We’re relaunching Our Top 5 Books of the Month from around the world for curious readers looking for something a little different. We recommend a selection of books new in translation, listed alphabetically by author, to keep your mind sharp, your perspective fresh and to remind us all why cultural literacy matters more than ever!
Jon Fosse, Vaim, Tr. Damion Searls
The narrative is structured as one long sentence right) broken into three sections, each adopting the voice of a different character. Jatgeir has come from Vaim to the big city, Bjørgvin, on his wooden boat, ‘Eline’, named after the long-lost love of his teenage years. He intends to buy a needle and thread to sew a button but he is cheated, twice, in the city. That night, while sleeping on his boat, he hears a familiar voice: unexpectedly, it is Eline, who wants to come home to Vaim with him. She leaves a note for her husband Frank, packs her bags and runs away while he is out fishing, setting off a chain of emotional consequences.
Being inside minds that wrestle with memory, longing and what left unsaid emphasises the instability of time; the fluidity between memory and present; the way consciousness loops back on itself. Vaim is Jon Fosse’s first novel since he received the 2023 Nobel Prize in Literature. It is the first volume of a trilogy.
BUY Vaim Fitzcarraldo Editions
Maxim Gorky, Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev, Tr. Bryan Karetnyk
Introduction by J. M. Coetzee
In 1920, Virginia and Leonard Woolf’s Hogarth Press published Maxim Gorky’s Reminiscences of Tolstoy which was recognized almost immediately as a masterpiece of modern biography. ‘It is one of the most remarkable biographical pieces ever written,’ writes Leonard Woolf in his autobiography. ‘It makes one hear, see, feel Tolstoy and his character as if one were sitting in the same room – his greatness and his littleness, his entrancing and infuriating complexity, his titanic and poetic personality, his superb humour.’
In 1934, the book was expanded to include Gorky’s memoirs of two other great Russian literary figures, Anton Chekhov and Leonid Andreyev. Almost a hundred years later, Reminiscences of Tolstoy, Chekhov and Andreyev is reissued in a new translation by Bryan Karetnyk.
‘[F]ull of vivid flashes and glimpses into the soul of the Russian genius . . . Gorky’s book is particularly valuable because it reveals not only Tolstoy as he saw him, but unconsciously Gorky reveals himself also,’ New York Times
BUY Reminiscences of Tolstoy et al Fitzcarraldo Classic No. 11
Alois Hotschnig, My Mother’s Silver Fox, Tr. Tess Lewis
My Mother’s Silver Fox by Alois Hotschnig is a meticulous excavation of memory, identity, trauma and survival. It is an engrossing moral and emotional investigation. Though fictional, the story is based on the testimony of a child born via the Lebensborn scheme, giving the novel authenticity and moral weight.
Heinz grows up with little knowledge of his origins. All he has is a tatty piece of paper from the SS Lebensborn programme, the Nazi regime’s scheme intended to propagate “racial purity.” His mother, Gerd, is Norwegian and during the German occupation had become involved with a Wehrmacht soldier. She put her trust in the wrong man. Arriving in Austria after a long journey, instead of welcoming her, the soldier’s family turns her away. She can’t go back to Norway because she’s branded a collaborator. Heinz is placed, first in a children’s home, then in a foster family. He meets his mother again in 1946 via the Red Cross. Gerd remarries and has more children. Heinz lives with her but suffers under her brutal new husband. As he matures, Heinz’s need to uncover his paternal identity intensifies. He interviews neighbours, collects letters, and gradually pieces together the truth about his biological father.
My Mother’s Silver Fox illuminates how profoundly state ideology and racial policies rupture ordinary lives through the generations. How do we tell the stories of our past when it is suppressed, distorted, or destroyed? Even as we assemble fragments, there is a disturbing absence, the void of the unknowable.
BUY My Mother’s Silver Fox Seagull Books
Read the BookBlast Review of LUDWIG’S ROOM by Henrietta Foster
Julio Llamazares, Wolf Moon, Tr. Simon Deefholts & Kathryn Phillips-Miles
Wolf Moon by Julio Llamazares is set in the immediate aftermath of the Spanish Civil War (1936 – 39), extending to around 1946. The repression continues despite the war officially being declared as ended, and Franco’s Nationalists hunt down Republican resistance fighters, many of whom go into hiding in Spain’s mountainous regions.
Four Republican fighters are on the run and depend on sympathetic villagers and families (some related to the fugitives) to supply food, clothing, and news, but every contact carries danger. The brothers-in-arms endure extreme cold, hunger, damp, isolation. Over the years, the psychological burden becomes heavier to bear. Will they survive, or will they be betrayed? What kind of Spain would they return to if they survive?
Wolf Moon was one of the first novels in post-Franco Spain to break the ‘Pact of Forgetting’ — an implicit agreement in the democratic transition (after 1975) to avoid reopening wounds from the Civil War and Franco’s repression. While grounded in Spanish history, the novel asks timeless, univeral questions: what happens to dissenters under authoritarian regimes, how terror and repression transform communities, how memory, and forgetting, shape national identities.
It was adapted into a film Luna de lobos (Wolves’ Moon) in 1987 directed by Julio Sánchez Valdés.
BUY Wolf Moon Pushkin Press Classics
Aoko Matsuda, The Woman Dies, Tr. Polly Barton
The Fifty-two stories in Aoko Matsuda’s The Woman Dies explore the persistent and pervasive sexism faced by women in modern-day Japan. Clever wordplay riffs off the absurdity of contemporary life. Violence against women, the normalization of suffering and how women are used as plot devices or props in narratives are explored and exposed with quirky humour, surreal twists and wry detachment.
Translated by Polly Barton, the translator of Asako Yuzuki’s Butter, The Woman Dies blends humour, surrealism and sharp social critique. It is a sprawling, multifaceted mosaic of ideas by one of Japan’s most exciting writers. The title story was originally published in Granta and in its original Japanese version was shortlisted for the Shirley Jackson Award. Aoko Matsuda is both a writer and translator, giving her a dual vantage point on language, narrative and cross-cultural expression.
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