Books like La mulâtresse Solitude by André Schwarz-Bart

Charles Dickens’ landmark historical novel, set in London and Paris during the French Revolution, follows Doctor Manette’s 18‑year imprisonment, his release, and his reunion with daughter Lucie amid looming terror.

Phileas Fogg wagers he can circumnavigate the globe in 80 days, a daring quest that unfolds into a globe‑spanning adventure.

Candide: A Tale of Conviviality and Optimism in a Wretched World

A gripping novel set in Oran, where a plague devastates all classes and evokes deep questions about destiny and the human condition.

Harriet Beecher Stowe’s classic expose the brutal reality of American slavery, following the devout slave Tom as he faces injustice and moral dilemmas—an influential work that stirred Northern anti‑slavery sentiment before the Civil War.

A la recherche du temps perdu by Marcel Proust is a seminal French literary work.

Giovanni Boccaccio's Decameron is a 14th‑century collection of 100 Italian tales told by ten young people who flee the plague‑ravaged Florence to a villa in Fiesole, each day presenting stories framed by a rule and a closing canzone.

A surreal French tale by Boris Vian in which bizarre events unfold, including a woman’s death when a flower grows inside her chest.

Marcus Goldman, a writer and former student of the affluent Goldman family of Baltimore, returns to the United States to confront a decades‑old tragedy that shook his privileged youth and threatens to unravel the family's glittering facade.

"Available in English for the first time, the latest astonishing, bestselling, and award-winning book by Annie Ernaux. The Years is a personal narrative of the period 1941 to 2006 told through the lens of memory, impressions past and present -- even projections into the future -- photos, books, songs, radio, television and decades of advertising, headlines, contrasted with intimate conflicts and writing notes from six decades of diaries. Local dialect, words of the times, slogans, brands and names for the ever-proliferating objects, are given voice here. The voice we recognize as the author's continually dissolves and re-emerges. Ernaux makes the passage of time palpable. Time itself, inexorable, narrates its own course, consigning all other narrators to anonymity. A new kind of autobiography emerges, at once subjective and impersonal, private and collective. On its 2008 publication in France, The Years came as a surprise. Though Ernaux had for years been hailed as a beloved, bestselling and award-winning author, The Years was in many ways a departure: both an intimate memoir "written" by entire generations, and a story of generations telling a very personal story. Like the generation before hers, the narrator eschews the "I" for the "we" (or "they", or "one") as if collective life were inextricably intertwined with a private life that in her parents' generation ceased to exist. She writes of her parents' generation (and could be writing of her own book): "From a common fund of hunger and fear, everything was told in the "we" and impersonal pronouns.""--

A powerful historical novel that traces the generational plight of a Jewish family, from 12th‑century York to the horrors of Auschwitz, through the lens of the mystical thirty‑six righteous souls of Judaism.

In post‑Civil War Kentucky, a young woman returns to her father’s plantation to find her mother was a slave and she is now a captive of creditors, sparking her quest for freedom.

A striking South African novel set on a Cape Colony farm in the early 1800s, where a slave rebellion led by Galant culminates in violence and death, exposing generations of family conflict and the brutal reality of slavery.