We Do Not Part
Han Kang, translated by e yaewon and Paige Aniyah Morris (Hamish Hamilton)
The Korean 2024 Nobel laureate combines the strangeness of The Vegetarian and the political history in Human Acts to extraordinary effect in her latest novel. Kyungha, a writer experiencing a health crisis (“I can sense a migraine coming on like ice cracking in the distance”), agrees to look after a hospitalised friend’s pet bird. The friend, Inseon, makes films that expose historical massacres in Korea. At the centre of the book is a mesmerising sequence “between dream and reality” where Kyungha stumbles toward Inseon’s rural home, blinded by snow, then finds herself in ghostly company. As the pace slows, and physical and psychic pain meet, the story only becomes more involving. This might be Han’s best novel yet.

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On the Calculation of Volume I and II
Solvej Balle, translated by Barbara J Haveland (Faber)
“It is the eighteenth of November. I have got used to that thought.” Book dealer Tara Selter is stuck in time, each day a repeat of yesterday. Groundhog Day it ain’t; this is more philosophical than comic – why, she doesn’t even bet on the horses – but it’s equally arresting. Tara slowly begins to understand how she occupies space in the world, and the ways in which we allow our lives to drift. At first she tries to live normally, recreating the sense of seasons passing by travelling to warm and cold cities. By the end of volume two, with five more books to come, we get hints of cracks appearing in the hermetic world – is Balle breaking her own rules? – but it just makes us want to read on further.

The Director
Daniel Kehlmann, translated by Ross Benjamin, (Riverrun)
In Hollywood in the 1930s, film-maker GW Pabst is surrounded by yes-men studio execs and egotists such as Fritz Lang (“Metropolis is the best film ever made.” “I know”). He returns to Europe to see his sick mother; when war breaks out, he’s stuck in Austria, where he still wants to make films, but can only do so with the Nazis’ say-so. Kehlmann turns Pabst’s real-life dilemma into a full-blooded, entertaining epic. “Times are always strange,” he’s told. “Art is always out of place.” It’s the secondary characters who steal the show, from his son Jakob, who takes up the fascist cause, to Leni Riefenstahl with her “skull-like smile”, or the surprise narrator of one chapter: prisoner of war PG Wodehouse.

Money to Burn/ The Devil Book
Asta Olivia Nordenhof, translated by Caroline Waight (Jonathan Cape)
You wait ages for a Scandinavian septology-in-progress, then two come along at once. But where Balle’s is cool and reflective, Nordenhof’s is hot and eccentric. The books are loosely structured around a fire – and possible insurance scam – on a passenger ferry in 1990 that killed 159 people. They harness rage from this (“capitalism is a massacre”) to spin out into stories of love, rape, mental illness, art and more. Like a normal novel with all the boring bits taken out, these books are more energising and thrilling the more furious they get – even if the very loose links between the stories mean the reader must work to fill in the connections. “I mean really /,” writes Nordenhof, “I can’t / do the whole thing / by myself.”

Sololand
Hassan Blasim, translated by Jonathan Wright (Comma)
Laughter is the best response to horror, say these three novellas of life in – and in exile from – postwar Iraq. The blend of darkness and humour is encapsulated in the first story, where a pharmacist closes her shop because she’s fed up with Islamic State fighters asking for Viagra: a comic-sounding detail, until we realise what they might want it for. In another, a youth tasked with managing a militia leader’s email account falls in love with one of his female admirers. Elsewhere, library books are soaked in blood dripping from the IS killing floor above: a blunt illustration that literature is under threat from fundamentalism. All the more reason to read Blasim’s essential stories.

The Ferryman and His Wife by Frode Grytten, translated by Alison McCullough (Serpent’s Tail, £12.99)
On the last day of his life – how does he know? He just does – Norwegian ferryman Nils Vik takes a final boat trip, alone after a lifetime helping others. He remembers those he has ferried, including actor Edward G Robinson; Miss Norway 1966, who was “declared the most beautiful woman in the nation and won a Fiat 850”; and young gay man Jon, who was bullied by his father, then drowned in a car, channelling the Smiths: “What a heavenly way to die … to die by his lover’s side.” That blend of light and dark runs through the novel, but the person Nils really misses is his late wife Marta. He masks his turmoil (“After the storm … there’s no evidence. Only the calm blue surface”), and tries to remember the happy times. He recalls his daughter taking him to see a play. “What did you like about it?” “Everything.” The reader understands.

