Your 2026 World Cup Book Brackets

One book from every group. This bracket might also break your heart.

The 2026 World Cup starts today, which means for the next 39 days, my group chats will be unusable, and I’ll be OOO on Brazil game days. This will be my fifth World Cup living in Brazil, and the stakes have never been higher. However, I’m also a reader 😉 So, I’ve also decided to play my own tournament.

Here is the idea: twelve groups, one book from one country in each group. In short? A reading bracket.

Think of it as a way to explore the countries on the screen through more than their team roster. Instead, this is a way to explore the culture of different countries, one book at a time. Most of these are translations, but a few are written in English originally.

Though I wanted to include a book from every country, I didn’t want to write the world’s longest Substack post. So I chose one country from each group and tried to give you the best possible book to explore a little bit about what life and the people in that country might be like.

Let’s kick off! ⚽️

---

A note on links: I’m an advocate for library books, but I also love a good hardcover. If you want to support indie bookstores and my work, consider using the affiliate links in this post. Thank you!

---

Group A: South Korea 🇰🇷

Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982 by Cho Nam-Joo

Kim Jiyoung is an ordinary South Korean woman and a new mother who has left her job. One day, she starts speaking in the voices of other women, her own mother, a friend who died. As her psychiatrist takes down her history, the book stacks up a whole life of sexism: the brother who always ate first, the teachers who looked past her, the career she surrendered without anyone having to ask.

The book became a feminist flashpoint in Korea, a runaway bestseller that men review-bombed and that female celebrities got attacked simply for admitting they had read. Five stars from me, and a book I still bring up in conversation on a regular basis.

Group B: Bosnia and Herzegovina 🇧🇦

The Bridge on the Drina by Ivo Andrić

A single stone bridge spans the river Drina in the Bosnian town of Višegrad, built by the Ottomans in the sixteenth century. The novel parks itself at that bridge for four hundred years and watches the town cross it: Ottoman rule giving way to the Austro-Hungarians, Muslims, Serbs, Croats, and Jews living together and then turning on each other, the wars of the twentieth century arriving at last.

Andrić won the Nobel for it, and it still explains the Balkans without ever feeling like a lesson: all those layered empires and faiths and grudges in a single place.

Group C: Brazil 🇧🇷

The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector

Macabéa is a young typist who has migrated from the drought-stricken northeast to Rio de Janeiro, where almost no one notices she exists. A writer narrates her story and keeps interrupting himself to wonder why he is even telling it, about a girl the country has decided does not matter.

The distance between the glamorous Rio of the postcards and the millions it overlooks is the most Brazilian thing about this slim, quietly devastating book.

Group D: Türkiye 🇹🇷

10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World by Elif Shafak

A murdered woman lies in a trash bin on the edge of Istanbul, and for the ten minutes and thirty-eight seconds after her death, her brain keeps working. She replays her life in tastes and smells, from a strict childhood in eastern Anatolia to the brothels of the city. Each memory pulls in one of the five misfit friends who became her real family.

This is the Istanbul the guidebooks skip, its sex workers and runaways and outcasts, written with far more tenderness than the premise lets you expect.

Group E: Curaçao 🇨🇼

Double Play by Frank Martinus Arion

Four men sit down to a daylong game of dominoes on Curaçao. Across that single afternoon, their rivalries, debts, and marriages all come due. What looks like a game opens out into the whole island: the Black Curaçaoans, the Dutch who still hold the money, and the women keeping everything upright while the men talk.

It is the great Curaçaoan novel and my island-nation pick, taut and tragic and funnier than it sounds. Fair warning, it is a hard-to-find 1998 edition, so plan on an interlibrary loan or a used copy.

Group F: Sweden 🇸🇪

Anxious People by Fredrik Backman

A spectacularly bad bank robber botches the job, flees into an apartment open house, and ends up holding a roomful of strangers hostage. What begins as pure farce slowly becomes the story of eight anxious people quietly coming apart over money, divorce, and loneliness.

It is the most Swedish book imaginable, all that polite conflict-avoidance with an ocean of feeling dammed up behind it, funny on the surface and devastating underneath.

Group G: Iran 🇮🇷

The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar

Narrated by the ghost of a thirteen-year-old girl, the novel follows a cultured, book-loving family who flee Tehran for a remote forest after the 1979 revolution. The losses come so fast that the story simply lets the supernatural in.

Under the magic is a clear-eyed account of what the revolution did to Iran’s intellectual class: the executions, the disappearances, and the books burned in the street. Azar wrote it after fleeing Iran herself, and it was shortlisted for the International Booker.

Group H: Spain 🇪🇸

The Time in Between by María Dueñas

A young Madrid seamstress is left broke and abandoned in Spanish Morocco, rebuilds her life stitch by stitch, and is eventually recruited to sew coded intelligence into her clients’ hemlines. The clients are the wives of Nazi sympathizers, and Europe is sliding toward war.

The history underneath is real: Franco’s rise, the Spanish protectorate in Tetouan (a country wrecked by civil war), and quietly choosing a side. Glamour, grit, and airtight plotting, this is a doorstopper to pack for a long flight.

Group I: Senegal 🇸🇳

At Night All Blood Is Black by David Diop

Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese soldier, one of the tirailleurs France shipped in from its colonies to fight in the trenches of 1914. After his closest friend is gutted in front of him, something in Alfa comes loose, and he turns into the thing both armies come to fear.

The history here is the kind most of us were never taught: how France fed tens of thousands of West African men into its war and called it loyalty. It won the International Booker and runs under two hundred pages.

Group J: Argentina 🇦🇷

Our Share of Night by Mariana Enríquez

A grieving father drives across Argentina with his young son, trying to keep the boy out of the hands of a wealthy occult order that wants to use the child as a doorway to the dead. The dread builds over six hundred pages and never once loosens its grip.

Enríquez ties the supernatural to the real horror of Argentina’s dictatorship, the torture and the thousands of disappeared, until you genuinely cannot tell the two apart. If you take one swing at horror this year, take it here.

Group K: Uzbekistan 🇺🇿

The Devils’ Dance by Hamid Ismailov

In a Tashkent prison in 1937, the real Uzbek writer Abdulla Qodiriy mentally composes the masterpiece that Stalin’s police will execute him before he can ever write it down. Woven through it is the story he is dreaming up, a lush nineteenth-century world of Central Asian khans and a poet-queen married to three of them.

You get both Uzbekistans at once, the Soviet machine erasing its artists and the older Silk Road culture it was trying to erase. Billed as the first major Uzbek novel translated straight into English, it is one the best of the whole list. Like the Curaçao pick, it is small-press, so reach for Kindle or your library’s loan system.

Group L: Ghana 🇬🇭

Homegoing by Yaa Gyasi

Two half-sisters in eighteenth-century Ghana never meet. One is married off to a British officer inside Cape Coast Castle. The other is captured and shipped out through the slave dungeon directly beneath it. Gyasi follows both bloodlines down three hundred years, a new descendant in every chapter.

This is the other English-language pick, blessedly easy to find, and each chapter reads like its own perfect short story.

Let the Games Begin

Thirty-nine days, twelve groups, one book each, and nobody checking your bracket but you. Keep a game on in the background and let these carry you from the opener all the way to the final!

Tell me in the comments where you are headed first. I will be traveling right alongside you, all tournament long.