I’m from America so of course our literary classics are pretty widely known in the western world, so I’m going to recommend something a bit more niche: There There by Tommy Orange. It shines light on many different aspects of the Native American experience, specifically in Oakland, California. It covers addiction, poverty, culture, and heritage in a way that I (not Native myself) found moving.

Also, in America is Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.

When this is asked first book, that comes to my mind, is R. U. R. by Karel Čapek.

Only because word robot is well known but very few people know that it originated in this book/play.

Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song, full of the richness of NE Scots dialect and the complex realities of rural life a bare 100 years ago. And Rabbie Burn’s poem urging social equality: “A Man’s A Man For A’ That” It was chosen for the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, when Scots reclaimed a modicum of self-governance again. https://piped.adminforge.de/watch?v=hudNoXsUj0o Words are here: https://www.nts.org.uk/stories/a-mans-a-man-for-a-that

Maybe the obvious answer, but East of Eden. It’s a genuine masterpiece.

The usual answer for Sweden is “The Emigrants” (Utvandrarna) by Vilhelm Moberg. However, and I don’t think this is obvious to foreign readers, the author John Ajvide Lindqvist really writes about Sweden. He’s most famous for the book “Let the right one in” about a vampire kid, but the story is actually about growing up as a young boy in Sweden. The horror aspect is part of the genre, but all his books manage to mix a description of swedish society with a supernatural horror element.

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