Around the World in 197 books

197 countries, 197 books.

Each one is from an author from that country (mostly a contemporary author) and the books are fiction whenever possible. The synopses are not mine but from various online sources.

The counter is updated as the books are added to each country when read and it will show how many have been read and how many are left to read:

28/197

The Kite Runner / Khaled Hosseini

AFGHANISTAN

An utterly absorbing and emotionally devastating account of betrayal and redemption amidst the turbulence of Afghanistan, Hosseini’s intensely powerful novel revolves around Amir and his attempts to right a grievous wrong from his past. Afghanistan, 1975: Twelve-year-old Amir is desperate to win the local kite-fighting tournament and his loyal friend Hassan promises to help him. But neither of the boys can foresee what will happen to Hassan that afternoon, an event that is to shatter their lives. After the Russians invade and the family is forced to flee to America, Amir realises that one day he must return to Afghanistan under Taliban rule to find the one thing that his new world cannot grant him: redemption.

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ALBANIA

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ALGERIA

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ANDORRA

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ANGOLA

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ANTIGUA & BARBUDA

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The Anatomist / Federico Andahazi

ARGENTINA

A lyrically written, sensual, and extraordinarily enjoyable novel in which a Renaissance anatomist's astonishing discovery forever changes the female erotic universe. In sixteenth-century Venice, celebrated physician Matteo Colombo finds himself behind bars at the behest of the Church authorities. His is a crime of disclosure, heinous and heretical in the Church's eyes, in that his research threatens to subvert the whole secular order of Renaissance society. Like his namesake Christopher Colombus, he has made a discovery of enormous significance for humankind. Whereas Colombus voyaged outward to explore the world and found the Americas, Mateo Colombo looked inward, across the mons veneris, and uncovered the clitoris. Based on historical fact, The Anatomist is an utterly fascinating excursion into Renaissance Italy, as evocative of time and place as the work of Umberto Eco, and reminiscent of the earthy sensuality of Gabriel García Márquez. Perceptive and stirring, it ironically exposes not only the social hypocrisies of the day but also the prejudices and sexual taboos that may still be with us four hundred years later.

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ARMENIA

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The book thief / Markus Zusak

AUSTRALIA

"When Death has a story to tell, you listen." It is 1939. Nazi Germany. The country is holding its breath. Death has never been busier and will become busier still. Liesel Meminger is a foster girl living outside of Munich, who scratches out a meagre existence for herself by stealing when she encounters something she can’t resist–books. With the help of her accordion-playing foster father, she learns to read and shares her stolen books with her neighbours during bombing raids as well as with the Jewish man hidden in her basement.

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AUSTRIA

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AZERBAIJAN

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BAHAMAS

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BAHRAIN

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BANGLADESH

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BARBADOS

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BELARUS

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BELGIUM

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BELIZE

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BENIN

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BHUTAN

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BOLIVIA

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BOSNIA & HERZEGOVINA

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BOTSWANA

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BRAZIL

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BRUNEI

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BULGARIA

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BURKINA FASO

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BURUNDI

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CAMBODIA

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CAMEROON

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Station Eleven / Emily St John Mendel

CANADA

Station Eleven by Emily St. John Mandel is a bold vision of a dystopian future, frighteningly real, perfect for fans of Margaret Atwood's The Handmaid's Tale. "What was lost in the collapse: almost everything, almost everyone, but there is still such beauty." One snowy night in Toronto famous actor Arthur Leander dies on stage whilst performing the role of a lifetime. That same evening a deadly virus touches down in North America. The world will never be the same again. Twenty years later Kirsten, an actress in the Travelling Symphony, performs Shakespeare in the settlements that have grown up since the collapse. But then her newly hopeful world is threatened. If civilization was lost, what would you preserve? And how far would you go to protect it?

