World reading progress list for Janine Bensadon

1. ALGERIA
• A Bookshop in Algiers by Kaouther Adimi

  A great book set in three different time settings and charting the changing fortunes of Charlot’s bookshop through the Second World War, the Algerian revolution and the continuing political turbulence that came with independence. It is a celebration of books, bookshops and the struggle of those who dare to dream.

2. ANGOLA
• A General Theory of Oblivion by Jose Eduardo Agualusa

  Would give it 4.5. Beautiful story about a woman, Ludo who never wants to leave the house and moves from Portugal to Angola to live with her newly wedded sister and her husband. The build up to Angolan Independence largely passes her by. When neither her sister or her brother-in-law do not return home on the eve of Angolan independence, she bricks herself into her apartment. She stays there for the next thirty years, living off vegetables and pigeons and writing her story on the walls of her home. Meanwhile life in Angola moves on. A variety of characters take the spotlight and their stories touch Ludo’s.

3. BENIN
• Spirit Rising : My Life, My Music by Angelique Kidjo, Rachel Wenrick

  Loved this book. Kidjo tells of her life and experiences and through it we learn of the Benin culture and how music travels through centuries and continents

4. BOTSWANA
5. BURKINA FASO
• Of Water and the Spirit—Ritual, Magic, and Initiation in the Life of an African Shaman by Malidoma Patrice Somé

  The author writes about his childhood and coming of age. As a child he is taken from his village to a Jesuit mission school and indoctrinated by French missionaries to the European ways of thought, life and religion. When he returns to his village as a young adult, he struggles to fit until he is initiated into the Dagara culture. He spends his life sharing his wisdom and the way of life of the Dagara to the rest of the world, in the hope that it is respected and protected.

6. BURUNDI
• Small Country : A Novel by Gaël Faye
7. CAMEROON
8. CAPE VERDE
9. CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC
10. CHAD
11. COMOROS
12. CONGO
13. CONGO, DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF
14. DJIBOUTI
15. EGYPT
16. EQUATORIAL GUINEA
17. ERITREA
18. ETHIOPIA
• Cutting for Stone by Abraham Verghese

  Beautiful saga of twins whose mum dies in childbirth, the dad, a doctor in a mission hospital in Ethiopia abandons them and they are brought up by a doctor and her partner.

• The Covenant of Water by Abraham Verghese

  Loved it. A saga of a family, starting with a child bride, set in Kerela

19. GABON
20. GAMBIA
21. GHANA
22. GUINEA
23. GUINEA-BISSAU
24. IVORY COAST
25. KENYA
26. LESOTHO
27. LIBERIA
28. LIBYA
29. MADAGASCAR
30. MALAWI
31. MALI
32. MAURITANIA
33. MAURITIUS
34. MOROCCO
• In the Country of Others : A Novel by Leila Slimani

  A historical fiction book about Mathilde, a young French woman, who meets a Moroccan soldier called Amine, in 1944 France. They fall in love, she gets pregnant, they get married and move together to Morocco. This is not a romance. We follow all the difficulties that the couple experiences, as Mathilde tries to adapt to life in a country with a very different culture to France and where the land that Amine was planning to cultivate turns out to be dry and really hard to exploit.

35. MOZAMBIQUE
36. NAMIBIA
37. NIGER
38. NIGERIA
• The Girl with the Louding Voice : A Novel by Abi Daré

  A wonderful book. Really enjoyed it

• A Spell of Good Things : A novel by Ayobami Adebayo
• And So I Roar : A Novel by Abi Daré
39. RWANDA
40. SAO TOME AND PRINCIPE
41. SENEGAL
42. SEYCHELLES
43. SIERRA LEONE
• A Long Way Gone : Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah
44. SOMALIA
• Black Mamba Boy by Nadifa Mohamed
45. SOUTH AFRICA
• Born a Crime: Stories From a South African Childhood by Trevor Noah
46. SOUTH SUDAN
47. SUDAN
48. ESWATINI
49. TANZANIA
50. TOGO
51. TUNISIA
52. UGANDA
53. ZAMBIA
54. ZIMBABWE
• The Girl on the Train by Paula Hawkins
• The No. 1 Ladies' Detective Agency by Alexander McCall Smith

1. AFGHANISTAN
• The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
• A Thousand Splendid Suns by Khaled Hosseini

  One of my all time favourite books. A Thousand Splendid Suns is a masterpiece that explores the lives of two women, set against the backdrop of Afghanistan's violent history. The book is about the struggles and brutality faced by women and about the bond that grows between them.

