It doesn’t have to be famous, just a work that you connect with that you feel represents your country in some way.
Also, in America is Jack Kerouac’s On the Road.
I’m from America so of course our literary classics are pretty widely known in the western world, so I’m going to recommend something a bit more niche: There There by Tommy Orange. It shines light on many different aspects of the Native American experience, specifically in Oakland, California. It covers addiction, poverty, culture, and heritage in a way that I (not Native myself) found moving.
When this is asked first book, that comes to my mind, is R. U. R. by Karel Čapek.
Only because word robot is well known but very few people know that it originated in this book/play.
Lewis Grassic Gibbon’s Sunset Song, full of the richness of NE Scots dialect and the complex realities of rural life a bare 100 years ago.
And Rabbie Burn’s poem urging social equality: “A Man’s A Man For A’ That” It was chosen for the opening of the Scottish Parliament in 1999, when Scots reclaimed a modicum of self-governance again. https://piped.adminforge.de/watch?v=hudNoXsUj0o
Words are here: https://www.nts.org.uk/stories/a-mans-a-man-for-a-that
Then let us pray that come it may (As come it will for a’ that) That Sense and Worth o’er a’ the earth, Shall bear the gree an a’ that. For a’ that, an a’ that, It’s coming yet for a’ that, That man to man, the world, o’er, Shall brithers be for a’ that.
Maybe the obvious answer, but East of Eden. It’s a genuine masterpiece.
