It doesn’t have to be famous, just a work that you connect with that you feel represents your country in some way.

  • 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.

  •  emma   ( @emma@beehaw.org ) 
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    1 year ago

    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

    Then let us pray that come it may (As come it will for a’ that) That Sense and Worth o’er a’ the earth, Shall bear the gree an a’ that. For a’ that, an a’ that, It’s coming yet for a’ that, That man to man, the world, o’er, Shall brithers be for a’ that.

  • 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.