1908 English gentleman, Ernest Westlake, packed a tent, a bicycle and forty tins of food and sailed to Tasmania. On mountains, beaches and in sheep paddocks he collected over 13,000 Aboriginal stone tools. Rebe Taylor is an academic specializing in indigenous Australians and the effect of European settlement. She writes in a well-articulated and light academic style: lucid and unembellished. This is a deep book that draws on many threads to weave the satisfying conclusion. The book centers on Ernest Westlake, a most curious British amateur anthropologist with an obsessive interest (along with other peculiar interests) in stone age culture and technology. After collecting huge numbers of stone tools from Europe he is exposed to indigenous Tasmanian stone tools, and this takes him to Tasmania on a journey of discovery and exposure to the raw fringe of Empire. He cannot see what he sees: that Tasmanian indigenous culture remained (and remains) even after original Tasmanians were supposedly hunted to extinction. 456 pages, published in 2017. Winner of the Tasmanian Book Prize, 2017

GenevaBookClub: Margo Jefferson is a 73 year old journalist and academic. This is her autobiography. She writes as a wealthy, privileged, highly educated member of the elite social caste of African Americans, but with a very charming, self-critical eye and an easy style. She reveals how privileged African Americans blend into the worlds of both African Americans and privileged European Americans. It is like a series of conversations with a best friend. 256 pages, published in 2016. Winner of the National Book Critics Circle Award 2016. Negroland: A Memoir is a 2015 book by Margo Jefferson. It is a memoir of growing up in 1950s and 1960s America within a small, privileged segment of black American society known as the black bourgeoisie, or African-American upper class.

GenevaBookClub: Against the background of a thousand years of vivid history, acclaimed writer Marie Arana tells the timely and timeless stories of three contemporary Latin Americans whose lives represent three driving forces that have shaped the character of the region: exploitation (silver), violence (sword), and religion (stone). Marie Arana is an extraordinary woman of letters and multicultural background in South and North America. She writes as someone who has a great comfort with words and writing that makes her easy to read. This book has a high concept: that much of Latin America history and culture can be explained by three elements: Silver - so much of the wealth of Latin America was and still is in the extraction of natural resources Sword - brutal violence has been central to its history and today with military coups and drug cartels Stone - the symbol of the old and new religions with the deep desire of the settlers to convert the indigenous souls, no matter what 400 pages, published in 2019 Longlisted for the 2020 Andrew Carnegie Medal.

GenevaBookClub: David E Stannard is a 79 year-old professor. This is a massively controversial work starting with the title! He argues that the European colonization of North and South America resulted in the death of 100 million indigenous peoples. This was mostly due to diseases, but even some of that was a conscious part of the settler strategy to eliminate indigenous populations. Stannard makes no attempt to moderate his language or sentiments but, like Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee, this book is pivotal to any discussion of the settlement of the Americas.

GenevaBookClub: Tommy Orange is a 38 year old American novelist and writer from Oakland, California. This is his first book. Told as a series of loosely connected stories centered around Oakland, California that all come together by the end of the book. Many of the characters are young, not full-blood and living on the margins of modern America. 300 pages, published in 2019. Finalist for 2019 Pulitzer Prize. Tommy Orange's wondrous and shattering novel follows twelve characters from Native communities: all traveling to the Big Oakland Powwow, all connected to one another in ways they may not yet realize. Among them is Jacquie Red Feather, newly sober and trying to make it back to the family she left behind. Dene Oxendene, pulling his life together after his uncle's death and working at the powwow to honor his memory. Fourteen-year-old Orvil, coming to perform traditional dance for the very first time. Together, this chorus of voices tells of the plight of the urban Native American--grappling with a complex and painful history, with an inheritance of beauty and spirituality, with communion and sacrifice and heroism. Hailed as an instant classic, There There is at once poignant and unflinching, utterly contemporary and truly unforgettable.

GenevaBookClub: David Treuer is a 50 year-old writer, critic and academic who is one of the most prolific writers (and critics) of the contemporary American Indian experience. A response to the classic Bury My Heart at Wounded Knee by Dee Brown, a well-known eulogy of American Indian culture. A strong counterpoint to the idea that everything of their original culture was destroyed, corrupted and stolen with modern American Indians as degenerate walking-dead dependent on drugs, alcohol and government handouts. 445 pages published in 2019. Finalist for 2019 National Book Award and longlisted for Andrew Carnegie Medal.

