After signing up for StoryGraph (an alternative to Goodreads), I decided to give a go to one of their annual challenges: to read, in 2025, ten novels from ten different countries. A year later, it’s time to debrief.

I started late — in July — when I picked Fernanda Melchor’s Hurricane Season as my book from Mexico. Incidentally, it turned out to be the one I liked most out of the 10. It’s not for the faint-hearted, though! It’s a very dark book — one of the darkest I’ve ever read. The only darker one I can recollect is Jerzy Kosiński’s The Painted Bird. Lovecraft, with his elder gods, is harmless fantasy in comparison. But Kosiński is a nihilist, while Fernanda Melchor is a writer with great sensitivity to social issues. I would define her genre as a psychologico-sociological crime novel with folk elements. She explores violence passed down through generations and the systemic problems that keep people trapped in desperate living conditions. But her greatest achievement in this book is the narrative — the shifting first-person perspective that lets us see more facets of the story through the eyes of different perpetrators. There are no “good guys” in the book; it’s a journey from one form of evil to another, without respite. The absence of an external, neutral narrator makes for a suffocating reading experience, and I wanted to give up more than once, longing for some serenity. Yet somehow, this unforgiving narrative kept luring me back for more. And I wanted to know what had really happened to the witch, found murdered on page one.

Later in July, I read Amélie Nothomb’s Hygiène de l'assassin (Belgium). It was a pleasant and easy read, composed almost entirely of dialogue. A young female journalist gets to interview a writer who is famous as much for his books as for his misanthropy. Their conversation turns into a fierce duel in which each tries to dominate the other, while the journalist gradually uncovers the dying writer’s dark secret from the past.

In August, I chose Meja Mwangi’s The Cockroach Dance (Kenya). This was a very surprising book that defied my expectations of what a novel should be. It’s a story without a clear plot — I kept reading, waiting for the narrative to begin, but instead, the book simply ended. The protagonist is a poor parking-meter reader who lives in a rented shared room. The history of the building — first constructed by an immigrant Indian engineer and later transformed into a tenement by a local entrepreneur — is perhaps the only coherent storyline. Otherwise, the protagonist simply gets on with his life. I’m not complaining, though; it was both interesting and entertaining. Although the book was published in 1979, the narrative felt very modern.

In September, I read The Yacoubian Building by Alaa Al Aswany (Egypt) during a long train journey. I would never have thought that an Arabic bestseller from a Muslim country would have so much sex in it! You could almost call it an encyclopedia of Egyptian sex. It spans everything from sex as one of the few pleasures available to the poor working class, through the risky encounters of gay men and the sadly common sexual harassment of young women in the workplace, to the marital bliss — both sexual and spiritual — of young jihadists in a desert training camp. That last part was a bit disturbing, I must confess.

In October, I thought I was in luck — my book club chose an Australian novel, so I could count it toward the Australian part of the challenge: Richard Flanagan’s Gould’s Book of Fish. However, despite the added incentive of discussing it with my friends, this was the only book on the list that I simply couldn’t force myself to finish. 400 pages of random, absurd violence inflicted on prisoners brought from Britain and on the Indigenous population, sprinkled with small and large miracles and paintings of fish made with blood and excrement? No, thank you — 200 were more than enough. The character of the obese French surgeon who fancied himself a scientist, corresponded with Newton, and spoke elliptically, with infinitives only, and always in capital letters, was worth only half the pain I endured through those 200 pages.

In November, I read Accidents Happen, a collection of short crime stories by F. H. Batacan (the Philippines). To me, this is an example of an excellent writer who should trust her talent and write sociological novels instead of crime fiction. Her instinct for storytelling and her curiosity about life around her are vivid, but her depiction of criminal investigations felt rather naïve and unconvincing.

In December, time was running out, and I still had to cover China, the Netherlands, Iceland, and Malaysia. I read the first part of Iceland’s Bell by the Nobel Prize–winning Icelandic author Halldór Laxness. The novel was published in three parts, and the first one felt complete in itself, but I’d like to continue with the rest — I might write about it in a separate post in the future.

As for the remaining countries, I decided to read single short stories to symbolically complete the challenge. Unexpectedly, the stories I enjoyed the most came from a modest 150-page collection titled Black and Whites and Other New Short Stories from Malaysia. I had planned to read just one story, but I ended up reading almost the whole book — the stories were so good and diverse, and their short length (10 to 20 pages) made them easy to get through. The best one, though, was also the longest: Daphne Lee’s After the Funeral. It tells the story of a young student on a scholarship in London who returns to Kuala Lumpur for her grandfather’s funeral and finds her secular, rational worldview challenged by strange events in the house — things that could only be explained, and resolved, by belief in toyols, ghost children.

If you want to join me for the 2026 challenge, the countries for this year are the following: Afghanistan, Albania, Bulgaria, Croatia, France, Iraq, Morocco, Senegal, Sweden, and Thailand.