Some highly readable and thought-provoking novels from around the world are being translated into English, opening up new worlds to readers. As well as including books shortlisted for the Booker International Prize, we list some of our favourites here. These are often books that have been bestsellers in their original language, or whose authors have won international prizes, such as the EU Prize for Literature or the Prix Ahmadou-Kourouma, a Swiss French-language prize for an African novel.
Abyss
by Pilar Quintana
***Winner 2021 Premio Alfaguara de Novela***
Abyss is the latest book by Colombian novelist Pilar Quintana, author of The Bitch. It's set in the city of Cali, and the story is told through the eyes of an eight-year-old girl. It's a compelling read, about a child's observations of her depressed mother, who reads celebrity magazines and is fixated on women who committed suicide.
The Leash and the Ball
by Rodaan Al Galidi & Translated by Jonathan Reeder
The Leash and the Ball by Rodaan Al Galidi is a laugh-out-loud funny novel about Samir, an Iraqi civil engineer who ends up as a refugee in the Netherlands. The wry commentary on the difference between Arabic and northern European attitudes to all sorts of things—from jihad to dinner etiquette to the bureaucratic machine asylum seekers find themselves enmeshed in—are completely fascinating. The book came out in 2020 in the Netherlands (entitled simply Holland) but has now been translated into English by Jonathan Reeder.
The Blunder
by Mutt-Lon
The Blunder by Mutt-Lon, the pen name of Nsegbe Daniel Alain, is a historical novel set in early 20th century Cameroon, when the country was split between French and English colonial administrations. It's based on the true story of Dr. Eugène Jamot, a French military doctor whose head still graces a monument outside the Ministry of Public Health in Yaoundé, the capital, but whose legacy is decidedly mixed. The book is a revealing, refreshing and entertaining read, written in French and translated into English by Amy Reid.
“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
Untraceable
Sergei Lebedev and Antonina Bouis (translator)
Untraceable, by Russian novelist Sergei Lebedev (born 1981), is a thriller that investigates what leads people to develop lethal poisons and use them on others in the name of the state. In atmosphere, it's a mixture of Death in Venice and John le Carré. Its urgency comes not from its pace, but from the fact that this is going on in the real world: the Russian state really does seem to think that publicly poisoning some of its opponents is a good idea.
Roundabout of Death
by Faysal Khartash & Max Weiss (translator)
To read a novel set in Aleppo, Syria, in 2012, is a glimpse into what it was like to be living there at that time and this book, by Aleppo-born author Faysal Khartash, is an incredible gift. It's about daily life, buying vegetables, visiting your mother, but against a terrible backdrop of a city under constant bombardment. There's also a side trip to ISIS headquarters in Raqqa.
Monkey King: Journey to the West
Wu Cheng'en and Julia Lovell (translator)
Monkey King or Journey to the West is one of the classics of Chinese literature, written at the end of the 16th century. The story is based on a real historical figure, Tripitaka, who in the late 620s travelled to India, bringing back Buddhist manuscripts to China. The 16th century, fantastical version of the story, attributed to Wu Cheng'en, may not correspond with historical reality, but offers a wonderful snapshot of imperial China and its very distinctive worldview.
This is a new, abridged translation by Julia Lovell, one of the West's leading Sinologists. As well as ensuring the book is very funny in modern English, she also gives us a very neat introduction to the book and what it tells us about Ming-era China. "Belying the old cliché of imperial China as self-sufficient, isolationist and xenophobic, Journey to the West—an odyssey out of China, to attain the wisdom of Indian Buddhist civilization—tells a different story: one of Chinese fascination with foreign exotica."
Editor's note: the Penguin clothbound edition of this book is beautiful.
“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
Tomb of Sand
by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell
*** Winner of the 2022 International Booker Prize***
“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
The Books of Jacob: A Novel
by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft
***🏆 A Five Books Book of the Year ***
“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
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1
Tomb of Sand
by Geetanjali Shree, translated by Daisy Rockwell -
2
Cursed Bunny
by Bora Chung, translated by Anton Hur -
3
A New Name: Septology VI-VII
by Jon Fosse, translated by Damion Searls -
4
Heaven
by Mieko Kawakami, translated by Sam Bett and David Boyd -
5
The Books of Jacob: A Novel
by Olga Tokarczuk, translated by Jennifer Croft -
6
Elena Knows
by Claudia Piñeiro, translated by Frances Riddle
The Best of World Literature: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlist, recommended by Frank Wynne
The Best of World Literature: The 2022 International Booker Prize Shortlist, recommended by Frank Wynne
The International Booker Prize celebrates the best fiction in translation published over the previous year. Frank Wynne, acclaimed translator and chair of the 2022 judging panel, tells Five Books about the six novels that made the shortlist, and reminds readers that world literature need not be tough, consumed only in the interests of self-improvement—but is often joyful, surprising and full of feeling.
