TTT: Books Set in Countries on my Bucket List

Top Ten Tuesday: Books Set in Countries on my Bucket List which I'd Like to Read

There are so many places in the world I'd like to visit someday. In the meantime I will have to satisfy my curiosity by reading about them. (If you've read any good books from these parts of the world, please share them below in the comments!)

Africa

• The Caliph's House by Tahir Shah: A modern, humorous account of a family moving into a haunted house in Casablanca, Morocco.
• The Return: Fathers, Sons, and the Land In Between by Hisham Matar: Matar’s account of searching for the father he lost to a 1990 kidnapping in Cairo functions equally as absorbing detective story, personal elegy and acute portrait of doomed geopolitics — all merged, somehow, with the discipline and cinematic verve of a novel. Egypt.
• Cry, the Beloved Country by Alan Paton:  the most famous and important novel in South Africa’s history, was an immediate worldwide bestseller in 1948. Alan Paton’s impassioned novel about a black man’s country under white man’s law is a work of searing beauty.
• Whatever You Do, Don't Run: True Tales of a Botswana Safari Guide by Peter Allison: A hilarious, highly original collection of essays based on the Botswana truism: “only food runs!”

India

• Midnight's Children by Salman Rushdie: A landmark novel tracing India's independence.
• The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy: A Booker Prize winner set in Kerala, India. (Reread for me.)
• The Inheritance of Loss by Kiran Desai: A story set between the Himalayas and New York.
• The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai: The sweeping tale of two young people navigating the many forces that shape their country, class, race, history, and the complicated bonds that link one generation to the next. Set in both the USA and India.
• A Fine Balance by Rohinton Mistry: With a compassionate realism and narrative sweep that recall the work of Charles Dickens, this magnificent novel captures all the cruelty and corruption, dignity and heroism, of India.

Vietnam, Japan, and Thailand

• Dust Child by Nguyễn Phan Quế Mai: Discrimination faced by Amerasians, products of the Vietnam conflict. Vietnam.
• Bangkok Wakes to Rain by Pitchaya Sudbanthad: A modern, acclaimed novel that interweaves multiple stories spanning different eras in Bangkok, from the past to the future. Thailand.
• Tokyo Ueno Station by Yu Miri : A poignant story of a ghost residing in Tokyo's Ueno Park, highlighting homelessness and social neglect. Japan.

Australia

• Cloudstreet by Tim Winton: A masterful family saga is both a paean to working-class Australians and an unflinching examination of the human heart's capacity for sorrow, joy, and endless gradations in between.
• The Secret River by Kate Grenville: In 1806 William Thornhill steals a load of wood and, as a part of his lenient sentence, is deported to the New South Wales colony in what would become Australia.

Remember: please leave me suggested titles for these corners of the world in my comments. Thank you.

-Anne