Fiction in translation

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...

Ben and the Greenblooms must protect a mythical new creature rising from the ocean that can bring light or darkness to whoever it first meets - a vast, mythical Aurelia. It's a race against time to protect it, for if the Aurelia is hurt, all fabulous creatures will vanish from Earth. In the end t...

Sweden 2012. When Inspector Gunnar Barbarotti returns to work after a terrible personal tragedy his boss asks him to investigate a cold case, hoping to ease him back gently into his police duties. Five years previously a shy electrician, Arnold Morinder, disappeared from the face of the earth, th...

'Beautiful Star' is a 1962 tale of family, love, nuclear war and UFOs, and was the novel Mishima considered to be his masterpiece. Translated into English for the first time, this atmospheric black comedy tells the story of the Osugi family, who come to the sudden realization that each of them ha...

Henri Koskinen, intrepid insurance mathematician and adventure-park entrepreneur, firmly believes in the power of common sense and order. That is until he moves in with painter Laura Helanto and her daughter. As Henri realises he has inadvertently become part of a group of local dads, a competing...

In a small back alley in Tokyo, there is a cafe which has been serving carefully brewed coffee for more than 100. But this coffee shop offers its customers a unique experience: the chance to travel back in time.

Born a girl to parents who expected a boy, Jihad grows up treated like the eldest son, wearing boy's clothing and sharing the financial burden of head of the household with her father. Now middle-aged, each night Jihad tells her daughter a story from her life. As Malika prepares to leave home to ...