15 Notable Translated Novels

Han Kang’s most revelatory book since The Vegetarian, We Do Not Part tells the story of a friendship between two women while powerfully reckoning with a hidden chapter in Korean history. Blurring the boundaries between dream and reality, We Do Not Part powerfully illuminates a forgotten chapter in Korean history, buried for decades — bringing to light the lost voices of the past to save them from oblivion. Both a hymn to an enduring friendship and an argument for remembering, it is the story of profound love in the face of unspeakable violence — and a celebration of life, however fragile it might be.

Translated from Arabic, this novel is set in the rubble-strewn streets of U.S.-occupied Baghdad. Hadi — a scavenger and an oddball fixture at a local café — collects human body parts and stitches them together to create a corpse. His goal, he claims, is for the government to recognize the parts as people and to give them proper burial. But when the corpse goes missing, a wave of eerie murders sweeps the city, and reports stream in of a horrendous-looking criminal who, though shot, cannot be killed. Hadi soon realizes he’s created a monster, one that needs human flesh to survive — first from the guilty, and then from anyone in its path.

Translated from Danish, this novel is set in a remote Viking settlement. Folkví and her brother, Áslakr, have always been close — unnaturally close. They’ve grown more intimate still as Folkví learns her shaman mother’s craft, as men regard her with newly devouring eyes. Then illness carries off their parents, and the nest of home is shattered. Áslakr sets off on his first expedition, abandoning Folkví to the dark of an endless winter. When he returns, he’s done the unthinkable: He’s found someone else to love. Sick with grief, Folkví rages to the gods where they sit at the foot of an ancient tree, contemplating the twisted passions of humans that play out in the face of an ever-approaching end of days. Will none of them save her now? Very well, Folkví will save herself. The wedding date is set. But first comes a fateful summer …

A journalist finds himself embroiled in a disastrous government campaign as well as a sweeping romance in this landmark English translation of Ethiopia’s most famous novel. In December 1981, Tsegaye Hailemaryam, a well-known journalist for the state-run media, has just landed in Asmara. He is on assignment as the head of propaganda for the Red Star campaign, a massive effort by the Ethiopian government to end the Eritrean insurgency. There, amid the city’s bars and coffeehouses buzzing with spies and government agents, he juggles the demands of his superiors. Oromay became an instant sensation when first published in 1983 and was swiftly banned for its frank depiction of the regime. The author vanished soon thereafter; the consensus is that he was murdered in retaliation for Oromay. A sweeping and timeless story about power and betrayal in love and war, the novel remains Girma’s masterpiece.

Written by an award-winning Afro-Brazilian novelist, this book is translated from Portuguese. Mabel has been living in the Golden Plate – the most expensive building on a block in an unnamed city in Brazil – her whole life, but her presence is merely tolerated. She, along with her mother Eunice, provide round-the-clock attention and care for the wealthy family who lives in the building. Eunice, uneducated, does her best to take care of her daughter and ailing mother and remains invisible and silent to the family she cares for. When tragedy strikes and a little boy dies, Eunice must decide if she can face the indifference and injustices of the ruling class she has spent so long orbiting.

When Myriam decides to return to work as a lawyer after having children, she and her husband look for the perfect nanny for their son and daughter. They never dreamed they would find Louise: a quiet, polite, devoted woman who sings to the children, cleans the family’s chic Paris apartment, stays late without complaint, and hosts enviable kiddie parties. But as the couple and the nanny become more dependent on one another, jealousy, resentment, and suspicions mount, shattering the idyllic tableau. Building tension with every page, The Perfect Nanny, translated from French, is a compulsive, riveting, bravely observed exploration of power, class, race, domesticity, motherhood, and madness.

A young man’s close-knit family is nearly destitute when his uncle founds a successful spice company, changing their fortunes overnight. As they move from a cramped, ant-infested shack to a larger house on the other side of Bangalore and try to adjust to a new way of life, the family dynamic shifts. Allegiances realign; marriages are arranged and falter; and conflict brews ominously in the background. Things become “ghachar ghochar”— a nonsense phrase uttered by one meaning something tangled beyond repair, a knot that can’t be untied. Elegantly written and translated from Kannada and punctuated by moments of unexpected warmth and humor, Ghachar Ghochar is a quietly enthralling, deeply unsettling novel about the shifting meanings — and consequences — of financial gain in contemporary India.

