50 Popular Books You Can Read This Summer

To mark #WorldBookDay, the School of Oriental and African Studies asked students, academics, alumni, and friends to suggest their top picks in global literature.

The response was fantastic. While SOAS received hundreds of nominations on Facebook, Twitter and their blog, they narrowed the list to 50. The list is enough to keep readers going for the next month, year or decade depending on voraciousness. At any rate, 50 books will sort you out for many summers.

So, without any further ado, here’s the list. How many have you read?

1. A Fine Balance, Rohinton Mistry

2. Brothers, Yu Hua

3. Nervous Conditions, Tsitsi Dangarembga

4. The Quiet Violence of Dreams, K.Sello Duiker

5. The Cockroach Dance, Meja Mwangi

6. Rainbow Troops, Andrea Hirata

7. The Corpse Walker, Liao Yiwu

8. Half of a Yellow Sun, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

9. Small Island, Angela Levy

10. 1Q84 Trilogy, Haruki Murakami

11. The Boy Who Harnessed the Wind, William Kamkwamba

12. Call me Woman, Ellen Kuzwayo

13. The Sea of Fertility, Yukio Mishima

14. House of Glass (Buru Quartet), Pramoedya Ananta Toer

15. Twilight in Jakarta, Mochtar Lubis

16. A Thousand Splendid Suns, Khaled Husseini

17. South Of The Border, West Of The Sun, Haruki Murakami

18. Things Fall Apart, Chinua Achebe

19. The Bastard of Istanbul, Elif Shafak

20. My Bird, Fariba Vafi

21. Dogeaters, Jessica Hagedorn

22. This Earth of Mankind, Pramodya Ananta Toer

23. Dust, Yvonne Adhiambo Owuor

24. Under the Udala Trees, Chinelo Okparanta

25. The Baghdad Eucharist (Ya Mariam), Sinan Antoon

26. Palace Walk, Naguib Mahfouz

27. Season of Crimson Blossoms, Abubakar Ibrahim

28. Samarkand, Amin Maalouf

29. Midnight’s Children, Salman Rushdie

30. The Prophet, Khalil Gibran

31. Woman at Point Zero, Nawal El-Saadawi

32. So Long a Letter, Mariama Bâ

33. Dream of the Red Chamber, Cao Xueqin

34. A Home in Tibet, Tsering Wangmo Dhompa

35. Island Beneath the Sea, Isabel Allende

36. Narcopolis, Jeet Thayil

37. Memed, my Hawk, Yasar Kemal

38. Si Parasit Lajang, Ayu Utami

39. After the Banquet, Yukio Mishima

40. Chinese Whispers, Hsiao-hung Pai

41. The God of Small Things, Arundhati Roy

42. Half of Man is Woman, Zhang Xianlang

43. Americanah, Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie

44. Reading Lolita in Tehran, Azar Nafisi

45. Train to Pakistan, Khushwant Singh

46. The Devotion of Suspect X, Keigo Higashino

47. A Golden Age, Tahmima Anam

48. The Garden of Evening Mists, Tan Twan Eng

49. We Need New Names, NoViolet Bulawayo

50. The Glass Palace, Amitav Ghosh

Which books are you planning to read? Email us or let us know in the comments below.

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The list originally appeared on the SOAS blog and has been published here with permission.