Europe can look very different from its edges. This is a selection of books from countries and regions often perceived as being on Europe’s geographical, historical, or cultural periphery: Georgia, Croatia, Portugal, Poland, Turkey, and the Balkans. These are places shaped by shifting borders, empires, occupations, migrations, political upheavals, and the uneasy meeting of different cultural worlds.
The books gathered here are not necessarily about borders themselves. Rather, they explore what it means to live between worlds, to inherit histories that overlap and conflict, to belong to more than one cultural sphere, or to feel slightly outside the centre of things.
From post-Soviet Georgia and the former Yugoslavia to the Mediterranean, Central Europe and the crossroads between Europe and Asia, these novels offer different ways of looking at identity, memory, exile, belonging, loneliness, and historical change.
For me, the edges of Europe are not peripheral places. They are places from which Europe can sometimes be seen more clearly.
1 COMPASS BY MATHIAS ENARD (Austria, Turkey, Syria, Persia)
Mathias Énard’s Compass is a hypnotic, melancholic meditation on cultural identity, exile, memory and the centuries of exchange between Europe and the Middle East. Set over a single sleepless night in Vienna, it follows Franz Ritter, an Austrian musicologist suffering from a terminal illness, as his thoughts move between Vienna, Istanbul, Damascus and Tehran, and between music, literature, history and his unrequited love for Sarah, a brilliant French-Jewish Orientalist.
Dense with references to forgotten writers, musicians, travellers and scholars, the novel becomes a vast cultural labyrinth in which East and West are revealed not as opposing worlds but as deeply intertwined ones. Istanbul occupies a particularly important place in Franz’s imagination, embodying the crossings between Europe and Asia, while memories of Syria before the civil war give the novel a profound sense of cultural loss.
At its heart, Compass is also a novel about people who exist between worlds: intellectually, geographically and emotionally. Énard explores the loneliness of exile and the fragility of cultural memory, while resisting simplistic ideas of separate civilisations. It is an elegy for the cosmopolitan worlds that have disappeared or been destroyed, and a celebration of the connections preserved through literature, music, art and memory.
Compass won the Prix Goncourt and is an extraordinarily rewarding novel for readers who enjoy slow, intellectually adventurous fiction. Reading it feels like entering a vast cultural archive where every forgotten name opens another path.
2 NIGHT TRAIN TO LISBON BY PASCAL MERCIER (Portugal)
Pascal Mercier’s Night Train to Lisbon is a philosophical and deeply introspective novel about identity, loneliness, memory and the possibility of living differently. Raimund Gregorius, a professor of classical languages in Bern, abruptly abandons his predictable life and travels to Lisbon after discovering the writings of Amadeu de Prado, a Portuguese doctor whose reflections on death, friendship, love and courage begin to transform his understanding of himself.
Lisbon becomes more than a destination: it is a place of reinvention, where Gregorius can step outside the life he has always known and consider the alternative lives he might have lived. Through Prado’s words and conversations with those who knew him, Gregorius embarks on a journey not only across Europe but into the depths of his own identity. Slow, philosophical and rich with vivid descriptions, Night Train to Lisbon is a novel about the strange power of books, places and other people to make us question the lives we have chosen, and wonder whether it is ever too late to begin again.
3 JOURNEY TO THE EDGE OF LIFE BY TEZER ÖZLU (Turkey, Balkans, Czechia, Italy)
Journey to the Edge of Life by Tezer Özlü is a restless, deeply introspective book that sits somewhere between travelogue, memoir, literary diary, and philosophical meditation on life, death, love, loneliness, and writing. In 1982, Özlü travels across Europe by train, following the lives and deaths of three writers who shaped her inner world: Franz Kafka, Italo Svevo, and Cesare Pavese. Moving through Berlin, Prague, Trieste, Turin and other cities, she visits their graves, homes, cafés, and the places they once inhabited, while reflecting on her own life, mental illness, alienation, and longing.
Her prose is fragmented, lyrical, and intensely personal. The physical journey gradually becomes an inner one, with cities, hotel rooms, memories and literature flowing into one another. Özlü finds in these writers something more than literary companionship: they become people through whom she can understand her own loneliness and the difficulty of living.
At the heart of the book is her profound belief in literature as a form of survival. “I trust in literature, my true home,” she writes, capturing the feeling that books can sometimes offer a deeper sense of belonging than any physical place. Raw, melancholic and beautifully searching, Journey to the Edge of Life is a book about living at the margins, finding kinship with the dead, and discovering that sometimes literature has more life in it than life.
4 THE ORPHANAGE BY SERHIY ZHADAN (Ukraine)
The Orphanage, by Ukrainian writer Serhiy Zhadan, is one of the best books I have read this year. Set in an unnamed, war-torn city resembling Donetsk around 2015, it follows Pasha, an apolitical Ukrainian-language teacher, as he crosses the city to collect his nephew from a boarding school and bring him home.
Over the course of three days, Pasha encounters fear, confusion, hunger, violence, and uncertainty. It is impossible to know who is a friend or enemy, which side people support, or how to behave safely. Although the novel rarely depicts violence directly, the constant sounds of explosions and gunfire create an intense atmosphere of anxiety and hopelessness.