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CAPE VERDE

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CENTRAL AFRICAN REPUBLIC

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CHAD

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Why information grows / César Hidalgo

CHILE

What is economic growth? And why, historically, has it occurred in only a few places? Previous efforts to answer these questions have focused on institutions, geography, finances, and psychology. But MIT professor César Hidalgo argues that in order to fully grasp the nature of economic growth we need to transcend the social sciences and turn to the science of information, networks and complexity. The growth of economies, he explains, is deeply connected with the growth of order - or information. At first glance, the universe seems hostile to order. Thermodynamics dictates that over time, order will disappear. But thermodynamics also has loopholes that promote the growth of information in pockets. Our cities are such pockets where information grows, but they are not all the same. For every Silicon Valley, Tokyo, and London, there are dozens of places with underdeveloped economies. Why does the US economy outstrip Brazil's, and Brazil's that of Chad? Why did the technology corridor along Boston's Route 128 languish while Silicon Valley blossomed? In each case, the key is how people, companies, and the networks they form process information - it is all about their knowledge, know-how and imagination. As Hidalgo compellingly shows, economies are made of networks of people and society is a collective computer. The problem of economic development is in fact the problem of making these networks more powerful. A radical new interpretation of global economics, Why Information Grows overturns traditional assumptions about the development of economies and the origins of wealth and takes a crucial step toward making economics less the dismal science and a more insightful one.

The day the Sun died / Yan Lianke

CHINA

One dusk in early June, in a town deep in the Balou mountains, fourteen-year-old Li Niannian notices that something strange is going on. As the residents would usually be settling down for the night, instead they start appearing in the streets and fields. There are people everywhere. Li Niannian watches, mystified. Until he realises the people are dream walking, carrying on with their daily business as if the sun hadn’t already gone down. And before too long, as more and more people succumb, in the black of night all hell breaks loose. Set over the course of one night, The Day the Sun Died pits chaos and darkness against the bright ‘Chinese dream’ promoted by President Xi Jinping. We are thrown into the middle of an increasingly strange and troubling waking nightmare as Li Niannian and his father struggle to save the town and persuade the beneficent sun to rise again.

Even silence has an end / Ingrid Betancourt

COLOMBIA

Ingrid Betancourt's story - her exemplary courage, spirit and resilience - has captured the world's imagination. A politician and presidential candidate celebrated for her determination to combat the corruption and climate of fear endemic in Colombia, in 2002 she was taken hostage by FARC, a terrorist guerrilla organisation. She was held captive in the depths of the jungle for six and a half years, chained day and night for much of that time, constantly on the move and enduring gruelling conditions. She was freed and reunited with her children and relatives in 2008. It is Betancourt's indomitable spirit that drives this important and deeply moving book, telling in her own words the extraordinary drama of her capture and eventual rescue, and describing her fight to survive, mentally and physically. As she confronts the horror of what she went through, her story also goes beyond the specifics of her own confinement to offer an intensely intelligent, thoughtful and compassionate reflection on what it means to be human.

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COMOROS

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CONGO

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COSTA RICA

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CROATIA

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CUBA

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The Beekeeper of Aleppo / Christy Lefteri

CYPRUS

Nuri is a beekeeper; his wife, Afra, an artist. They live a simple life, rich in family and friends, in the beautiful Syrian city of Aleppo--until the unthinkable happens. When all they care for is destroyed by war, they are forced to escape. But what Afra has seen is so terrible she has gone blind, and so they must embark on a perilous journey through Turkey and Greece towards an uncertain future in Britain. On the way, Nuri is sustained by the knowledge that waiting for them is Mustafa, his cousin and business partner, who has started an apiary and is teaching fellow refugees in Yorkshire to keep bees. As Nuri and Afra travel through a broken world, they must confront not only the pain of their own unspeakable loss but dangers that would overwhelm the bravest of souls. Above all, they must journey to find each other again.

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CZECHIA

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DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF THE CONGO

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Miss Smilla’s feeling for snow / Peter Høeg

DENMARK

One snowy day in Copenhagen, six-year-old Isaiah falls to his death from a city rooftop.The police pronounce it an accident. But Isaiah's neighbour, Smilla, an expert in the ways of snow and ice, suspects murder. She embarks on a dangerous quest to find the truth, following a path of clues as clear to her as footsteps in the snow.

