Fiction in translation

Sadegh Hedayat's most famous work is a deeply haunting and disturbing gem of world literature, a classic tale in which the reader is drawn into his hallucinatory and pained world, with recurring motifs, as definitions begin to blur.

It is April, 1995. Kosovo is a country on the cusp of a dreadful war. Arsim is twenty-two, newly married, cautious - an Albanian trying to keep his head down and finish his studies in an atmosphere of creeping threat. Until he encounters Milos, a Serb, and begins a life in secret. Bolla is the st...

Samuel Abba is a young angel who has just been expelled from Paradise. As a result of a crafty trick, Samuel has retained his memory of his previous life. The humans around him plead for details of that other realm, but the Paradise of his mischievous stories is far from their expectations: a wor...

In 'The Books of Jacob', Tokarczuk traverses the Hapsburg and Ottoman Empires and the Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth in search of Jacob Frank, a highly controversial historical figure from the eighteenth century and the leader of a mysterious, heretical Jewish splinter group that converted at dif...

Botchan is a modern young man from the Tokyo metropolis, sent to the ultra-traditional Matsuyama district as a maths teacher after his the death of his parents. Cynical, rebellious and immature, Botchan finds himself facing several tests, from the pupils - prone to playing tricks on their new, na...

Working as a cook on a merchant ship, a woman comes to know and love Samsa, a woman who gives her the nickname 'Boulder'. When Samsa gets a job in Reykjavik and the couple decides to move there together, Samsa decides that she wants to have a child. She is already forty and can't bear to let the ...

Envisioned as a criticism of and insider's guide to African history, this dark, pugancious epic, spanning the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries, recounts the fate of the imaginary empire of Nakem. With its acerbic pen portraits of the dynasty of devious, asp-wielding Saifs who reign in Nakem;...

A nameless protagonist gives up his identity & the trappings of normal life to live in a large cardboard box he wears over his head. Wandering the streets of Tokyo & scribbling on the inside walls of the box, he describes the world outside as he sees it.

Following a devastating earthquake and tsunami, a young man in Japan finds a stray dog outside a convenience store. The dog's tag says 'Tamon', a name evocative of the guardian deity of the north. The man decides to keep Tamon, becoming the first in a series of owners as the dog journeys south to...

Fresh from maternity leave, Detective Elma finds herself confronted with a complex case, when a man is found murdered in a holiday cottage in the depths of the Icelandic countryside - the victim of a frenzied knife attack, with a shocking message scrawled on the wall above him. At home with their...