An Italian general travels to post-WWII Albania to retrieve the bones of fallen soldiers. Kadare's 1963 debut is haunting, ironic, and philosophically strange: a meditation on war, memory, and national identity from inside a country most Westerners cannot find on a map. He has been called "the Albanian Kafka," which is reductive but not inaccurate.

The case for it, the case against, and the rest of the canon open with Pro.