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DJIBOUTI

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DOMINICA

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DOMINICAN REPUBLIC

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ECUADOR

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The map of love / Ahdaf Soueif

EGYPT

Lady Anna Winterbourne, an English widow, arrives in British-occupied Cairo in 1900. Fascinated by Egyptian culture, Anna bridles at the prejudices and parochial attitudes of the colonial community and follows her sense of curiosity to places few Europeans venture. During one disastrous secret outing, she meets and falls in love with Sharif Basha-al-Baroudi, a fierce Arab nationalist. He, in turn, falls in love with her, and against their better judgment, they marry. In a world where politics and personal relationships are inextricably intertwined, the choices Anna and Sharif make have profound repercussions not only in their own lives but in the lives of their descendants. Isabel Parkman, Anna’s great-granddaughter, is a young American divorcée irresistibly drawn to Omar-al-Ghamrawi, a renowned Egyptian musician living in New York. Hoping to find keys to understanding him, Isabel travels to Omar’s homeland, taking with her an old truck full of papers she inherited from Anna. In Cairo, Isabel and Omar’s sister, Amal, unwrap Anna’s treasures and discover an unsuspected blood link between their families: Amid Anna’s diaries and letters and newspapers crackling with age is a notebook written in Amal’s grandmother’s hand recounting the story of her brother, Sharif, and the Englishwoman he loved. As Anna’s experiences during the first decades of the century and Isabel’s contemporary quest unfold in counterpoint, the politics that divide two cultures and the passions that bring lovers together resound across time and space. Ahdaf Soueif evokes Egypt in meticulous detail, describing age-old and modern-day customs, the stark beauty of the desert and bustle of the cities, and the interactions among Egyptians and between Egyptians and Westerners. In a compelling, impressive combination of historical fidelity and fictional artistry, she takes a culture little understood by most Westerners and makes it real.

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EL SALVADOR

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EQUATORIAL GUINEA

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ERITREA

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ESTONIA

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ESWATINI

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ETHIOPIA

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FIJI

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FINLAND

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FRANCE

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GABON

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GAMBIA

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GEORGIA

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The 13 ½ lives of Captain Bluebear / Walter Moers

GERMANY

"A bluebear has twenty-seven lives. I shall recount thirteen and a half of them in this book but keep quiet about the rest," says the narrator of Walter Moers’s epic adventure. "What about the Minipirates? What about the Hobgoblins, the Spiderwitch, the Babbling Billows, the Troglotroll, the Mountain Maggot…Mine is a tale of mortal danger and eternal love, of hair’s breadth, last-minute escapes." Welcome to the fantastic world of Zamonia, populated by all manner of extraordinary characters. It’s a land of imaginative lunacy and supreme adventure, wicked satire and epic fantasy, all mixed together, turned on its head, and lavishly illustrated by the author.

Homegoing / Yaa Gyasi

GHANA

Ghana, eighteenth century: two half-sisters are born into different villages, each unaware of the other. One will marry an Englishman and lead a life of comfort in the palatial rooms of the Cape Coast Castle. The other will be captured in a raid on her village, imprisoned in the very same castle, and sold into slavery. Homegoing follows the parallel paths of these sisters and their descendants through eight generations: from the Gold Coast to the plantations of Mississippi, from the American Civil War to Jazz Age Harlem. Yaa Gyasi’s extraordinary novel illuminates slavery’s troubled legacy both for those who were taken and those who stayed—and shows how the memory of captivity has been inscribed on the soul of our nation.

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GREECE

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GRENADA

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GUATEMALA

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GUINEA

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GUINEA-BISSAU

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GUYANA

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HAITI

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HONDURAS

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HUNGARY

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ICELAND

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The glass palace / Amitav Ghosh

INDIA

The acclaimed author of The Calcutta Chromosome and The Shadow Lines has burst out onto the big stage with a major saga on that hidden country, Burma. Rajkumar is only another boy, helping on a market stall in the dusty square outside the royal palace when the British force the Burmese king, queen and all the court into exile. He is rescued by the far-seeing Chinese merchant, and with him builds up a logging business in upper Burma. But haunted by his vision of the royal family, he journeys to the obscure town in India where they have been exiled. The picture of the tension between the Burmese, the Indian and the British, is excellent. Among the great range of characters are one of the court ladies, Miss Dolly, whom he marries; and the redoubtable Jonakin, part of the British-educated Indian colony, who with her husband has been put in charge of the Burmese exiled court. The story follows the fortunes - rubber estates in Malaya, businesses in Singapore, estates in Burma - which Rajkumar, with his Chinese, British and Burmese relations, friends and associates, builds up - from 1870 through World War II to the scattering of the extended family to New York and Thailand, London and Hong Kong in the post-war years.