Woman in the Pillory by Brigitte Reimann, translated by Lucy Jones (Penguin Classics, £10.99)
When a German farm needs extra manpower during the second world war while farmer Heinrich is off fighting for the Third Reich, a Russian prisoner of war, Alexei, is brought in to help. Frieda, Heinrich’s sister, treats him like dirt (“they’re only half-human”), but Heinrich’s young wife, Kathrin, is charmed, and then some. When she sees him showering outside and they make eye contact, “a jolt went through her as if she’d been caught doing something wicked”. The story goes inward and outward at once, showing Kathrin and Alexei’s claustrophobic relationship, and the social pressures of xenophobia and sexism. Women who have affairs are publicly shamed, except for one who is pregnant by an SS officer. “Every woman ought to feel proud,” her husband is told. The story twists and twists again, right up to the perfectly satisfying ending.

Iran + 100, edited by Fereshteh Ahmadi, Peter Adrian Behravesh and Leila Elder, translated by various (Comma, £10.99)
Ten Iranian authors imagine Iran in 2053, a century after the US- and UK-backed coup that overthrew the democratically elected government. In one story, Iran must pour away its sanctioned oil, and a man uses the public ceremony as cover to fake his own death. In another, a further revolution has taken place, with men subjugated by women, and strictures enforced by drones. “Once feared clerics were sent to the same prisons they’d once filled. Only this time, the guards were women. They called it therapy.” One highlight is a mesmerising satire in which a man leaps from a window and remains suspended, prevented from being allowed to fall to his death as punishment for western involvement in the 1953 coup. A later story, with the amplitude of a novel, features temporal voids that show the future and terrify the government. This is an imaginative, audacious, exciting collection.

Sea Now by Eva Meijer, translated by Anne Thompson Melo (Peirene, £12.99)
When a collapse in the Gulf Stream causes the sea to reclaim the Netherlands, a kilometre per day, there’s panic over what to do. Businesses see an opportunity (“Four life jackets for the price of three!”), while most people evacuate, except those calling themselves “remainers”, who believe the flooding is a “LEFT WING CONSPIRACY”. Meijer has fun switching between a series of characters: the prime minister (other countries, he hopes, “would be overjoyed at the arrival of the Dutch”); members of a pressure group Sea Now! (“We must take our lead from the sea now”); and a newsreader reduced to broadcasting on YouTube (“Don’t forget to like and subscribe”). It’s so lively that when the tone changes, and a group of young people return later on a boat to explore the old country, the silence and serenity are mesmerising.

A new festival of translated literature is being launched in Bristol next week amid a sales boom in translated fiction in the UK.

Translated By, Bristol is the brainchild of Polly Barton, author and translator of the award-winning Butter by Asako Yuzuki, and Tom Robinson, owner of Gloucester Road Books, which is organising the festival alongside Barton and another independent Bristol bookshop, Storysmith.

“Translated fiction becoming more popular in recent years has not necessarily led to a greater appreciation for the work of translators, or much consideration of the act of translation itself,” says Robinson. “We wanted to think about whether there was something we could do that would address both of these concerns.”

The festival, which runs 12-25 May, will feature a conversation between five translators shortlisted for the International Booker prize and a “translation duel” – in which translators debate their translations of a text in front of an audience – among other events.

UK readers continue to have strong appetites for translated fiction, with Butter selling almost 250,000 copies in the UK last year. Social media buzz around particular titles has helped shift copies: Ros Schwartz’s translation of Jacqueline Harpman’s I Who Have Never Known Men, a favourite on “BookTok”, sold 45,000 copies last year, an elevenfold rise on 2022 sales.

Festival organisers were aware of increased interest in translated literature from readers, meaning they felt the festival “would have a breadth of appeal it might not have done, say, five years ago”, says Barton.

A central reason for the recent success of translated literature is the work of independent publishers such as Fitzcarraldo, Peirene and Comma, say the organisers. Those presses “tend to be more willing to take risks”, adds Robinson.

One of the key aims of the festival is to showcase a “breadth of languages and geographies, beyond the major languages and locations of Europe, which tend to occupy so much focus”, says Robinson.

The programme features an event on translating the work of the Cameroonian poet Jean-Claude Awono and another with Hassan Blasim, who writes in Arabic, along with his translator Jonathan Wright. The festival will also host a conversation between two prominent translators of Latin American literature, Frank Wynne and Annie McDermott.

“We also have events featuring European languages that aren’t the five or so that get the most attention,” says Barton, with conversations about books translated from Slovakian (This Room Is Impossible to Eat by Nicol Hochholczerová, translated by Julia and Peter Sherwood) and Danish (Iron Lung by Kirstine Reffstrup, translated by Hunter Simpson).

