Around the world in 80 books

Introduction: The voyage out

1. London: inventing a city. Virginia Wolf, Mrs. Dalloway

Charles Dickens, Great expectations

Arthur Conan Doyle, The complete Sherlock Holmes

P.G. Wodehouse, Something fresh

Arnold Bennett, Riceyman steps

2. Paris: writers' paradise. Marcel Proust, In search of lost time

Djuna Barnes, Nightwood

Marguerite Duras, The lover

Julio Cortázar, The end of the game

Georges Perec, W, or the memory of childhood

3. Kraków: After Auschwitz. Primo Levi, The periodic table

Franz Kafka, The metamorphosis and other stories

Paul Celan, Poems

Czeslaw Milsz, Selected and last poems, 1931-2004

Olga Tokarczuk, Flights

4. Venice-Florence: invisible cities. Marco Polo, The travels

Dante Alighieri, The divine comedy

Giovanni Boccaccio, The decameron

Donna Leon, By its cover

Italo Calvino, Invisible cities

5. Cairo-Istanbul-Muscat: stories within stories. Love songs of ancient Egypt

The thousand and one nights

Naguib Mahfouz, Arabian nights and days

Orhan Pamuk, My name is red

Jokha Alharthi, Celestial bodies

6. The Congo-Nigeria (Post) Colonial encounters. Joseph Conrad, Heart of darkness

Chinua Achebe, Things fall apart

Wole Soyinka, Death and the King's horseman

Georges Ngal, Giambatista Viko, or the rape of African discourse

Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, The thing around your neck

7. Israel/Palestine: strangers in a strange land. The Hebrew Bible

The New Testament

D. A. Mishani, The missing file

Émile Habibi, The secret life of Saeed the pessoptimist

Mahmoud Darwish, The butterfly's burden

8. Tehran-Shiraz: a desertful of roses. Marjane Satrapi, Persepolis

Farid ud-Din Attar, The conference of the birds

Faces of love: Hafez and the poets of Shiraz

Ghalib, A desertful of roses

Agha Shahid Ali, Call me Ishmael tonight

9. Calcutta/Kolkata: rewriting empire. Rudyard Kipling, Kim

Rabindranath Tagore, The home and the world

Salman Rushdi, East, West

Jamyang Norbu, The mandala of Sherlock Holmes

Jhumpa Lahiri, Interpreter of maladies

10. Shanghai-Beijing: journeys to the West. Wu Cheng'en, Journey to the West

Lu Xun, The real story of Ah-Q and other stories

Eileen Chang, Love in a fallen city

Mo Yan, Life and death are wearing me out

Bei Dao, The rose of time

11. Tokyo-Kyoto: the West of the East. Higuchi Ichiy¬ō, In the shade of spring leaves

Murasaki Shikibu, The tale of Genji

Matsuo Bashō, The narrow road to the deep north

Yukio Mishima, The sea of fertility

James Merrill, "Prose of departure"

12. Brazil-Columbia: Utopias, dystopias, and heterotopias. Thomas More, Utopia

Voltaire, Candide, or optimism

Joaquim Maria Machado de Assis, Posthumous memoirs of Brás Cubas

Clarice Lispector, Family ties

Gabriel García Márquez, One hundred years of solitude

13. Mexico-Guatemala: the Pope's blowgun. Cantares Mexicanos: songs of the Aztecs

Popol Vuh: the Mayan book of the dawn of life

Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz, Selected works

Miguel Ángel Asturias, The president

Rosario Castellanos, The book of lamentations

14. The Antilles and beyond: fragments of epic memory. Derek Walcott, Omeros

James Joyce, Ulysses

Jean Rhys, Wide Sargasso Sea

Margaret Atwood, The Penelopiad

Judith Schalansky, Atlas of remote islands

15. Bar harbor: the world on a desert island. Robert McCloskey, One morning in Maine

Sarah Orne Jewett, The county of the pointed first

Marguerite Yourcenar, Memoirs of Hadrian

Hugh Lofting, The voyage of Doctor Doolittle

W. B. White, Stuart Little

16. New York: Migrant metropolis. Madeleine L'Engle, A wrinkle in time

Saul Steinberg, The labyrinth

James Baldwin, Notes of a native son

Saul Bellow, Henderson the rain king

J. R. R. Tolkein, The lord of the rings

Epilogue: The eighty-first book.