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INDONESIA

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Afghanistan, where God only comes to weep / Siba Shakib

IRAN

One woman’s harrowing story about life under the Taliban regime in Afghanistan. Shirin-Gol was just a young girl when her village was levelled by the Russians in 1979. When the men in her family joined the resistance, she fled with the other women and children to Kabul, and so began a life of day-to-day struggle in her war-torn country. A life that included a Pakistani refugee camp, a forced marriage to pay off her brother’s gambling debts, selling her body and begging for money to feed her growing family, an attempted suicide and an unsuccessful attempt to leave Afghanistan for Iran after the Taliban seized control of her country. This is the story of the fate of many women in Afghanistan. But it is also a story of a courageous and proud woman who refused to be banished to a life behind the walls of her house, who wanted an education for her children so that they could have a chance to live their lives without fear and poverty.

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IRAQ

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Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha / Roddy Doyle

IRELAND

Roddy Doyle's Booker Prize-winning novel describes the world of ten-year-old Paddy Clarke, growing up in Barrytown, north Dublin. From fun and adventure on the streets, boredom in the classroom to increasing isolation at home, Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is the story of a boy who sees everything but understands less and less.

Sapiens / Yuval Noah Harari

ISRAEL

Planet Earth is 4.5 billion years old. In just a fraction of that time, one species among countless others has conquered it. Us. We are the most advanced and most destructive animals ever to have lived. What makes us brilliant? What makes us deadly? What makes us Sapiens? In this bold and provocative book, Yuval Noah Harari explores who we are, how we got here and where we're going. Sapiens is a thrilling account of humankind's extraordinary history - from the Stone Age to the Silicon Age - and our journey from insignificant apes to rulers of the world. A specialist in World History, military history and medieval history, Yuval Noah Harari is best known for his investigations into macro-historical questions concerning the relationship between history and science, the origins of mankind and its future.

Timeskipper / Stefano Benni

ITALY

One late winter morning, a young man is cycling downhill to primary school when he encounters a peculiar man - as big as a mountain and as filthy as a garbage dump. After a brief conversation, this earthy apparition endows him with a gift: an internal clock that allows him to see into the future and exist in the present at the same time. The young man becomes Timeskipper, seeing and foreseeing the epochal events of his era, from postwar reconstruction to the birth of television. These events are tenderly offset by his own personal experiences - love, jobs and adventures.

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IVORY COAST

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JAMAICA

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JAPAN

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JORDAN

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KAZAKHSTAN

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KENYA

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KIRIBATI

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KOSOVO

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KUWAIT

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KYRGYZSTAN

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LAOS

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LATVIA

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Balthasar’s odyssey / Amin Maalouf

LEBANON

There are ninety-nine names for God in the Koran, is it possible that there is a secret one-hundredth name? In this tale of magic and mystery, of love and danger, Balthasar's ultimate quest is to find the secret that could save the world. Before the dawn of the apocalyptic 'Year of the Beast' in 1666, Balthasar Embriaco, a Genoese Levantine merchant, sets out on an adventure that will take him across the breadth of the civilised world, from Constantinople, through the Mediterranean, to London shortly before the Great Fire. Balthasar's urgent quest is to track down a copy of one of the rarest and most coveted books ever printed, a volume called 'The Hundredth Name', its contents are thought to be of vital importance to the future of the world. There are ninety-nine names for God in the Koran, and merely to know this most secret hundredth name will, Balthasar believes, ensure his salvation.

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LESOTHO

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LIBERIA

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LIBYA

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LIECHTENSTEIN

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LITHUANIA

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LUXEMBOURG

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MADAGASCAR

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MALAWI

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MALAYSIA

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MALDIVES

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MALI

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MALTA

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MARSHALL ISLANDS

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MAURITANIA

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MAURITIUS

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MEXICO

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MICRONESIA

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MOLDOVA

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MONACO

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MONGOLIA

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MONTENEGRO

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The Sand Child / Tahar Ben Jelloun

MOROCCO

In this lyrical, hallucinatory novel set in Morocco, Tahar Ben Jelloun offers an imaginative and radical critique of contemporary Arab social customs and Islamic law. The Sand Child tells the story of a Moroccan father's effort to thwart the consequences of Islam's inheritance laws regarding female offspring. Already the father of seven daughters, Hajji Ahmed determines that his eighth child will be a male. Accordingly, the infant, a girl, is named Mohammed Ahmed and raised as a young man with all the privileges granted exclusively to men in traditional Arab-Islamic societies. As she matures, however, Ahmed's desire to have children marks the beginning of her sexual evolution, and as a woman named Zahra, Ahmed begins to explore her true sexual identity. Drawing on the rich Arabic oral tradition, Ben Jelloun relates the extraordinary events of Ahmed's life through a professional storyteller and the listeners who have gathered in a Marrakesh market square in the 1950s to hear his tale. A poetic vision of power, colonialism, and gender in North Africa, The Sand Child has been justifiably celebrated around the world as a daring and significant work of international fiction.

