Fiction in translation

Mattis doesn't understand much about the world. He doesn't understand why others call him simple. Or why his sister Hege, who has cared for him in their peaceful lakeside cottage since they were young, gets so frustrated. But he knows that the woodcock which starts to fly over their house every d...

Colombia's Pacific coast, where everyday life entails warding off the brutal forces of nature. Damaris lives with her fisherman husband in a shack on a bluff overlooking the sea. Childless and at that age 'when women dry up,' as her uncle puts it, she is eager to adopt an orphaned puppy. But this...

On the shores of a tranquil fjord in Northern Iceland, a man is brutally beaten to death on a bright summer's night. As the 24-hour light of the Arctic summer is transformed into darkness by an ash cloud from a recent volcanic eruption, a young reporter leaves Reykajvik to investigate on her own,...

Early one morning, a body is found lying next to the railway tracks just outside of Kuki Station in Saitama Prefecture, shot dead. It is identified as belonging to the owner of a local mill which is embroiled in a labour dispute. Suspicion initially falls on the workers' union, then on a new reli...

Antonia Scott is the lynchpin of the Red Queen project, created to work behind the scenes to solve the most devious and dangerous crimes. But she is unwilling to move past the last case, convinced it's related to a personal tragedy, until a series of deadly events pulls her back in. In the Costa ...

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...