Our Reading Around the World Top 5 Books of the Month come from France and the Congo, Iran, Suriname and the Netherlands, India, Spain. Ève Guerra, Shahnrush Parsipur, Astrid Roemer, Vivek Shanbhag and Sara Torres all write from the edges of dominant culture and challenge power structures as they explore identity through innovative storytelling from outside the literary mainstream.
Repatriation by Ève Guerra Tr. Clodagh Kinsella
Winner of the 2024 Prix Goncourt du Premier Roman
Annabella Morelli lives in Vieux Lyon, a world away from Congo-Brazzaville, the land of her birth. A student in love, she dreams of a life as a poet, far from the shadows of her past. Born to a Franco-Italian industrial worker and a young Congolese villager, Annabella’s childhood was fractured early; her mother, once radiant and joyful, fled the home to escape her father’s alcoholic rages. Annabella grew up as an “adult child,” navigating her father’s excesses until she eventually left for France to study. When her father is killed in a brutal industrial accident, the tragedy is compounded by a corporate cover-up. To bring his body home is a bureaucratic nightmare. Annabella is obliged to confront her father’s legacy of secrets and lies. Her journey takes her from the streets of France, to Africa, and back to France again, unravelling a shattering web of corruption and treachery as she goes.
Women without Men by Shahnrush Parsipur Tr. Faridoun Farrokh
Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026
A foundational text for understanding the “Woman, Life, Freedom” movement and the long history of feminist resistance in Iran. Published in 1989, three years after her release from prison, Women without Men is currently banned in her homeland. It has been translated into many languages.
“Set in Tehran during the 1953 coup, Women Without Men blends magical realism and old-school Iranian allegory to condemn the policing of women’s bodies through the stories of five women: Munis, who escapes her brother’s control by jumping from a rooftop and continues narrating after death; pious Faezeh, whose rape shatters her faith; Zarrin, a sex worker who begins seeing her clients as faceless and flees; Mahdokht, who fears sex so intensely she transforms into a tree; and Farrokhlaqa, who leaves her middle-class husband and buys a garden outside the city. The women converge at Farrokhlaqa’s garden, creating a temporary refuge from marriage, male control and sexual shame,” Dinah Nayeri, The Guardian
Off-White by Astrid Roemer Tr. Lucy Scott & David McKay
Set in 1966 Suriname, matriarch Grandma Bee mulls over the legacy of her family, a multi-generational clan defined by its profound ethnic diversity and the trauma of colonial history. Through the lens of Bee’s reflections and her granddaughter Heli’s exile to the Netherlands, the novel explores kinship, the impact of systemic violence, and the complexities of racial identity.
“A complex portrait of male violence, the legacy of colonialism, and a dismantling of what it means to be ‘white’. Written after a nearly twenty-year break from publishing, Off-White is another masterpiece from the only Surinamese author to win the prestigious Dutch Literature Award,” Good Reads
Sakina’s Kiss by Vivek Shanbhag Tr. Srinath Perur
Shortlisted for James Tait Black Prize for Fiction 2026
Vivek Shanbhag’s protagonist is an unlikable, coward called Venkat, living a stagnant, “beige” middle-aged life in Bengaluru with his resentful wife. His passive existence is disrupted when his feminist daughter, Rekha, who dreams of being a journalist, disappears while on holiday at the family’s remote plantation. What begins as a domestic crisis escalates into a political and personal nightmare when Venkat is confronted by the uncles of his daughter’s male student friends. Forced to return to his ancestral home, Venkat is forced to face his sadistic uncle and the violent, long-buried secrets of his past. Through Venkat’s moral failings, Shanbhag explores the enmeshment of patriarchy, power and class in modern India.
X Is Where I Am by Sara Torres Tr. Maureen Shaughnessy
A novel about the politics of attraction and how we use other people to navigate our own internal voids.
A young photographer travels to a coastal town to visit an older woman while grieving the death of her mother. What begins as platonic pilgrimage to see an intellectual she deeply admires soon dissolves into a tense, erotic power play. Torres masterfully links the protagonist’s mourning with her physical awakening, suggesting that desire is often a way to ground oneself back in the world after a profound loss. It is a deeply internal novel, prioritizing the “landscape of the mind” over external action.
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