• And the Mountains Echoed by Khaled Hosseini
2. ARMENIA
• Family of Shadows : A Century of Murder, Memory, and the Armenian American Dream by Garin K. Hovannisian

  A factual historical book about the author’s family, starting with his great grandfather who fled from Armenia to the US after the Armenian genocide

3. AZERBAIJAN
4. BAHRAIN
• Yummah by Sarah A. Al Shafei

  Read as the Bahrain entry for the read around the world challenge. The novel is an easy read, even though the translation is far from perfect. The novel romanticises child marriages and all the characters appear to be perfect. Yes it provides a small insight into Bahrain’s culture, but I cannot recommend it.

5. BANGLADESH
• I Remember Abbu by Humayun Azad

  Novella narrated by a very young child during the war of independence of Bangladesh. Diary entries by the father are used to relate important events. Sad and poignant.

6. BHUTAN
7. BRUNEI
• Written In Black by KH Lim
8. CAMBODIA
9. CHINA
• Wild Swans : Three Daughters of China by Jung Chang

  4 stars. Deeply absorbing story about a Chinese family and their history

• Monkey King : Journey to the West (Penguin Classics Deluxe Edition) by Wu Cheng
10. CHRISTMAS ISLAND
11. GEORGIA
12. INDIA
• The Henna Artist by Alka Joshi
• Animal Farm by George Orwell
• Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell
• Untouchable by Mulk Raj Anand

  A day in the life of an “Untouchable” in India during the 1930s. Bakha is a sweeper and toilet-cleaner, the lowest of the Indian rungs in the Hindu caste system. Through all the insults and frustrations, Bakha performs his work efficiently and gracefully. Throughout he maintains his dignity and tries to find purpose in his life. I have put this book under India though it might be Pakistan. The author was born in Peshawar in 1905 when it was still part of British India. It became part of Pakistan in 1947

13. INDONESIA
14. IRAN
15. IRAQ
16. ISRAEL
• Sapiens: a Graphic History : The Birth of Humankind (Vol. 1) by Yuval Noah Harari
17. JAPAN
• Before the Coffee Gets Cold by Toshikazu Kawaguchi
• Geisha : A Life by Mineko Iwasaki
• Norwegian Wood by Haruki Murakami
18. JORDAN
19. KAZAKHSTAN
20. KUWAIT
21. KYRGYZSTAN
22. LAOS
23. LEBANON
24. MALAYSIA
25. MALDIVES
26. MONGOLIA
27. MYANMAR
28. NEPAL
29. NORTH KOREA
30. OMAN
31. PAKISTAN
• I Am Malala by Malala Yousafzai
32. PALESTINE
33. PHILIPPINES
34. QATAR
35. SAUDI ARABIA
36. SINGAPORE
37. SOUTH KOREA
38. SRI LANKA
• The English Patient by Michael Ondaatje
39. SYRIA
40. TAJIKISTAN
41. THAILAND
42. TURKEY
43. TURKMENISTAN
44. VIETNAM
• Dust Child by Que Mai Phan Nguyen
45. UZBEKISTAN
46. YEMEN
47. TIMOR-LESTE
48. UNITED ARAB EMIRATES
49. TAIWAN

