Max Havelaar by Multatuli (1860)

I almost gave up on this one halfway through, but I'm glad I didn't. Max Havelaar tells the story of a minor Dutch official in colonial Java who becomes outraged at the way the local people are being exploited. It's somewhat autobiographical and while the book shocked Holland and eventually led to reforms, the author suffered the usual whistleblower's fate and died in exile, embittered. As a novel, Max Havelaar is often self-indulgent and you never quite know where it is heading, but it is redeemed by the strength of its message and prose that is passionate, surprisingly fresh, sometimes beautiful and often very funny.

Season of Migration to the North by Tayeb Salih (1966)

Considered something of a classic and a very readable one at that, Salih's novel is narrated by a young man returning to his Sudanese village after studying abroad, only to find a mysterious man living there. That man confides that he too studied abroad and relates his time in England, his seduction of various Western women and the abiding sense that he was caught between two worlds. It all ties together in the end but some plot points do stretch credibility. Still, the frank discussion of sex must have made this book dynamite when first published in Arabic in 1966 and it remains a poignant meditation on colonialism.

Turbott Wolfe by William Plomer (1926)

Turbott Wolfe exploded like a bomb upon publication in Plomer's native South Africa. Plomer was just 22 when he wrote this novel which brutally exposed the attitude of white South Africa toward the black population. That was crime enough, but it was the novel's unashamed embrace of interracial sex that really cemented its notoriety. The story centres around the title character, a young man running a store in a native reserve, who becomes appalled by his white neighbours and captivated by a young black woman. It's a stunning and amazingly prescient book - with an instructive but hefty 70 page introduction by Laurens van der Post.

A Life Full of Holes by Driss ben Hamed Charhadi (1964)

This is a most unique book. Charhadi was an uneducated North African house servant encouraged to record a series of tapes on his life by the author Paul Bowles. The tapes were transcribed and published as A Life Full of Holes. The result is a remarkable story of the precarious hand-to-mouth existence led by untold numbers of people around the world. Through forced migrations, prison terms, betrayals and more, Charhadi comes across as charming, positive and yet somehow resigned to his lot in life. He is a compelling storyteller from a long oral tradition, and his observations on Christians – or Nazarenes as he calls them – are fascinating.

The Sheltering Sky by Paul Bowles (1949)

I heard David Marr say recently that we are forever marked by our high school texts. Mine was Conrad’s Heart of Darkness, which I went on to wrestle with at university, and now I see it in almost everything. The Sheltering Sky is a Saharan variant, and a masterful one at that. Port and Kit’s sometimes brutal odyssey through 1940’s North Africa is a rare sort of love story. Like couscous on the steam, you know there is searing heat underneath but can’t quite see it. I’m stoked this is going to be re-released as a Penguin cheapie. Read it before you see the (very good) Bertolucci adaptation.