Not the country this time, but the pseudonym of the Wheel of Time's author, Robert Jordan.
I discovered this series of books 8 years ago while I was in Australia, living a year abroad in high school, and come the third book I was thouroughly taken up by the story ( yes, it takes time and a lot of pages for me to decide if a book(s) is worth continuing ) ... The first two books didn't uterly convince me, particurlaly the first one, because to my eyes of the ever Tolkien fan, it was too much inspired from the Lord of the Rings to b original ( and so, interesting ). Wether it was conscious or unconscious, when I reread the first book 3 weeks ago, I definitely found several scenes much alike to Tolkien's book. But Robert Jordan, like Ken Follett, being an even better scenario-writer ( is there a particular word for this job ? ) than novelist, you have a hard time putting the book down.
To love Tolkien, you have to be patient and of a contemplative nature ( or lover of the beautiful sentence, nostagia, etc ... as I am ), and then you're gripped by the story, and to love Jordan you just have to open the book. It's not the best written book I've read, but it's one of the more efficient. And the story is complex, and at last you get a fantasy world that draws from all kinds of imaginaries : you find reminders of chinese civilisation, or arab people, or ... but all well blended and worked into original people and characters so as not to be a mere "copy-paste" of our world.
Anyway, I'm re-reading it now that I'm sure the story approaches the end ( sadly without Jordan to do it, but the one they picked up, Sanderson, looks really good to me ), so that I won't have to wait another 8 years to know it ... And to anyone who never heard of it, or just heard and didn't read, whatever litterature you usually like, two words : read it !
