Libya

Amy @ In Consideration of Books said, "Hi Bonnie, I have a book for you for a country you don't yet have listed and that is very topical right now:  Libya.  It was an excellent book and the author just has his second book out this month.  Here is the link to my review."

In the Country of Men ~ by Hisham Matar, 2006

On a white-hot day in Tripoli, Libya, in the summer of 1979, nine-year-old Suleiman is shopping in the market square with his mother.  His father is away on business — but Suleiman is sure he has just seen him, standing across the street in a pair of dark glasses.  But why isn't he waving?  And why doesn't he come over when he knows Suleiman's mother is falling apart?  Whispers and fears intensify around Suleiman:  his best friend's father disappears and is next seen being interrogated on state television; a man parks his car outside the house every day and asks strange questions; and his mother frantically burns his father's books.  As Suleiman begins to wonder whether his father has disappeared for good, it feels as if the walls of his home will break with the secrets that are being held within.  This book was a finalist for the 2008 National Book Critics Circle Award for Fiction.

Luxembourg

Amy @ In Consideration of Books wrote:  "Are you still active with Books Around the World?  I have another suggestion for a country you don't have listed, Luxembourg.   Here's my review."

The Expats ~ by Chris Pavone, 2012

Can we ever escape our secrets?  Kate Moore is a working mother, struggling to make ends meet, to raise children, to keep a spark in her marriage . . . and to maintain an increasingly unbearable life-defining secret.  So when her husband is offered a lucrative job in Luxembourg, she jumps at the chance to leave behind her double-life, to start anew.

She begins to reinvent herself as an expat, finding her way in a language she doesn’t speak, doing the housewifely things she’s never before done — playdates and coffee mornings, daily cooking and never-ending laundry.  Meanwhile, her husband works incessantly, at a job Kate has never understood, for a banking client she’s not allowed to know.  He’s becoming distant and evasive; she’s getting lonely and bored.

Then another American couple arrives.  Kate soon becomes suspicious that these people are not who they say they are, and she’s terrified that her own past is catching up to her.  So Kate begins to dig, to peel back the layers of deception that surround her.  She discovers fake offices and shell corporations and a hidden gun, a mysterious farmhouse and numbered accounts with bewildering sums of money, and finally unravels the mind-boggling long-play con that threatens her family, her marriage, and her life.