Barton sees this approach of “actively looking beyond our immediate borders” as helping to “resist the political currents promoting xenophobia, prejudice and cultural homogeneity”.

The festival will also see Max Porter talking to two of his translators, Saskia van der Lingen (Dutch) and Charles Recoursé (French). It will close with the translation duel, featuring Adriana Hunter and Wynne. “The language of the slam this year is French, and we’re distributing the text to people in advance, so there’s the opportunity for people with a little French knowledge to have a go themselves if they like,” says Robinson.

Duels are an “excellent way of opening up the process for people and allowing them to get a sense of how creative translation really is”, adds Barton.

About the author

“Severo Sarduy’s writings combine a vibrant Cuban language with sophisticated theoretical reflections, and Barroco is one of his most important works: a meditation on the aesthetic that shaped Latin American and European cultures in the seventeenth and eighteenth centuries, along with a Neo-Baroque turn in the twentieth.”

—Rubén Gallo, Princeton University

“The Baroque, it could be said, is an exercise in the liberation of the Spanish language. Barroco refuses the foregone conclusions perpetuated by language; Sarduy embraces the Neo-Baroque practice of remaking representation, impelled by the need for a language free of the world’s mere duplication in writing.”

—Julio Ortega, Brown University

“At long last, in a new and complete translation that navigates the author’s tergiversation between Spanish and French, we have a definitive English edition of Barroco: an intriguing experiment with theories of figuration, geometric formalism, temporal recursion (retombée), and cosmic eccentricity by the Cuban exile Severo Sarduy. A novel exercise in anamorphic, elliptical thinking, a true event in the history of poetics and critical thought, Barroco will become essential reading for thinkers and comparatists of every stripe.”

—Emily Apter, New York University

Clean by Alia Trabucco Zerán, translated by Sophie Hughes (4th Estate, £16.99)
There’s no hanging about in Chilean author Alia Trabucco Zerán’s third novel, which opens with images of rabbits being frightened to death, life-threatening fungus, a piglet killed – and the warning that in the end, “the girl dies”. Our narrator is Estela (“I’ve killed before”), who worked as a nanny to a wealthy couple – doctor, lawyer – and “the girl” is their daughter Julia. Estela appears to be under questioning by police, held in a room and talking directly to “you who’ll eventually pass judgment on me”. Her story proceeds at pace, building its depth from an accumulation of small details: the family’s cruelty to her; the father’s shocking way of teaching Julia to swim; the secret behind the household maid. A strong narrative energy drives the novel to its conclusion, by which time the atmosphere is so full of dread you could weigh it.

Comrade Papa by GauZ’, translated by Frank Wynne (MacLehose, £12)
This funny, ebullient, often chaotic tale of French colonial exploitation of Ivory Coast tells two alternating stories. In the late 19th century, a young man joins a colonial expedition, caught between self-styled “Negrophiles” and “Negrophobes” – who disagree on everything except their shared loathing of the British – as he experiences his own bumpy personal voyage of discovery. Meanwhile, a century later, a European Black boy gives an account, filled with comic malapropisms (“lumpy proletariat”), of his own trip to Ivory Coast, and his upbringing by his communist father – Comrade Papa – who rails against everything from tulips (markers of capitalism) to Philips lightbulbs (made by fascist collaborators). Ivorian author GauZ’ was shortlisted for the International Booker prize for his novel Standing Heavy. Comrade Papa is even better.

The Son of Man by Jean-Baptiste Del Amo, translated by Frank Wynne (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99)
An opening scene of a group of ancient hunters switches, in a 2001: A Space Odyssey-style jump cut, to a present-day French family – father, mother, son – on a journey. “Are we there yet?” They’re heading to the father’s old house in the mountains of Les Roches to spend the summer. But this is no holiday: through flashbacks we begin to get the full, ugly picture, all told in visceral, physical prose. The mother lives on romance novels, beer and painkillers; the supplies packed by the father include cigarettes and a revolver. (The way he devours a chicken carcass will put you off poultry for life.) The father’s unpredictability reflects his experience with his own father, the mother turns out to be pregnant – and what about the mysterious Uncle Tony? The novel explores how unknowable the motives of adults are to children, and how man hands on misery to man. There aren’t many laughs on the way to the inevitable, satisfying conclusion, but it isn’t half gripping.

