For my WORLD LIT pick, jammies' Fahrenheit 451 is going to go with A SOLDIER OF THE GREAT WAR, by Mark Helprin (who, although an American, grew up in the Caribbean, served in the British Merchant Marine and the Israeli Air Force among other foreign postings), which is the story of Alessandro Giuliani, an upper-class Italian young man living in Rome who experiences the profound through the medium of war and its aftermaths.
From the summary on the author's website:
"In the summer of 1964, Alessandro Giuliani, an old and partially lame professor of aesthetics —white hair and mustaches, white suit, cane— is thrown off a trolley on the outskirts of Rome after he comes to the defense of a young and semi-literate factory worker who has irritated the driver. Alessandro and Nicolò, the boy, decide to make the very long journey into the mountains, on foot, as a defiant pilgrimage away from those things --worthless and imposed--that people allow to take the place of real life. In their trying walk the towns of Italy glittering below them in the warm summer air, the sea polished by a weightless fume of silver light, the old man is moved to tell the story of his life: of a youthful paradise instantly shattered by the First World War, of how he lost one family, gained another, and lost it as well. The boy is enthralled by the war and its spectacular events, by Alessandro's privations, heroism, and adventures, and by the extraordinary beauty of the story and in its telling. At the end of the long walk, however, he comes to understand its deeper import, that love is superior to and greater than all the glories of civilization, but that each is heightened by the understanding of the other, and that even in the face of death, life can be made worthwhile if these things are made to run together seamlessly, like a song."
Helprin's prose is known for his mastery of description and lyricism; here is an example from the novel:
"In the evenings after dinner he watched the flame of the lamp. When the wind howled with great strength, it moved as if the abyss were trying to take it away. Wind and darkness seemed to say that if only the flame would surrender and be extinguished, leaving behind a trace of white smoke, it would be taken at unimaginable speed and in unimaginable cold, whistling like a million flutes, high over the mountains of ice, rocketing into the darkness of space in distances that had no limit and for a time without end -- but the flame kept burning, wavering perilously behind a thin shell of brittle glass, and it lit the room, turning everything to gold."
An entirely beautiful book.