The Stranger, also published in English as The Outsider, is a 1942 novella written by French author Albert Camus. The first of Camus's novels published in his lifetime, the story follows Meursault, an indifferent settler in French Algeria, who, weeks after his mother's funeral, kills an unnamed Arab man in Algiers. The story is divided into two parts, presenting Meursault's first-person narrative before and after the killing.

Winner of the 1981 Nobel Prize for Literature, Elias Canetti uncovers the secret life hidden beneath Marrakesh’s bewildering array of voices, gestures and faces. In a series of sharply etched scenes, he portrays the languages and cultures of the people who fill its bazaars, cafes, and streets. The book presents vivid images of daily the storytellers in the Djema el Fna, the armies of beggars ready to set upon the unwary, and the rituals of Moroccan family life.

Things Fall Apart is the first novel by the Nigerian author Chinua Achebe. It portrays the life of Okonkwo, a traditional influential leader of the fictional Igbo clan, Umuofia. He is a feared warrior and a local wrestling champion who opposed the European colonialism and Christian missionaries. An early modernist novel, it received positive reviews upon publication. The novel was published in the United Kingdom in 1958 by William Heinemann Ltd. The novel takes its title from a verse of the poem, "The Second Coming" by W. B. Yeats. It was written in three parts, and was followed by a sequel, No Longer at Ease, originally written as the second part of a larger work along with Arrow of God.

On the eve of Angolan independence an agoraphobic woman named Ludo bricks herself into her apartment for 30 years, living off vegetables and the pigeons she lures in with diamonds, burning her furniture and books to stay alive and writing her story on the apartment’s walls. Almost as if we’re eavesdropping, the history of Angola unfolds through the stories of those she sees from her window. As the country goes through various political upheavals from colony to socialist republic to civil war to peace and capitalism, the world outside seeps into Ludo’s life through snippets on the radio, voices from next door, glimpses of someone peeing on a balcony, or a man fleeing his pursuers.