Our translated fiction expert, Laura Garcia Moreno, is back with her latest selection of fiction from around the world. Read on to see what gems she has uncovered this month…
Checking Out by Meryem El Mehdati (tr. by Julia Sanches). Meryem is the twenty-five-year-old daughter of Moroccan immigrants, navigating the sterile corporate isles of a Canary Island’s megastore. She’s an intern, unpaid and overextended, while her dreams of writing and freedom slowly calcify beneath fluorescent lights. What begins with hope dissolves into quiet dread. This is a biting, darkly funny portrait of late capitalism’s daily humiliations: misogyny in the break room, racism hidden behind soft HR speak, and the strange poetry of burnout with a dash of swoony romance in the devastatingly handsome figure of Omar.
Waist Deep by Linea Maja Ernst (tr. by Sherilyn Nicolette Hellberg). Five old friends gather in a Danish cabin for midsummer, hoping to reclaim something they’ve already lost. Sylvia, stuck between her girlfriend and the longing for her friend’s fiancée, rekindles an obsession with Esben while tension rises like steam from the lake. Each character wrestles with the versions of themselves they were supposed to become. The writing is lucid, hot, and full of aching sensual desire, where every touch or glance carries the weight of memory. It’s about friendship, betrayal, and the unbearable weight of the life you didn’t choose. Tender and messy. For fans of Sally Rooney and Johanna Hedman.
Roman Stories by Jhumpa Lahiri (co-translated by Lahiri and Todd Portnowitz). Lahiri writes about life on the edges. Outsiders in Rome caught between countries, languages, belonging, identities and under the constant threat of violence. The city looms but doesn’t welcome; her characters move through it half-seen, half-settled. Each story is spare, observant, and emotionally precise but in a cool tone. It’s a book about migration without sentimentality, identity without big declarations. The drama is in the details: a quiet snub, an apartment hallway, a dinner that goes sideways. Understated, elegant, and devastating.
The Deserters by Mathias Enard (tr. by Charlotte Mandell). Two lives: a soldier bleeding out in an unknown war, and a woman recounting her father’s suicide decades after surviving a concentration camp. The link between them is grief, history, and the echo of violence. Énard writes sparsely, deliberately, hauntingly. The soldier trudges through mud with only a donkey for company, while the woman tries to stitch memory into something survivable. It’s a bleak fable about persistence, not redemption. It’s about quiet sorrow, like tainting smoke.
There’s a Monster Behind the Door by Gaëlle Bélem (tr. by Karen Fleetwood and Laëtitia Saint-Louber). A girl grows up in 1980s Réunion, trying to dodge the cruelties of her family which seem terryfingly impossible to escape. Her voice is sharp, funny, tragic, full of razor-sharp observation and resistance. She hides from beatings behind her school books, spies on her parents’ violence, and records everything with the precision of someone who knows that one day, she’ll write it all down. Bélem captures a childhood of fear and brilliance with language that bites. It’s brutal, hilarious, unforgettable. A coming-of-age novel like no other as it’s part ghost story, part survivor’s spell.
Collected Short Stories by Roberto Bolaño (tr. by Natasha Wimmer and Chris Andrews). Bolaño’s stories are drifting places, bruised poets, blurry crimes and dreams. This is the terrain on which his work was build. You travel through Mexico City bars, lost towns, beachside illusions and you are always following someone who doesn’t quite know what they’re looking for. His prose is quiet, strange and beautiful. Stories nest within stories, voices echo. It’s a book for people who want to get lost and who want fiction that stays with you. Read one before bed and wake up feeling haunted, like someone whispered something to you in a dream you almost understood. Simply a genius.