This list focuses, with a handful of exceptions, almost entirely on prose fiction. I wanted to avoid having a smorgasbord of literary genres. So no non-fiction, science fiction, fantasy, poetry, drama, horror, mystery, young adults or children's. Why? Because there many good lists specific to these genres on this site as well as many others. Including a few of each would smack of tokenism and be disrespectful to those genres.
Secondly, all lists are biased to some extent as they reflect the biases of their creators. If I include samples from these genres they will be books I know about. It would lead to this list being overly biased towards European books.
Currently books by non-European writers make up over one third of this list. I am not suggesting that is appropriate, just how it worked out given my own biases.
The best lists are always those that bring unknown, or little known writers and books to one's attention. Hopefully, this list achieves that for some of you.
