Seven books that put you in Lithuania. Three are by writers from Lithuania and set there, starting with The Issa Valley and Vilnius Poker. The other four are wider picks: books by long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well.
Lithuania's most celebrated writer abroad is Czesław Miłosz, born there and awarded the 1980 Nobel Prize in Literature, though he wrote in Polish. Lithuanian itself is among the oldest living Indo-European languages, and its literature is often traced to Kristijonas Donelaitis, whose eighteenth-century poem The Seasons portrays a peasant year. Soviet occupation meant writers worked under censorship until independence was restored in 1990.
Miłosz's The Issa Valley, the place to start, recalls a childhood in a rural river valley where Catholic and pagan belief mix. Ričardas Gavelis's Vilnius Poker is a dark satire of paranoia and surveillance in Soviet-occupied Vilnius, while Jurgis Kunčinas's Tula drifts among the city's artists and outcasts. The American writer Ruta Sepetys wrote Between Shades of Gray about a Lithuanian family seized in the 1941 Soviet deportations.
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A childhood in a river valley in rural Lithuania, blending Catholic and pagan folk belief, forests, and the seasonal rhythm of a manor and its villagers.
A dark, satirical novel of Soviet-occupied Vilnius, showing paranoia, surveillance and the everyday oppression of late Soviet Lithuania.
A bohemian, drink-soaked portrait of Vilnius's artists and outcasts in the late Soviet era and the years just after independence.
By long-time residents and outsiders who know the place well, or folk tales, poetry and history with a strong feel for Lithuania.
A day-by-day diary of Jewish Vilna under Soviet, then Nazi occupation, showing the city's lost cultural life and its destruction.
Follows a Lithuanian family seized in the 1941 Soviet deportations, with vivid scenes of prewar Kaunas before the journey to Siberia.
Diary-memoir opening with a farming childhood in Semeniškiai and the Nazi and Soviet occupations, then years in German labour and displaced-persons camps.
A first-hand account of the postwar anti-Soviet partisan resistance in Lithuania's forests, and of the villagers who sheltered the fighters.
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