Zhadan’s poetic yet rough prose vividly captures the city’s streets, ruins, snow, mud, and desolation. The novel explores war’s impact on ordinary people, the dangers of indifference, and the senseless suffering of civilians. It is a powerful, universal story about helplessness, moral uncertainty, and the collapse of a familiar world.
5 MEDALLIONS BY ZOFIA NALKOWSKA (Poland)
Medallions by Polish writer Zofia Nałkowska is one of the most powerful and haunting works of Holocaust literature I have read. Written partly from her experience as a member of the Commission for the Investigation of Nazi War Crimes, it consists of eight short reportages based on the testimonies of survivors and eyewitnesses, recorded only months after the end of the Second World War. Nałkowska writes with extraordinary restraint. There is no romanticising, no grand language, and no attempt to turn the victims into heroes or martyrs. Instead, she preserves their voices, silences, gestures, fear, shame and shock. Again and again, we are reminded that some experiences are so terrible that language itself becomes inadequate.
The reportages explore the dehumanisation of victims, the machinery of genocide, ideological fanaticism and the frightening ease with which human beings can become perpetrators or silent witnesses to suffering. In “Professor Spanner”, Nałkowska shows how education, science, authority and social status offer no guarantee of empathy or human decency. The book opens with the devastating words, “People dealt this fate to people.” The sentence is simple, almost unbearably so, and becomes a reminder that the perpetrators of these crimes were not monsters from another world, but human beings. It also makes Medallions a profound meditation on responsibility, the ‘banality of evil’, memory and the necessity of bearing witness.
At only around fifty pages, this is a very short book, yet its weight is enormous. Medallions is not simply a record of one of the darkest periods in history. It is a quiet, devastating reflection on human suffering, silence, memory and what happens when we stop seeing another human being as human. A small book in size, but immense in its moral and emotional weight.
6 THE ANTHROPOLOGISTS BY AYSEGUL SAVAS (Turkey)
The Anthropologists by Ayşegül Savaş is a quiet, deeply observant novel about immigration, belonging, marriage, language, and the small rituals through which we create a life. It follows Asya, a young immigrant filmmaker trained in anthropology, and her husband Manu as they build a home together in an unnamed foreign city, far from their families and native languages. Their lives are shaped by seemingly ordinary moments: quiet breakfasts, aromatic coffee, walks through a cemetery, Sunday cinema screenings, and evenings watching their favourite detective series.
Savaş finds something quietly profound in these everyday rituals. For Asya and Manu, home is not so much a place as something they gradually create through shared habits, private jokes, borrowed words, and an intimate language of their own.
The novel also captures the melancholy of living between worlds: becoming a stranger to the place you came from, watching parents grow older from a distance, and realising that belonging cannot always be found in geography, nationality, or inherited traditions. A tender meditation on migration, intimacy, and the fragile, everyday acts through which we make a home.
7 JOURNEY TO KARABAKH BY AKA MORCHILADZE (Georgia)
Journey to Karabakh by Aka Morchiladze is a short novella set in post-Soviet Georgia in the early 1990s, against the backdrop of the war between Armenia and Azerbaijan. Twenty-four-year-old Gio and his friend Goglik travel from Tbilisi to Azerbaijan to buy drugs, but accidentally cross into Karabakh, where they are captured first by Azerbaijani and then Armenian forces.
In captivity, Gio reflects on his life in Tbilisi—his domineering father, an unapproved relationship, the limited prospects of his generation, and the social and cultural constraints that shape his life. Paradoxically, he experiences a sense of freedom and tranquillity in captivity that he never felt at home, leading him to question what freedom actually means.
Through Gio’s experience, Morchiladze explores war, personal freedom, alienation and the disillusionment of a generation coming of age after the collapse of the Soviet Union. A concise, quietly unsettling novel about the boundaries between freedom and captivity, and the ways in which political conflict and social constraints shape individual lives.
8 RED WATER BY JURICA PAVICIC (Croatia, former Yugoslavia, Balkans)
Red Water by Jurica Pavičić is a haunting crime novel and a meditation on loss, collective trauma, moral ambiguity, and the collapse of a society. Set in a small town on the Dalmatian coast, the novel begins in 1989, when seventeen-year-old Silva disappears, and follows the consequences of her disappearance over the next twenty-six years, until 2015. Her disappearance becomes both a family tragedy and a metaphor for the disintegration of Yugoslavia and the social order that had seemed stable for decades.
Moving between different perspectives, Pavičić traces the lives of Silva’s family, the police, and the wider community as they are shaped by the break-up of Yugoslavia, the Croatian War of Independence, the economic and social transformations of the 1990s and 2000s, and Croatia’s eventual integration into a rapidly changing European society.
The novel shows how a single unresolved tragedy can reverberate across generations. There are no simple divisions between guilt and innocence, truth and lies, and when the truth about Silva finally emerges decades later, it brings neither justice nor closure. A bleak and atmospheric novel about disappearance, memory, and the way an individual tragedy can become entangled with the history of an entire society.
