61. France

 The President's Hat by Antoine Laurain

When French President Francois Mitterrand leaves his hat in a restaurant in Paris, it finds the heads of strangers and has some profound effects on their lives.

Laurain's recognisably offbeat style makes this a charming and funny novella. Short at a nicely rounded 200 pages, but as satisfying as if it were a weighty tome.

This is a good place to start if you've never read Antoine Laurain before, and is an easier read than, say, Smoking Kills, for instance.

81. Iraq

 Frankenstein in Baghdad by Ahmed Saadawi

Set in 2005 after the fall of Saddam Hussein, a local man renowned for telling tall tales collects body parts in the aftermath of suicide bombings in the hope of stitching them together to make a complete corpse so that it can be left on the streets and recognised as a person and given a proper burial. The corpse goes missing, and there are reports of a monster that cannot be killed by bullets murdering criminals.

This is a very entertaining novel that is interesting not only because of its insights into the country concerned but also its insights into the human condition.

This darkly humorous satire was a finalist for the International Booker Prize.  

162. South Africa

Disgrace by JM Coetzee

Set in the post-apartheid South Africa, this is an un-sugar-coated and fairly bleak snapshot into the life of a middle-aged, middle-class white man. 

David Lurie is a twice-divorced university professor who, after lightly stalking the prostitute he favours and therefore losing her custom, begins sexual relations with one of his students who, though of legal age, is still a teenager. This shallow relationship soon falls apart and it is revealed that though Lurie's principles may be morally dubious, he is a still man of integrity and does not waver from them - even when it harms his career and reputation. However, this is not to say that he is an admirable character - not at all. David Lurie is, in fact, a bit of a shit. A misogynistic, sex-addicted snob who believes that he is too old to change and should have the right not to.

This is a story about his hard fall into disgrace and is a pretty accurate reflection of post-apartheid South Africa in that time (I haven't been there for the last thirteen years so can't say more than that).

Disgrace won the Man Booker Prize (1999) and four years later JM Coetzee won the Pullitzer Prize for Literature.