GenevaBookClub: Eco’s first novel. Not only an intricate detective story. Combining semiotics in fiction with biblical analysis, medieval studies, and literary theory. In 1327 a young Benedictine novice, Adso of Melk, and a learned Franciscan, William of Baskerville, visit a Benedictine monastery in northern Italy for a theological debate. The abbot, Abo of Fossanova, asks William to look into the recent death of the illuminator Adelmo of Otranto, who fell from the octagonal Aedificium, which houses the abbey’s labyrinthine library. “Books are not made to be believed, but to be subjected to inquiry. When we consider a book, we mustn't ask ourselves what it says but what it means”. The meaning of “truth” from theological, philosophical, and historical perspectives The power of words and interpretation. The power of the culture and the reading.

GenevaBookClub: Amazing portrait of Italian history during and after the WWII. The story of a woman, Ida Ramundo, and her two sons Antonio (nicknamed "Ninnarieddu", "Ninnuzzu" or "Nino") and Giuseppe ("Useppe") in Rome during and immediately after the WWII Criticized by leftist intellectuals. “The worst violence against men is the degradation of the intellect”. History vs stories. Depiction of a wounded Italy, torn between ideologies, the horror of the war and false myths Realism.

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: Formerly beautiful and at one time betrothed to a fallen soldier, Bonaria Urrai has long held covenant with the dead. Midwife to the dying, easing their suffering and sometimes ending it, she is revered and feared in equal measure as the village's Accabadora. When Bonaria adopts Maria, the unloved fourth child of a widow, she tries to shield the girl from the truth about her role as an angel of mercy. Moved by the pleas of a young man crippled in an accident, she breaks her golden rule of familial consent, and in the recriminations that follow, Maria rejects her and flees Sardinia for Turin.

GenevaBookClub: Second novel of the internationally popular Inspector Montalbano series While chasing down a mafia crime, Montalbano finds a cave with symbolic artifacts and the bodies of two young lovers, hidden since World War II. The young couple is guarded by a terracotta dog. “A stimare da come l’alba stava appresentandosi, la iurnata s’annunziava certamente smèusa, fatta cioè ora di botte di sole incaniato, ora di gelidi stizzichii di pioggia, il tutto condito da alzate improvvise di vento. Una di quelle iurnate in cui chi è soggetto al brusco cangiamento di tempo, e nel sangue e nel ciriveddro lo patisce, capace che si mette a svariare continuamente di opinione e di direzione, come fanno quei pezzi di lattone, tagliati a forma di bannèra o di gallo, che sui tetti ruotano in ogni senso ad ogni minima passata di vento”. The mix of cultures in Sicily The unfairness of the death and injustice.

GenevaBookClub: The series follows the lives of two perceptive and intelligent girls, Elena (sometimes called “Lenù”) Greco and Raffaella (“Lila”) Cerullo, from childhood to adulthood and old age, as they try to create lives for themselves amidst the violent and conservative culture of their home – a poor neighborhood on the outskirts of Naples, Italy. The novels are narrated by Elena Greco. “We were twelve years old, but we walked along the hot streets of the neighbourhood, amid the dust and flies that the occasional old trucks stirred up as they passed, like two old ladies taking the measure of lives of disappointment, clinging tightly to each other. No one understood us, only we two—I thought—understood one another.” Growing up in violent domestic and social environments The power, fierceness and violence of friendship Class conflict, the role of literature and the social responsibility of the writer amidst social upheaval.