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MOZAMBIQUE

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MYANMAR

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NAMIBIA

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NAURU

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NEPAL

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NETHERLANDS

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NEW ZEALAND

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NICARAGUA

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NIGER

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NIGERIA

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NORTH KOREA

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NORTH MACEDONIA

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Sophie’s world / Jostein Gaarder

NORWAY

A page-turning novel that is also an exploration of the great philosophical concepts of Western thought, Sophie's World has fired the imagination of readers all over the world, with more than twenty million copies in print. One day fourteen-year-old Sophie Amundsen comes home from school to find in her mailbox two notes, with one question on each: "Who are you?" and "Where does the world come from?" From that irresistible beginning, Sophie becomes obsessed with questions that take her far beyond what she knows of her Norwegian village. Through those letters, she enrols in a kind of correspondence course, covering Socrates to Sartre, with a mysterious philosopher, while receiving letters addressed to another girl. Who is Hilde? And why does her mail keep turning up? To unravel this riddle, Sophie must use the philosophy she is learning―but the truth turns out to be far more complicated than she could have imagined.

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OMAN

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PAKISTAN

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PALAU

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PALESTINE

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PANAMA

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PAPUA NEW GUINEA

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PARAGUAY

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PERU

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PHILIPPINES

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Flights / Olga Tokarczuk

POLAND

The book interweaves reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion, and migration. Chopin’s heart is carried back to Warsaw in secret by his adoring sister. A woman must return to her native Poland in order to poison her terminally ill high school sweetheart, and a young man slowly descends into madness when his wife and child mysteriously vanish during a vacation and just as suddenly reappear. Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time. Where are you from? Where are you coming in from? Where are you going? we call to the traveler. Enchanting, unsettling, and wholly original, Flights is a master storyteller’s answer.

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PORTUGAL

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QATAR

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ROMANIA

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RUSSIA

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RWANDA

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SAINT KITTS AND NEVIS

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SAINT LUCIA

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SAINT VINCENT AND THE GRENADINES

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SAMOA

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SAN MARINO

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SAO TOME AND PRINCIPE

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SAUDI ARABIA

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SENEGAL

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SERBIA

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SEYCHELLES

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SIERRA LEONE

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SINGAPORE

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SLOVAKIA

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Against the double blackmail / Slavoj Žižek

SLOVENIA

Today, hundreds of thousands of people, desperate to escape war, violence and poverty, are crossing the Mediterranean to seek refuge in Europe. Our response from our protected European standpoint, argues Slavoj Zizek, offers two versions of ideological blackmail: either we open our doors as widely as possible, or we try to pull up the drawbridge. Both solutions are bad, states Zizek. They merely prolong the problem, rather than tackle it. The refugee crisis also presents an opportunity, a unique chance for Europe to redefine itself: but, if we are to do so, we have to start raising unpleasant and difficult questions. We must also acknowledge that large migrations are our future: only then can we commit to a carefully prepared process of change, one founded not on a community that sees the excluded as a threat, but one that takes as its basis the shared substance of our social being. The only way, in other words, to get to the heart of one of the greatest issues confronting Europe today is to insist on the global solidarity of the exploited and oppressed. Maybe such solidarity is a utopia. But, warns Zizek, if we don't engage in it, then we are really lost. And we will deserve to be lost.

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SOLOMON ISLANDS

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SOMALIA

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SOUTH AFRICA

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SOUTH KOREA

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SOUTH SUDAN

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The shadow of the wind / Carlos Ruiz Zafón

SPAIN

Barcelona, 1945: A city slowly heals from its war wounds, and Daniel, an antiquarian book dealer's son who mourns the loss of his mother, finds solace in a mysterious book entitled The Shadow of the Wind, by one Julian Carax. But when he sets out to find the author's other works, he makes a shocking discovery: someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book Carax has written. In fact, Daniel may have the last of Carax's books in existence. Soon Daniel's seemingly innocent quest opens a door into one of Barcelona's darkest secrets--an epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love.