1. CYPRUS
2. ALBANIA
• Chronicle in Stone by Ismail Kadare

  Knowing nothing about Albania, I decided to read this book and I am glad I did. The book recounts the traumatic events the citizens of Gjirokaster, close to the Greek border, endured from around 1939, with the invasion by the Italians, then the Greeks, the Italians again and then finally the Germans in 1943. It does not go into what happened after the Germans left so I’ll have to look that up for myself. The story is narrated through the eyes of a child and his curiosity in girls, murders, hermaphrodites, homosexuals and planes give this story a childish simplicity

3. ANDORRA
• The Mysterious Balloon Man by Albert Salvadó

  Novel about the UK foreign office trying to place a spy in Spain during the time of the French Revolution. Good fun

4. AUSTRIA
• The Tobacconist by Robert Seethaler

  Loved this book. Set in 1937, a young man from a village goes to work at a tobacconist in Vienna

5. BELARUS
• A Replacement Life by Boris Fishman

  An interesting book. I had a slightly difficult time at first with the sometimes deliberately fractured English, but I got used to the writing. Slava, emigrated from Belarus with his parents and grandparents when he was still a child. He now works for a New York newspaper as a junior who hopes to get his articles published. Although he has been very close to his family, there is a distance now, he is trying to fit in with being “American” in Manhattan, rather than with the Brooklyn immigrants in the neighbourhood he grew up in. At his grandmother’s funeral, he is asked by his grandfather to invent a story so he can claim for repatriation from the German government for the crimes committed against Jews. This book explores the relationships between first generation migrants and their children, as well as the hardships that many Russian Jews suffered during the war, even if they were not in Ghettos.

6. BELGIUM
• First Blood by Amélie Nothomb
7. BOSNIA AND HERZEGOVINA
• The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andrić
8. BULGARIA
• Street Without A Name : Childhood And Other Misadventures In Bulgaria by Kapka Kassabova

  An honest and witty account of life growing up in communist Bulgaria. It is a memoir of the author’s life and brings to life characters in her family, her school friends as well as people she meets on her travels. The second half of the book consists of her returning to Bulgaria after emigrating in her teens and travelling through the country once it has joined the European Union. It shows how Bulgaria has been affected by its history, both recent with communism and further back, during and after the Ottoman Empire Underlining the book is the struggle she and other Bulgarian emigrants feel to belong in any country. Interesting, witty, funny and sad.

9. CROATIA
10. CZECH REPUBLIC
11. DENMARK
• Out of Africa by Isak Dinesen, Karen Blixen
• Hitler's Canary by Sandi Toksvig

  Suitable for younger audiences. It deals with the Nazi invasion of Denmark and how the resistance below many Jews escape to Sweden. It’s inspired by the expériences the author’s father during WW2.

12. ESTONIA
13. FINLAND
14. FRANCE
• The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak

  4 stars. Story of loss set in Cyprus during the civil war

• 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World by Elif Shafak

  4.5 stars. Leila’s body lies in a trash bin. She is dead but her brain is still functioning. It is said the brain can continue to work for 10 minutes and 38 seconds and it is in this time that Leila runs through the memory of her life. We are taken from her birth, childhood, and the tragic circumstances of her life that led to her eventual murder.

• Around the World in Eighty Days by Jules Verne
• Les Miserables by Victor Hugo
• The Count of Monte Cristo by Alexandre Dumas
• Twenty thousand leagues under the sea by Jules Verne
15. GERMANY
• The Little Paris Bookshop by Nina George
16. GREECE
17. HUNGARY
18. ICELAND
19. IRELAND
• A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man by James Joyce
• Dracula by Bram Stoker
• Normal People : A Novel by Sally Rooney
• Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
• The Boy in the Striped Pajamas by John Boyne
• The Picture of Dorian Gray by Oscar Wilde
20. ITALY
• My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante
• The Adventures of Pinocchio by Carlo Collodi
21. KOSOVO
22. LATVIA
23. LIECHTENSTEIN
24. LITHUANIA
25. LUXEMBOURG
26. NORTH MACEDONIA
27. MALTA
28. MOLDOVA
29. MONACO
30. MONTENEGRO
31. NETHERLANDS
32. NORWAY
• The Bookseller of Kabul by Åsne Seierstad
• The Snowman : A Harry Hole Thriller (Oslo Sequence 5) by Jo Nesbø
33. POLAND
• Quo Vadis by Henryk Sienkiewicz

  Classic Polish novel Saga set during the Roman Empire. A love story set during the time of the Christian persecution in Rome.

