Our translated fiction bookseller, Laura Garcia Moreno, is back with a collection of the best of translated fiction from around the world of the year. This month she is joined by our Fiction Lead Tom Mooney.
Taiwan Travelogue written by Yang Shuang-zi (tr. Lin King). Winner of the 2026 International Booker Prize, published by And Other Stories: An elaborate ruse: a rediscovered Japanese travelogue from the 1930s that is, in reality, a translation from Mandarin Chinese written in this decade, complete with footnotes. Aoyama Chizuko is a Japanese writer that during the Japanese rule of Taiwan gets funded by her government to visit the island and travel with a translator, Chizuru, whom she falls in love with. Inspecting colonialism from up close, Chizuko, even as a coloniser, both longs for real Taiwan and its food. Taiwan Travelogue is about food as it’s about history and love.
Pedro the Vast by Simon Lopez Trujillo (tr. by Robin Myers): A Bolano prize-winner, this eco-dystopian story is both lucid in meaning and textured in its haziness: you can grasp it all and still you come out of it without any idea of what has just happened. Slipping in and out of characters’ perspectives, Lopez Trujillo reveals an expansive world where an infectious fungus can take over minds. In Chile, Pedro works as a forest worker at a eucalyptus plantation and continues to ignore a persistent cough while he is raising his children, Pato and Cata. In parallel, we follow Giovanna, a mycologist who has set out to investigate a lethal case of the infection. Mind-blowing.
Cathedrals by Claudia Pinero (tr. Frances Riddle): Thirty years ago, the youngest of the Sarda sisters was found dismembered and burned in an empty lot. In the aftermath, middle sister Lía left not only her family but the church. Now in middle age and working as a bookseller in Spain, she finds the ghosts of the past returning to haunt her once again. At once a compelling mystery and an aching portrait of family, grief, and memory.
The Notebook Trilogy by Agota Kristof (tr. Alan Sheridan, David Watson): In the rotting, forgotten corner of a country under occupation, twin refugees Claus and Lucas are left at the house of their grandmother, ‘the Witch’ (who everyone knows poisoned their grandfather). Stuck in a place where the normal rules of society are suspended, the pair use bizarre exercises to harden themselves against the brutalities of war, while observing the depraved behaviour of their fellow citizens. One of the most arresting and astonishing books of the 20th century.
The Family by Sara Mesa (tr. Katie Whitmore):An expansive kaleidoscopic story about a family… and yet it’s not a family saga. The Family plays with structure, intentionally shuffling decades, characters and themes presenting a solid story through sketches of moments in the characters’ lives creating a connect the dots narrative. Full of psychological insight, Mesa loves to unsettle us. Damian, has structured his family around silence, brandishing his authority like a knife. And the kids learn to navigate his mood, his lies, his contradictions, the shame of him. His looming shadow follows them into adulthood in the hurricane of moments that Mesa chooses to show us. Tense, powerful and intimate.
Dams by Irene Sola (tr. Mara Faye Lethem): This was Irene Sola’s debut novel and a work of metafiction now translated from Catalan. Ada returns to her rural village after living in London. As she returns to her day to day of outdoors hanging out and spending time with Vincenç Jr. She is a storyteller: of real and invented stories. As the narrative interweaves Ada’s stories of rural people and a dam that can’t hold any more, and Ada’s story this is at heart a tale about community and home, of imagination and local culture.