New Books From Around the World

“This is a slim, elliptical novel, a portrait of four relationships that seduced me from the start. There’s something about the tone, the intimacy… As Edgar Allan Poe put it: melancholy, beauty, loss—what is more poetic? Then she throws in a slew of literary references, mediating the world through books, reflections on life, relationships, our contemporary experience of connection and isolation. The way she uses language! This is another book I kept wanting to quote from.” Read more...

The Best Novels in Translation: The 2024 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Eleanor Wachtel, Broadcaster

“The story unfolds around a disturbing affair between a 19-year-old student and a 53-year-old married writer in East Berlin. Initially there is intense attraction. They both love music and art. He is a kind of mentor to her. They meet in secret, it’s very dramatic. It starts with love and passion, but it’s at least as much about power, art and culture—a different kind of obsession. The discussions of music, poetry and theatre take place alongside the political upheavals. It’s a novel about the weight of history, how it impinges on our lives.” Read more...

The Best Novels in Translation: The 2024 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Eleanor Wachtel, Broadcaster

“This is Posthuma’s second novel, her first to be translated into English. To give you a thumbnail description, it’s about a young woman whose twin brother—45 minutes her senior—is suicidal. She has to deal with his death at 35. It’s written in short sketches. It’s smart, well-observed, powerful, very controlled. It has lots of substance despite what on the surface appears to be a slim narrative. Without being showy, it’s impressively accomplished.” Read more...

The Best Novels in Translation: The 2024 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Eleanor Wachtel, Broadcaster

“Mater 2-10 refers to a locomotive that was captured during the Korean War by the South Korean army as they advanced north. In 1950, the American army destroyed it to keep it out of enemy hands. Then, in the early 2000s, it was restored and became an icon of the Korean War, and the division of the country. It’s an epic story, as you said. It threads together three generations of railroad workers over a century of Korean history, a complicated national history of occupation and freedom, alongside the political struggles of the working class.” Read more...

The Best Novels in Translation: The 2024 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Eleanor Wachtel, Broadcaster

“This is Vieira Junior’s first novel. He has published a collection of stories, and has since come out with a second novel. He comes to this from an academic background; his doctoral research focused on the ongoing struggles of the quilombolas, the African-Brazilian communities organised by escaped slaves and their descendants. Crooked Plow is a vivid tale which won many of the major literary awards in Brazil and became a bestseller. It offers a unique window into a world where the legacy of resistance and the fight for land rights weave through the personal and collective narratives of its characters. At the same time, it also reflects the global struggle for environmental preservation, social justice, and cultural identity.” Read more...

The Best Novels in Translation: The 2024 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Eleanor Wachtel, Broadcaster

“Selva Almada is an established, influential Argentinian writer who is compared to Flannery O’Conner, even William Faulkner. She’s published ten books, including novels, poetry, and short story collections. Not a River is inspired by the territory where she was born and raised, and by the people who inhabit that land and are, as she says, marginalised by government policies that condemn them to poverty, and to a lack of education and healthcare. It’s her tribute to the land and its people.” Read more...

The Best Novels in Translation: The 2024 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Eleanor Wachtel, Broadcaster

“It was a story that had been sitting with me for a very long time, and I just wasn’t able to put it down. The home that the main characters, Misha and Zohaib, live in, is my childhood home. The mulberry tree, the big garden, and the staircase—all of that is based on my childhood home, but the characters are fictional. The story is about a pair of siblings and their househelp’s daughter. I wanted to talk about class structures in Pakistan. Because my first novel dealt with the elite class, I wanted this to be a commentary between the middle, the lower, and the upper class. I draw that comparison by the househelp’s daughter being best friends with the two children in the house. I tried to show how the children are able to form a deep friendship with Nadia, who’s the househelp’s daughter, but there is this resentment and tension in the air when the adults are involved. It deals with harassment, at different levels, in Nadia’s life, and it deals with mental health. I tried to touch upon quite a few things without actually saying too much, but my main focus was on what a woman’s life looks like when she is plucked from a very low class and dropped into the upper class and then the middle class. It’s a commentary on what happens when a girl receives an education she didn’t really ask for. Because here, when you educate someone, you are doing them a favor. You’re trying to make a better life for them, but, at the same time, does the social structure support this escalation in class? Is the girl then able to take agency in her life or is she somehow confused between the two classes? There are a lot of questions that come up within the story.” Read more...

The Best Novels from Pakistan

Safinah Danish Elahi, Novelist

“Siblings is a mind-blowing novel first published in German in 1963. It has recently been translated into English by Lucy Jones, who is a phenomenal translator. It has everything you want from a book, and a bonus is – it’s short. It’s about siblings living in East Germany. While the brother decides to flee across the border into West Germany, the sister is convinced that the world they live in is great. The book is narrated by the sister, an artist who paints for the Party. The novel questions the meaning of art and whether art can still be considered art when it is controlled by someone other than the artist. Reimann, who was herself a state-sponsored artist living in the GDR, had grappled with the same questions about whether to leave or to stay. Her protagonist realizes that in a life that does not have peaks and troughs and which simply ticks along, there’s a sense of contentment to be found. When the Wall came down, it came as a shock to the East Germans for many reasons. One of these reasons is that life had become so comfortable.” Read more...

