Your top German books and authors

Metamorphosis cover — Metamorphosis (Die Verwandlung) by Franz Kafka Photograph: Public Domain

Back in 2006, the books team at guardian.co.uk spotted this comment by Diego in a thread about new year's reading resolutions:

My new year's book resolution is to post an entry on the Guardian book blog asking them to start a world tour of literature, whereby an attempt is made to uncover a selection of the best authors from as many countries as possible, ideally including some authors who are currently unknown in the UK.

Right there we go then ... anyone know any good Finnish authors?

Everyone agreed it was a great idea, and the Guardian's world literature tour began. The idea was to build an "atlas of literature" by publishing a blogpost about a different country each month (or thereabouts), with readers leaving their recommendations of literature from the region – and nominations for the next country on the tour – in the comment threads.

The series led to a wonderful debate about books and authors from across the globe, but the Guardian's commenting system meant that compiling any kind of user-friendly resource from this information was pretty labour-intensive. Added to this, a couple of changes to our commenting platform over the years has meant, sadly, that a lot of the original comments have disappeared (we live in hope that they will be returned to us some time in the future).

Then came the Guardian's New Europe season, and the perfect opportunity to resurrect the series – this time with a bit of added functionality. These days, it's a doddle for us to embed a simple form in an article and ask people to fill in the names of books and authors (along with a comment explaining why they're great). The recommendations feed into a spreadsheet of information that we can then present back to you. The first four weeks cover Germany, France, Spain and Poland, in line with the countries New Europe will be focusing on. After that you can nominate countries for the next stop.

We weren't sure what the response would be like. The level of discussion last time was so rich that we didn't want to stop people from commenting this time around - but would people fill in the form as well as leaving a comment? We hoped so – and our opening blogpost on Germany and Austria resulted in more than 140 recommendations of literary works from or about the countries.

We're still thinking about the best way to present the data long-term (any suggestions are welcome) but for now we'll make the results available to view on the website or to download on a week-by week basis. This week we're asking for recommendations about French books and authors – add yours here.

• Keep up with the world literature tour here