Comedy in a Minor Key by Hans Keilson, translated by Damion Searls (Pushkin, £9.99)
First published in German in 1947, this novella is a surprisingly entertaining account of a Dutch couple harbouring a Jewish man in their home during the Nazi occupation. As though things aren’t difficult enough, he then dies and becomes a much bigger problem. The story switches between his time in the house – playing chess against himself, looking wistfully through the window at the world he can’t join, trusting the local barber (“I only do one kind of cut. I hope you like it”) – and the couple’s attempts to dispose of his body. At first it appears that they have the ideal solution, and dump him under a park bench at night, “under the sky like a dead bird” – then they remember he was wearing a pair of the husband’s monogrammed pyjamas … Keilson wrote only four works of fiction in his lifetime. We should treasure them.

The Delivery by Margarita García Robaya, translated by Megan McDowell (Charco, £11.99)
A young Colombian woman living in Argentina is estranged from her family but still in touch with her sister, who sends regular packages. One day a huge crate arrives that occupies the whole living room: it contains her mother. “I don’t want to bother you,” she says. “Did you eat breakfast?” As our narrator adjusts to becoming a daughter again (“Aside from heavy food and popular tourist information, what else did she bring?”), she also has to work for an ad agency, writing an “appealing story about a cow who is happy … so her meat will be optimal”. And she must deal with disputes between neighbours, who “tore down walls and more walls until they created not space, but emptiness”. This multi-centred novel (family, work, home) contains everything: death, life and all the stuff in between.

The Book of Paradise by Itzik Manger, translated by Robert Adler Peckerar (Pushkin, £10.99)
A rambunctious fantasy, first published in 1937 against the rise of antisemitism in Europe, it tells the story of a young man expelled from Paradise back to Earth, where he is born with a cry of “Good Shabbos to you, Mama!” Once arrived, Samuel regales the local rabbi with tales of his previous life (“compared to Paradise canaries, Earth birds are just chickenshit”). His account is at once irreverent and steeped in Torah culture, as he sneaks around King David’s estate, experiences the sharp end of Solomon’s wisdom, and eavesdrops on Adam and Eve. “That verfluchte snake, she talked me into it.” Manger, a Yiddish “poet of the people” who was born in what is now Ukraine, called this his happiest book, and planned (but never wrote) two sequels, The Book of the Earth and The Book of the World of Chaos. No matter: there is enough chaos here, and joy, to be going on with.

The Factory by Hiroko Oyamada, translated by David Boyd (Granta, £12.99)
The blurb for this brilliantly strange novella compares it to Kafka and Beckett, but Magnus Mills meets Hitchcock would be more accurate. Three Japanese people talk about their employment in The Factory, a place where “everyone has at least one family member”. The jobs are purposeless: one worker is on the “shredder squad”; another tasked with roofing the entire factory in moss – and where are all those large black birds coming from? This is more than just a workplace satire, where the staff mental health guide is called Goodbye to All Your Problems and Mine. There’s a blend of the banal and the outrageous that we recognise from a certain strain of modern Japanese literature, and the delivery is exquisite, making comedy even from a local pervert known as the Forest Fairy Pantser. As the workers toil and their voices blur, it all leads to a question simultaneously outraged and amused: “What the hell is wrong with the world?”

Nothing Belongs to You by Nathacha Appanah, translated by Jeffrey Zuckerman (MacLehose, £12)
“For a long time,” recalls Tara, the narrator, “I was sure everyone around me, everyone I loved, was eternal.” But her husband Emmanuel died three months ago – “an event that left us with nothing” – and her stepson Eli is concerned about her state of mind, as destructive thoughts crash over her like the waves that feature throughout the book. Then we learn about her past: Tara is not her real name, but Vijaya; she was born a privileged girl in a “devastated country”, and her dissident parents were killed. The descriptions of her happy childhood, including her joy in dancing, are all the more powerful for the knowledge of what is to come. This is a novel of exceptional emotional force, where the reader can only nod when Vijaya cries: “This heart, this damned heart, should have known that it did no good to open itself up.”

About the author

“This erudite, yet accessible book has no equal. The quality and breadth of Sapiro’s scholarship is excellent. We would have to go back to a thinker like Adorno for a scholar as proficient in both literary research and sociological theory.”

—Bridget Fowler, University of Glasgow

“Sapiro’s clear survey of the sociology of literature synthesizes Bourdieu’s field theory with other approaches, adding subtle, provocative twists of her own. This book is essential reading for scholars and students of literary theory and the sociology of culture.”

—Andrew Goldstone, Rutgers University

“The Sociology of Literature is distinguished by unusual breadth of scope, both international and interdisciplinary. This book will be of great interest not only to sociologists but to literary scholars, historians, and anyone else interested in the systematic study of written culture.”

—Ted Underwood, University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign

“a concise but comprehensive handbook… which showcases a wide range of approaches and research problems in literary sociology.”

—Lee Konstantinou, Chronicle of Higher Education