Conquest of PagesBooks by European authors: a reading list by country
Europe’s shelf is the one most English-language readers already know best — and still full of surprises beyond the big names. Smaller countries and languages often have writers who are only a few translated books deep, which makes them an easy way to widen your reading without leaving a familiar kind of story: the novel, the short story, the family saga.
How to use this list
Europe has 44 countries in the read-around-the-world challenge. Below is one well-loved book by an author born in 29 of them — a place to start, not a verdict. Try the countries whose literature you have never opened — the Baltics, the Balkans, the Nordic languages beyond the famous crime novels — before returning to the big literatures you can name from memory.
A book to start with, country by country
| Country | A place to start |
|---|---|
| Albania | Chronicle in Stone — Ismail Kadare |
| Austria | Chess Story — Stefan Zweig |
| Belgium | Fear and Trembling — Amélie Nothomb |
| Bosnia and Herzegovina | The Lazarus Project — Aleksandar Hemon |
| Bulgaria | Time Shelter — Georgi Gospodinov |
| Croatia | The Museum of Unconditional Surrender — Dubravka Ugrešić |
| Czechia | The Unbearable Lightness of Being — Milan Kundera |
| Denmark | Smilla's Sense of Snow — Peter Høeg |
| Estonia | The Czar's Madman — Jaan Kross |
| Finland | The Summer Book — Tove Jansson |
| France | Les Misérables — Victor Hugo |
| Germany | The Magic Mountain — Thomas Mann |
| Greece | Zorba the Greek — Nikos Kazantzakis |
| Hungary | Fatelessness — Imre Kertész |
| Iceland | Independent People — Halldór Laxness |
| Ireland | Dubliners — James Joyce |
| Italy | The Name of the Rose — Umberto Eco |
| Netherlands | The Discovery of Heaven — Harry Mulisch |
| Norway | Hunger — Knut Hamsun |
| Poland | Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead — Olga Tokarczuk |
| Portugal | Blindness — José Saramago |
| Romania | Solenoid — Mircea Cărtărescu |
| Russia | Crime and Punishment — Fyodor Dostoevsky |
| Serbia | A Tomb for Boris Davidovich — Danilo Kiš |
| Spain | The Shadow of the Wind — Carlos Ruiz Zafón |
| Sweden | Pippi Longstocking — Astrid Lindgren |
| Switzerland | The Pledge — Friedrich Dürrenmatt |
| Ukraine | Dead Souls — Nikolai Gogol |
| United Kingdom | Pride and Prejudice — Jane Austen |
Your pick
No single obvious starting point for these — any author born in the country counts. Search a library catalogue for “literature of” the country, or look at its national prize winners.
- Andorra
- Belarus
- Vatican City
- Latvia
- Liechtenstein
- Lithuania
- Luxembourg
- Malta
- Moldova
- Monaco
- Montenegro
- North Macedonia
- San Marino
- Slovakia
- Slovenia
Keep going
Other regions: Africa · Asia · North America · South America · Oceania. The whole challenge is explained on Read around the world.
In Conquest of Pages each book you finish plants a forest where its author was born, so a list like this one turns into a map you can watch fill in. It is free, and your library stays on your device.