Books like Penguin Island
A short-sighted abbot mistakes a colony of great auks for people and baptises them, and heaven has to turn them into humans; their history then follows France's from Charlemagne to the Dreyfus affair.
Explore books like this on the map12 books for readers of Penguin Island
The Revolt of the Angels
Arcade, the guardian angel of a dull young Parisian, reads his way through the family's great theological library, loses his faith in God and resolves to start a new rebellion in heaven.
Seeing
The sequel to Blindness: the city holds an election where every ballot is cast blank, and the government's response reveals that democracy's greatest threat is its own defenders.
Glory
In the animal kingdom of Jidada, the Old Horse who has ruled for decades is overthrown by his own deputy, and Destiny, a young goat back from exile, watches what happens next.
Candide
Candide, a naive young man taught that all is for the best in the best of all possible worlds, is thrown out into a world of war, earthquake and cruelty that tests his optimism to destruction.
The Time Regulation Institute
Hayri İrdal, a man of no particular ability, tells how he came to help run an institute devoted to setting all the clocks of Istanbul to the same time.
Children of the Alley
The history of a Cairo alley told as allegory: Gabalawi, its founder, shut away in his great house, while his descendants fight over his estate generation after generation.
Paradise Reclaimed
Steinar, a poor, upright Icelandic farmer, gives his daughter's beloved pony to the King of Denmark and later leaves his family to follow a Mormon missionary to Utah.
Only Yesterday
Isaac Kumer, a young idealist from Galicia, arrives in Ottoman Palestine in the early 1900s to work the land and ends up a house painter caught between secular Jaffa and religious Jerusalem.
The Real Story of Ah-Q and Other Tales of China
The complete fiction of Lu Xun, the father of modern Chinese literature, from A Madman's Diary to the story of Ah-Q, a village labourer who turns every humiliation into a victory.
The Atom Station
Ugla, a country girl from the north, comes to Reykjavík to work as a maid in the house of a member of parliament, just as Iceland argues over selling the Americans a base.
Prometheus and Epimetheus
A prose epic of two brothers: Prometheus, who answers only to his own soul, and Epimetheus, who accepts the conscience an angel offers him and is made king.
Death with Interruptions
On New Year's Day in an unnamed country, death stops killing, and as the old fail to die, the funeral industry collapses and the church panics, until death returns with new rules.