The Ventriloquist's Tale by Pauline Melville — A multi-generational novel set partly in Georgetown and partly in the Rupununi savanna. Melville's prose moves between the colonial city and the indigenous interior, and her sense of Guyana's strangeness — a country at once Caribbean, South American, and Amazonian — is unmatched.
A House for Mr Biswas by V.S. Naipaul — Set in Trinidad, but indispensable for understanding the Indo-Caribbean world that shaped large parts of Georgetown's culture. Naipaul's portrait of an Indo-Trinidadian man's struggle for identity and a home of his own resonates strongly with Indo-Guyanese experience.
Wilson Harris, The Palace of the Peacock — The first novel of one of the great Guyanese writers, a dense, dreamlike journey up a river into the interior. It is not an easy read, but no novel captures the Guyanese landscape and its colonial inheritance more powerfully.
The Sly Company of People Who Care by Rahul Bhattacharya — An Indian writer's first novel about a year spent drifting through contemporary Guyana, from Georgetown to the interior. Sharp, funny, observant, and the best recent foreign account of the country.
Walter Rodney, A Groundings with My Brothers — The collected lectures of the Guyanese historian and political activist assassinated in Georgetown in 1980. Essential for understanding the radical politics that shaped — and continues to shape — modern Guyanese society.