GenevaBookClub: Small town of Santo Stefano Belbo, in Piedmont, north-west Italy. The main character, known only by his nickname of Anguilla (Eel), has returned to his home town in the years immediately following the Second World War. He left twenty-five years earlier and had made his fortune in the United States. Returning to his home town, he finds many of the same smells and sights that filled his youth, but he also finds a town and its inhabitants that have been deeply changed by war and by the passage of time. “You need a village, if only for the pleasure of leaving it. Your own village means that you're not alone, that you know there's something of you in the people and the plants and the soil, that even when you are not there it waits to welcome you”. The rhythm of rural life and of nature – inexorable despite human efforts The “recherche” of roots. The physical and moral destruction caused by the war (resistance civil war in Italy)

GenevaBookClub: Published in 2000; set in 20th Century Burma, Malaya (now Malaysia) and India Amitav Ghosh (born in 1956 in Calcutta), who grew up in India, Bangladesh and Sri Lanka A sprawling epic of love and colonialism, Ghosh’s novel follows several generations of Indians and Burmese as they either collaborate or resist the ever-present British Spans a century from the British invasion of Burma and the consequent fall of the Konbaung Dynasty in Mandalay, through the Second World War to late 20th century. Through the stories of a small number of privileged families, it illuminates the struggles that have shaped Burma, India and Malaya into the places they are today. Explores the various facets of the colonial period, including the economic fall of Burma, the rise of timber and rubber plantations, the moral dilemmas faced by Indians serving the British army, and the devastating effects of World War II

GenevaBookClub: Published in 1972; set in 1960s Singapore. Singaporean writer Goh Poh Seng (1936-2010) was a medical doctor who was a well-known arts supporter – he also opened Singapore’s first Disco Lounge! Widely regarded as the first “true” Singapore novel If We Dream Too Long explores the dilemmas and challenges faced by its hero, Kwang Meng, as he navigates the difficult transitional period between youthful aspirations and the external demands of society and family Kwang Meng’s experiences question the concept of self amidst the dreariness and aimlessness of an increasingly urbanized and materialistic Asian society The book also provides a portrait of Singapore as it was in the 1960s, and a landscape and society that have undergone many changes.

GenevaBookClub: Published in 1973; set in 1960s Singapore. Paul Theroux (born 1941) did a 3-year stint in Singapore where he taught at the English Department of the National University of Singapore Saint Jack was banned in Singapore for 30 years as it cast the country in an unfavourable light. His novel Jungle Lovers (1971) was similarly banned in Malawi for being critical of the government Brimming with sex, sleaze, and violence, Theroux’s gritty-yet-loving portrait of Singapore tells of an alienated American expat who works as a pimp, and how he struggles to make it big without losing his strange but strict code of morals.

GenevaBookClub: Published in 1934; set in 1920s Burma, which was a British colony George Orwell (1903-1950) worked as a colonial policeman in Burma from 1922 to 1927. Burmese Days, his first novel, grew out of reflection on his own days as a colonial policeman in Burma during the 1920s. It tells the story of John Flory, a timber merchant, and his troubles relating to the other expats that he has to live and work with It provides a very caustic view of British colonialism at the ground level, where Orwell’s characters (and Orwell himself) must do “the dirty work of empire”.

GenevaBookClub: Published in 2015; set in 1970s Vietnam and Los Angeles. Winner of the 2016 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. Viet Thanh Nguyen (born 1971) is a Vietnamese-American professor, the son of refugees from South Vietnam who fled to the US in 1975 after the fall of Saigon. A spy novel, an astute exploration of extreme politics, and a moving love story, The Sympathizer explores a life between two worlds and examines the legacy of the Vietnam War in literature and film. The story starts in April 1975 at the fall of Saigon. It follows soldiers in the defeated South Vietnamese army, who flee Vietnam to start a new life in Los Angeles, unaware that one among their number, a captain, is secretly observing and reporting on the group to a higher-up in the Viet Cong.

GenevaBookClub: Published in 2002 and translated into English in 2015; set in 20th Century Eka Kuriawan (born 1975) uses magic realism, and his work has led to comparisons to Gabriel Garcia Marquez Beauty Is a Wound set in the fictional coastal town of Halimunda, spans more than half a century. It revolves around Dewi Ayu, a wily prostitute of mythical beauty who has risen from the dead, and her accursed daughters, who are subjected to violence on a daily basis. The novel chronicles Indonesia’s occupation by the Japanese during the Second World War; its Indonesia bloody struggle with the Dutch, who attempted to reassert their control over Indonesia after the war; the massacres of the mid-sixties; the violence and corruption that marked Suharto’s New Order regime; and the nation’s anxious lurch toward self-determination after Suharto’s leadership crumbled, in 1998.