Translated from Korean into English, this novel is set in 1980s South Korea amid the tremors of political revolution. Following Jung Yoon, a highly literate, 20-something woman, as she recounts her tragic personal history as well as those of her three intimate college friends. When Yoon receives a distressing phone call from her ex-boyfriend after eight years of separation, memories of a tumultuous youth begin to resurface, forcing her to re-live the most intense period of her life. With profound intellectual and emotional insight, she revisits the death of her beloved mother, the strong bond with her now-dying former college professor, the excitement of her first love, and the friendships forged out of a shared sense of isolation and grief.

Translated from Spanish to English, this novel is set in Barcelona, 1945. A city slowly heals in the aftermath of the Spanish Civil War, and Daniel, an antiquarian book dealer’s son who mourns the loss of his mother, finds solace in a mysterious book entitled The Shadow of the Wind by one Julián Carax. But when he sets out to find the author’s other works, he makes a shocking discovery: someone has been systematically destroying every copy of every book Carax has written. In fact, Daniel may have the last of Carax’s books in existence. Soon, Daniel’s seemingly innocent quest opens a door into one of Barcelona’s darkest secrets — an epic story of murder, madness, and doomed love.

A wry, affecting tale set in a small town on the Indonesian coast, Man Tiger tells the story of two interlinked and tormented families and of Margio, a young man ordinary in all particulars except that he conceals within himself a supernatural female white tiger. The inequities and betrayals of family life coalesce around and torment this magical being. An explosive act of violence follows, and its mysterious cause is unraveled as events progress toward a heartbreaking revelation. Discover the unforgettable tale of literary magical realism from a critically acclaimed Indonesian writer who has been compared to Salman Rushdie, Gabriel Garcia Marquez, and Mark Twain.

Written by a Nobel Prize-winning author and translated to English from Arabic, this experimental novel is set in Cairo and follows the lives of three related families from the arrival of Napoleon to the 1980s through short character sketches arranged in alphabetical order. What results is a biographical dictionary where individual entries come together to paint a vivid portrait of life in Cairo from a range of perspectives. Characters include representatives of every class and culture, and as the intricate family saga unfolds, a powerful picture of a society in transition emerges. This is a tale of change and continuity, of the death of a traditional way of life and the road to independence and beyond, seen through the eyes of Egypt’s citizens.

Originally written in Arabic, the young narrator of this novel returns to his village along the Nile in Sudan after years of study in Europe. It is the 1960s, and he is eager to contribute to the new postcolonial life of his country. Back home, he discovers a stranger among the familiar faces of childhood — the enigmatic Mustafa Sa’eed. Mustafa takes the young man into his confidence, telling him the story of his years in London, of his brilliant career as an economist, and of the series of fraught and deadly relationships with European women that led to a terrible public reckoning and his return to his native land. But what is the meaning of Mustafa’s shocking confession? Mustafa disappears without explanation, leaving the young man, whom he has asked to look after his wife, in an unsettled and violent no-man’s-land between Europe and Africa, tradition and innovation, holiness and defilement, and man and woman, from which no one will escape unaltered or unharmed.

Written by a Chinese-born British writer whose school education was cut short by the  Cultural Revolution, this book is a dark and comic fable blending fact and fiction. An unflinching satire of totalitarianism, this story follows Ma Daode, who is a corrupt and lecherous party official. He feels deeply satisfied with his life, which consists of an impressive office, three properties, and multiple mistresses who text him day and night. After decades of loyal service, he is appointed director of the China Dream Bureau, where he is charged with replacing people’s private dreams with President Xi Jinping’s great China Dream of national rejuvenation. But just as he is about to present his plan for a mass golden wedding anniversary celebration, his sanity begins to unravel. Suddenly plagued by flashbacks of the Cultural Revolution, Ma Daode’s nightmare visions from the past threaten to destroy his dream of a glorious future.

A haunting Orwellian novel about the terrors of state surveillance, translated from Japanese. On an unnamed island, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses. Most of the inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few able to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten. When a young writer discovers that her editor is in danger, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards, and together they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past. Powerful and provocative, The Memory Police is a stunning novel about the trauma of loss.