Wave, a memoir of life after the tsunami / Sonali Deraniyagala

SRI LANKA

The book opens and we are inside the wave: thirty feet high, moving at twenty-five mph, racing two miles inland. And from there into the depths of the author's despair: how to live now that her life has been undone? Sonali Deraniyagala tells her story - the loss of her two boys, her husband, and her parents - without artifice or sentimentality. In the stark language of unfathomable sorrow, anger, and guilt: she struggles through the first months following the tragedy -- someone always at her side to prevent her from harming herself, her whole being furiously clenched against the reality she can't face; and then reluctantly emerging and, over the ensuing years, slowly allowing her memory to function again. Then she goes back through the rich and joyous life she's mourning, from her family's home in London to the birth of her children to the year she met her English husband at Cambridge, to her childhood in Colombo while learning the balance between the almost unbearable reminders of her loss and her fundamental need to keep her family, somehow, still with her.

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SUDAN

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SURINAME

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The 100-year-old man who climbed out the window and disappeared / Jonas Jonasson

SWEDEN

Sitting quietly in his room in an old people's home, Allan Karlsson is waiting for a party he doesn't want to begin. His one-hundredth birthday party to be precise. The Mayor will be there. The press will be there. But, as it turns out, Allan will not. Escaping (in his slippers) through his bedroom window, into the flowerbed, Allan makes his getaway. And so begins his picaresque and unlikely journey involving criminals, several murders, a suitcase full of cash, and incompetent police. As his escapades unfold, Allan's earlier life is revealed. A life in which - remarkably - he played a key role behind the scenes in some of the momentous events of the twentieth century.

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SWITZERLAND

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SYRIA

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TAIWAN

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TAJIKISTAN

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TANZANIA

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THAILAND

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TIMOR-LESTE

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TOGO

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TONGA

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TRINIDAD AND TOBAGO

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TUNISIA

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Snow / Orhan Pamuk

TURKEY

Dread, yearning, identity, intrigue, the lethal chemistry between secular doubt and Islamic fanaticism–these are the elements that Orhan Pamuk anneals in this masterful, disquieting novel. An exiled poet named Ka returns to Turkey and travels to the forlorn city of Kars. His ostensible purpose is to report on a wave of suicides among religious girls forbidden to wear their headscarves. But Ka is also drawn by his memories of the radiant Ipek, now recently divorced. Amid blanketing snowfall and universal suspicion, Ka finds himself pursued by figures ranging from Ipek’s ex-husband to a charismatic terrorist. A lost gift returns with ecstatic suddenness. A theatrical evening climaxes in a massacre. And finding god may be the prelude to losing everything else. Touching, slyly comic, and humming with cerebral suspense, Snow is of immense relevance to our present moment.

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TURKMENISTAN

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TUVALU

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UGANDA

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UKRAINE

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UNITED ARAB EMIRATES

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The catastrophist / Ronan Bennett

UNITED KINGDOM

Shortlisted for the Whitbread Novel Award, The Catastrophist is a haunting novel set in the politically charged landscape of the Belgian Congo just before independence. At its heart is the passion between novelist James Gillespie and the fiery idealistic journalist Inès, whom he follows to Africa as their affair begins to fray. They are as unlike as lovers can be: he is willfully apolitical and desperate for her love, while she is obsessed with the unfolding drama, caught up in history, hero-worship, and soon, a new passion. In a country that will self-destruct upon giving birth to itself, Gillespie is plunged into violence and betrayal, and moved by love to a final act of nobility. The Catastrophist delivers heart-stopping suspense, profound moral questioning, and a searing depiction of doomed love.

A prayer for Owen Meany / John Irving

UNITED STATES OF AMERICA

"I am doomed to remember a boy with a wrecked voice—not because of his voice, or because he was the smallest person I ever knew, or even because he was the instrument of my mother's death, but because he is the reason I believe in God; I am a Christian because of Owen Meany." In the summer of 1953, two eleven-year-old boys—best friends—are playing in a Little League baseball game in Gravesend, New Hampshire. One of the boys hits a foul ball that kills the other boy's mother. The boy who hits the ball doesn't believe in accidents; Owen Meany believes he is God's instrument. What happens to Owen after that 1953 foul ball is extraordinary.