34. PORTUGAL
35. ROMANIA
36. RUSSIA
• Nutcracker and Mouse King by E. T. A. Hoffmann

  Childhood favourite

• Anna Karenina by Leo Tolstoy
• Lolita by Vladimir Nabokov
• The Nutcracker by E. T. A. Hoffmann
• War and Peace by Leo Tolstoy
37. SAN MARINO
38. SERBIA
39. SLOVAKIA
40. SLOVENIA
41. SPAIN
• American Dirt by Jeanine Cummins
• The Shadow of the Wind by Carlos Ruiz Zafón
42. SWEDEN
• The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo by Stieg Larsson
• A Man Called Ove by Fredrik Backman
• The Girl Who Played With Fire by Stieg Larsson
• The Hundred-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared by Jonas Jonasson
43. SWITZERLAND
• Heidi by Johanna Spyri
44. UKRAINE
45. VATICAN CITY
46. ENGLAND
• Corelli's Mandolin by Louis de Bernieres
• The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
• A Town Like Alice by Nevil Shute
• Child 44 by Tom Rob Smith
• David Copperfield by Charles Dickens
• Death on the Nile by Agatha Christie
• Emma by Jane Austen
• Frankenstein by Mary Shelley
• Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
• Godmersham Park by Gill Hornby
• Great Expectations by Charles Dickens
• Hamlet by William Shakespeare
• Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Harry Potter, Book 2) by J. K. Rowling
• Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows (Harry Potter, Book 7) by J. K. Rowling
• Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Harry Potter, Book 4) by J. K. Rowling
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince (Harry Potter, Book 6) by J. K. Rowling
• Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Harry Potter, Book 5) by J. K. Rowling
• Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban (Harry Potter, Book 3) by J. K. Rowling
• Harry Potter and the Sorcerer's Stone (Harry Potter, Book 1) by J. K. Rowling
• Jane Eyre by Charlotte Brontë
• Lord of the Flies by William Golding
• Macbeth by William Shakespeare
• Oliver Twist by Charles Dickens
• Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen
• Rebecca by Daphne du Maurier
• Romeo and Juliet by William Shakespeare
• Salmon Fishing in the Yemen by Paul Torday
• Sense and Sensibility by Jane Austen
• Songbirds : A Novel by Christy Lefteri
• Tale of Two Cities by Charles Dickens
• The Dictionary of Lost Words by Pip Williams
• The Familiars by Stacey Halls
• The Merchant of Venice by William Shakespeare
• The Midnight Library by Matt Haig
• The Sunrise by Victoria Hislop
• The Switch by Beth O'Leary
• The Tale of Peter Rabbit by Beatrix Potter
• Wuthering Heights by Emily Brontë
• Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence

  Semi-autobiographical novel set in the late 1800s/early 1900s in industrial England. Deals with issues of relationships, sexuality, a demanding mother and the inability to form long term relationships

• Lady Chatterley’s lover by D. H. Lawrence

  Love story between a high class woman and a working class man. Very sexual in content and shocking for the time when it was written. Touches social divide. Very well written, an English classic

47. NORTHERN IRELAND
• Hamnet by Maggie O'Farrell
• The Seven Sisters by Lucinda Riley
• The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe by C. S. Lewis
48. SCOTLAND
• Doors Open by Ian Rankin
• Eleanor Oliphant Is Completely Fine : A Novel by Gail Honeyman
• The Hound of the Baskervilles by Arthur Conan Doyle
• The Strange Case of Dr Jeckyl and Mr Hyde by Robert Louis Stevenson
49. WALES
• The Pillars of the Earth by Ken Follett