The Lost and the Damned by Olivier Norek
Translated by Nick Caistor Reviewed by Gill Davies This is the first novel by Olivier Norek to be translated into English. It was first published in France in 2013 and…
Earthlings by Sayaka Murata
Translated by Ginny Tapley Takemori Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth How do you feel about the prospect of someone having sex with their grandfather? And them justifying it by the fact…
The Lying Life of Adults by Elena Ferrante
Translated by Anne Goldstein Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth Adolescence can be brutal, and in The Lying Life of Adults Elena Ferrante brings it out in all its ugly passions, grievances…
One Billion Years to the End of the World by Arkady and Boris Strugatsky
Translated by Antonina W. Bouis Reviewed by Karen Langley Science fiction writing often gets a bad press; dismissed as lightweight genre writing, mocked for some of the horrendous cover art…
Daughters by Lucy Fricke
Translated from the German by Sinéad Crowe Reviewed by Eleanor Updegraff In the Translator’s Note at the end of Daughters, Sinéad Crowe writes of her concern about successfully translating the…
The Madness by Narcís Oller
Translated from the Catalan by Douglas Suttle Reviewed by Eleanor Updegraff Joining the ranks of small presses dedicated to one particular region or language, Fum d’Estampa is a Barcelona–London go-between…
Breasts and Eggs by Meiko Kawakami
Translated by Sam Bett & David Boyd Reviewed by Anna Hollingsworth When Breasts and Eggs appeared in bookshops alongside all the Murakamis, Convenience Store Woman and Stranger Weather in Tokyo…
Journey through a Tragicomic Century: The Absurd Life of Hasso Grabner by Francis Nenik
Translated by Katy Derbyshire Reviewed by Eleanor Updegraff This September sees the launch of V&Q Books, a brand-new publishing imprint with the mission of translating ‘remarkable writing from Germany’ for…
People From My Neighbourhood by Hiromi Kawakami
Translated by Ted Goossen Review by Anna Hollingsworth With Hiromi Kawakami, you don’t know what to expect other than that her writing will be wonderfully odd. Her gentle quirkiness and…
My Summer Reading: The Manual of Darkness by Enrique de Hériz
Translated by Frank Wynne Reviewed by Annabel Members of the Shiny reviewing team share previously published books from their shelves that they’re reading this summer… This book is subtitled ‘A…
Rolling Fields by David Trueba
Translated from Spanish by Rahul Bery Reviewed by Michael Eaude Too often, reviews are distorted because they are written by someone who knows and likes the author’s work. One of…
The Coral Merchant: Essential Stories by Joseph Roth
Review by Eleanor Updegraff Translated by Ruth Martin Austrian author Joseph Roth is best known – if indeed he is known at all – for his sometimes relatively lengthy novels…
Chitambo by Hagar Olsson
Translated by Sarah Death Reviewed by Karen Langley When we think of Nordic fiction nowadays, we’re probably inevitably aware of the preponderance of Scandi-crime; it not only seems to have…
Crisis by Karin Boye
Translated by Amanda Doxtater Reviewed by Karen Langley When we think of Nordic fiction nowadays, we’re probably inevitably aware of the preponderance of Scandi-crime; it not only seems to have…
I Remember by Georges Perec
Introduced, Translated, Annotated, Edited and Indexed by Philip Terry and David Bellos Reviewed by Karen Langley Regular readers of Shiny New Books may recall the Bookbuzz piece earlier this year…
The Inugami Curse by Seishi Yokomizo
Translated by Yumiko Yamazaki Review by Terence Jagger This Japanese detective thriller is set in the 1940s and so is relatively ‘modern’, but only in that calendar sense: in style…
The Great Homecoming by Anna Kim
Translated by Jamie Lee Searle Review by Eleanor Updegraff Ever since Han Kang and translator Deborah Smith won the 2016 Man Booker International Prize for The Vegetarian, there has been…
The Mystery of Henri Pick by David Foenkinos
Translated by Sam Taylor Reviewed by Harriet Back in 1977, Marilyn French’s The Women’s Room was published. On the cover was the bold (and possibly correct) statement that ‘This novel…
Diary Of A Foreigner In Paris, by Curzio Malaparte
Translated by Stephen Twilley Reviewed by Basil Ransome-Davies An adjective frequently applied to Curzio Malaparte is ‘colourful’. To the Cambridge dictionary it means ‘vivid, rich, or distinctive in character’, and…
The Bell in the Lake by Lars Mytting
Translated by Deborah Dawkin Review by Harriet Lars Mytting, a Norwegian author, has had great acclaim for his two previous books – the non-fiction Norwegian Wood, a surprise bestseller about…
A Long Way Off by Pascal Garnier
Translated by Emily Boyce Reviewed by Annabel For the past eight years, Gallic Books have been translating and publishing the gloriously black-humored noir novellas of Pascal Garnier. Garnier, who died…
The Birds They Sang: Birds and People in Life and Art by Stanisław Łubieński
Translated from Polish by Bill Johnston Review by Peter Reason Stanisław Łubieński first began observing birds in childhood through Soviet binoculars. Later, he took his hobby to a more serious…
Winter in Sokcho by Elisa Shua Dusapin
Translated by Aneesa Abbas Higgins Review by David Hebblethwaite Winter in Sokcho is a first in several senses: the debut novel by French-Korean writer Elisa Shua Dusapin, and the first…
Snow, Dog, Foot by Claudio Morandini
Translated by J. Ockenden Reviewed by Rebecca Foster Who could resist the title of this Italian bestseller? A black comedy about a hermit in the Italian Alps, it starts off…