My Mediterranean Reading Summer 2013: The Summary

Here in my corner the weather has turned autumnal, even prematurely hibernal. The summer is irrevocably over and on this last day of September My Mediterranean Reading Summer 2013 is going to an end, too. For four months I’ve been reading my way criss-cross through twenty-one countries around the Mediterranean Sea plus Palestine and Gibraltar, but although I found at least one novel for each country I couldn't read them all. The summer has been too short as always!

This bookish odyssey has been a very interesting experience for me. A welcome side-effect of it is that I had the pleasure of discovering some wonderful stories and authors on the way that otherwise might have completely slipped my attention. Some of the novels figuring on my list haven’t yet made it into the bookshops here in Graz and some never will because they aren’t to the taste of the average reader. Others are popular here and almost unheard of in the Anglo-American world.

Out of twenty-four novels I had to order about half and even that way some of them have been really hard to come by through my usual channels. A couple of books didn’t even make it on the list because I couldn’t get them at all like a novel by the Portuguese writer Helena Marques set in Malta. The only German edition of A deusa sentada is long out of print and unavailable in the libraries nearby. Well, the book has never been translated into English and I wouldn't blog about it, anyway.

Over the past weeks I reviewed most of the books which I thoroughly enjoyed and left others to write about later because they didn’t seem to fit in right then. My personal favourites of the summer have been The Calligrapher’s Secret by Rafik Shami, Small Wars by Sadie Jones and The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna. However, here’s the complete list of my Mediterranean reads including those five which remain for the time being on my pile of books to be read. Just follow the links to read my reviews!

Slovenia	Veronika Decides to Die by Paulo Coelho
Croatia	The Hired Man by Aminatta Forna
Bosnia & Herzegovina	The Cellist of Sarajevo by Steven Galloway
Montenegro	TBR: The Lady of the Shroud by Bram Stoker
Albania	Broken April by Ismail Kadaré
Greece	Swell by Ioanna Karystiani
Turkey	The Towers of Trebizond by Rose Macaulay
Cyprus	Small Wars by Sadie Jones
Syria	The Calligrapher's Secret by Rafik Shami
Lebanon	TBR: Wild Mulberries by Iman Humaydan Younes
Israel and Palestine	The Remains of Love by Zeruya Shalev The Almond Tree by Michelle Cohen Corasanti
Egypt	Sunset Oasis by Bahaa Taher
Libya	TBR: Gold Dust by Ibrahim al-Koni
Malta	TBR: Sword & Scimetar by Simon Scarrow
Tunesia	TBR: The Pillar of Salt by Albert Memmi
Algeria	What the Day Owes the Night by Yasmina Khadra
Morocco	Horses of God by Mahi Binebine
Gibraltar/U.K.	The Sailor from Gibraltar by Marguerite Duras
Spain	The House of Ulloa by Emilia Pardo Bazán Nada by Carmen Laforet
France	Bonjour Tristesse by Françoise Sagan
Monaco	Twenty-Four Hours in the Life of a Woman by Stefan Zweig
Italy	Accabadora by Michela Murgia