Fiction in translation

In 1872 the mistress of a neighbouring landowner threw herself under a train at a station near Tolstoy's home. This gave Tolstoy the starting-point he needed for composing this novel, which many believe to be the greatest novel ever written.

A story of desire, power, obsession, observation, and taboo. 'Antiquity' follows its unnamed narrator, a lonely woman in her thirties who becomes enamoured of a chic older artist, Helena, after interviewing her for a magazine. Helena invites the narrator to join her in the Greek city of Ermoupoli...

'Antwerp' is Bolano intensified and distilled. As his friend and literary executor, Ignacio Echevarria, once suggested, it can be viewed as the Big Bang of his fictional universe. It is the birth of Bolano's enterprise in prose: all the elements are here, highly compressed, at the moment when his...

In a small town in Sweden, it appears to be an ordinary day. But look more closely, and you'll see a mysterious masked figure approaching a bank. Two hours later, chaos has descended. A bungled attempted robbery has developed into a hostage situation - and the offender is refusing to communicate ...

In a small town in Sweden, it appears to be an ordinary day. But look more closely, and you'll see a mysterious masked figure approaching a bank. Two hours later, chaos has descended. A bungled attempted robbery has developed into a hostage situation - and the offender is refusing to communicate ...

Oslo, 1938. War is in the air and Europe is in turmoil. Hitler's Germany has occupied Austria and is threatening Czechoslovakia; there's a civil war in Spain and Mussolini reigns in Italy. When a woman turns up at the office of police-turned-private investigator Ludvig Paaske, he and his assistan...

The seventh novel in Zola's Rougon-Macquart cycle, 'The Assommoir' is the story of a woman's struggle for happiness in working-class Paris.

In 1760, Guillaume le Gentil, real-life astronomer to King Louis XV, sets out for the oceans of India to document the transit of Venus. The weather is turbulent, the seas are rough and his quest may be more complicated than initially thought. 250 years later, estate agent Xavier Lemercier chances...

Alfa and Mademba are two of the many Senegalese soldiers fighting in the Great War. Together they climb dutifully out of their trenches to attack France's German enemies whenever the whistle blows, until Mademba is mortally wounded, and dies in a shell hole with his belly torn open. Without his m...

At 18, Somlata married into the Mitras: a once noble Bengali household whose descendants have taken to pawning off the family gold to keep up appearances. When Pishima, the embittered matriarch, dies, Somlata is the first to discover her aunt-in-law's body - and her sharp-tongued ghost. First dem...