The best books on Being Average

Eleanor Ross,

“The Orphanage is an extremely interesting book. Serhiy Zhadan comes from Eastern Ukraine and during Maidan was taking part in the clashes in the second-largest Ukrainian city, Kharkiv, which is now under the threat of possible attack.” Read more...

The best books on Ukraine and Russia

Serhii Plokhy, Historian

“The Nobel laureate’s first novel in almost fifty years is billed by the publisher as ‘at once a literary hoot, a crafty whodunit, and a scathing indictment of Nigeria’s political elite’, which features stolen body parts, Yoruba royalty and a murdered engineer.” Read more...

Notable Novels of Fall 2021

Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor

“Elena Knows is a day in the life of a woman with advanced Parkinson’s disease. Technically it’s a crime novel, a thriller—of sorts. It’s about a woman whose daughter has died recently, and wrapped up by the police who have said that it’s a straightforward suicide. But Elena knows that it’s not, because she knows that her daughter would never have gone near the church when it was raining, because she was terrified of lightening, and there was a lightning rod on the church, and so on, and so on. But actually, Elena Knows is an extraordinarily beautiful and harrowing description of aging and disability. Everything that happens in it happens to the rhythm of the pills she needs to take, every time she needs to stop and sit down, to pause on her way to get to the metro or the church. So, in fact, as a book, it is much closer to something like Elizabeth is Missing or Olive Kitteridge than a crime novel.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Frank Wynne, Translator

“Heaven is a very short, deeply claustrophobic novel of two children in what Americans would call middle school—what we’d call early secondary school—who, for different reasons, are bullied by their peers. Eventually they get to know each other. The girl sends the boy a note and they meet up where nobody can see them and they talk about how they can or should deal with what they are experiencing. These 230 pages act as a a tiny capsule, taking you back to the time you felt at your most vulnerable, and felt that no one was going to come and save you.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Frank Wynne, Translator

“The Septology as a whole, and A New Name in particular, is an extraordinary meditation on art and love, and the possibility of eternity. Each of the individual sections in the book is a single sentence. Those sentences have an incantatory feel to them. There is a lot of repetition, a lot of repeated images, repeated sections. It has an extraordinary hypnotic quality. Frequently, the reader will shift from being inside the mind of character A to character B and it will take a moment before you realise it, but that’s entirely deliberate. The prose is luminous. It’s like swimming in an open sea. You can’t see land in any direction. You aren’t trying to. You have no frame of reference as to where you are. You are simply here, and must deal with the waves as they come. It’s a reading experience unlike anything else I’ve come across in the last several years, and an extraordinary meditation on human mortality and human endeavour, what we do with our lives, what we don’t do, what we may regret, what we may invest ourselves in—in terms of our art or whatever it is.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Frank Wynne, Translator

“What’s extraordinary about Bora Chung’s stories is that, on the surface, they are horror stories that brush the boundaries of science fiction—they all have fantastical elements—but they are very much rooted in human emotion, in fear and need and love and want. So they speak as directly to the human experience as anything else, in the same way as do David Cronenberg’s stories, or Iain M Banks. What’s amazing about them is not simply the extraordinary imagination that gives rise to them as works of fantasy, but the humanity in which they are grounded, and which makes them stick in your mind long after you read them. The experience of reading them is profoundly and viscerally affecting and moving.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Frank Wynne, Translator

“This is an extraordinary piece of fiction, but also an extraordinary piece of metafiction. It’s a novel of Partition, which is obviously a genre within from the Indian subcontinent. And at the same time, it is also none of these things, it is sui generis. It’s an extraordinarily joyful and playful and funny book, despite the fact that it begins with an 80-year-old woman who has lost her husband retiring to bed for months on end, turning to the wall and refusing to engage with life.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Frank Wynne, Translator

“This book is attempting to embrace an entire world and culture, a particular period in Poland and Eastern Europe, and fold it into everything that can be known. It is a maximalist novel in that sense. There’s the theology of it, but also how market garden towns worked, how peasants lived, what beliefs people had and how those were challenged or changed. Both The Books of Jacob and A New Name are dealing with the numinous, a sense of God. But Jacob Frank is an apostate, he’s someone who is prepared to overturn centuries of his own religion in an attempt to create something new. Thanks to Olga—through Jenny—we get to witness this vast pageant of what it means to have lived through that time in Poland. It’s like a very, very large Bayeux Tapestry. But also, what it is to look back on that, given what we know now, because there are outside observers.” Read more...

The Best of World Literature: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlist

Frank Wynne, Translator