• General Recommendations
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Books in Translation - Fiction

Translation offers readers windows into other cultures and ways of thinking. Translation is an often underappreciated art. We hope you enjoy these carefully curated titles that include classic, new and award-winning translated works.

West Vancouver Memorial Library

25 items

  • A masterpiece of the surreal that influenced a generation of writers in Latin America, Pedro P̀ramo is the otherworldly tale of one man's quest for his lost father. Now published in a new translation from the definitive Spanish edition by celebrated…
    Book, 2023New York : Grove Press, 2023. — FICTION RUL
  • Fever Dream is a nightmare come to life, a ghost story for the real world, a love story and a cautionary tale.
    Book, 2017New York : Riverhead Books, [2017] — FICTION SCH
  • By Nobel prize winning author Han Kang, The Vegetarian is a novel about modern day South Korea, but also a novel about shame, desire and our faltering attempts to understand others, from one imprisoned body to another.
    Book, 2018London : Granta, 2018. — FICTION HAN
  • A confession, a lament, a mad gush of grief and obsession, My Heavenly Favorite is a remarkable and chilling novel. It tells the story of a veterinarian who visits a farm in the Dutch countryside where he becomes enraptured by his "Favorite"--the…
    Book, 2024Minneapolis, Minnesota : Graywolf Press, 2024. — FICTION RIJ
  • Welcome to Argentina and the fascinating, frightening, fantastical imaginationof Mariana Enriquez. In twelve spellbinding new stories, Enriquez writes about ordinary people, especially women, whose lives turn inside out when they encounter terror,…
    Book, 2024London : Hogarth, [2024] — FICTION ENR
  • Heralded as a masterpiece, this fascinating and gripping story about the lives of subsistence farmers in Brazil's poorest region, three generations after the abolition of slavery, is at once fantastic and realist, covering themes of family,…
    Book, 2023London : Verso, 2023. — FICTION VIE
  • Centred on a family of rail workers, Mater 2-10 vividly depicts the lives of workers and common folk, starting from the Japanese colonial era, continuing through Liberation, and right up to the twenty-first century, rendering in elegant prose a…
    Book, 2023Brunswick, Victoria, Australia : Scribe Publications, 2023. — FICTION HWA
  • Hidden in the heart of the old city of Barcelona is the 'Cemetery of Forgotten Books', a labyrinthine library of obscure and forgotten titles. To this library, a man brings his ten-year-old son, Daniel, one cold morning in 1945.
    Book, 2005New York : Penguin Books, 2005. — FICTION RUI
  • In brief, precise vignettes, full of surprising humour and gentle melancholy, Posthuma tells the story of a depressive brother, viewed from the perspective of the sister who both loves and resents her twin, struggles to understand him, and misses…
    Book, 2023London : Scribe, 2023. — FICTION POS
  • Kairos, the winner of the International Booker Prize in 2024, is the story of two lovers – a man in his fifties and a 19-year-old woman – through the ruins of a relationship, set against the tumult of East Berlin in the 1980s.
    Book, 2023New York : New Directions Books, 2023. — FICTION ERP
  • The Details is a novel built around the small details that, pieced together, comprise a life. This exhilarating, provocative tale raises profound questions about the nature of relationships, and how we tell our stories. The result is an intimate and…
    Book, 2023New York, NY : HarperVia, an imprint of HarperCollinsPublishers, 2023. — FICTION GEN
  • A story of three friends on a fishing trip and a river in Argentina. This deceptively simple short novel contains a deep sense of foreboding and memories of past traumas, turning a seemingly bucolic trip into a haunted story.
    Book, 2024Minneapolis, Minnesota : Graywolf Press, [2024] — FICTION ALM
  • A reunion with two childhood friends draws Kath and her companions on a nostalgic odyssey into their lives at Hailsham, an isolated private school in the English countryside, and a confrontation with the truth about their childhoods.
    Book, 2010Toronto : Vintage Canada, 2010. — FICTION ISH
  • Beginning in the 1950s Elena and Lila grow up in Naples, Italy, mirroring two different aspects of their nation.
    Book, 2012New York : Europa Editions, 2012. — FICTION FER
  • This is the story of three women, West African immigrants in France, who say no. As these three lives intertwine, each woman manages an astonishing feat of self-preservation against the incomprehensibly methodical and relentless humiliation that is…
    Book, 2012New York : Alfred A. Knopf, 2012. — FICTION NDI
  • Juan Gabriel Vasquez is one of the leading novelists of his generation, and The Sound of Things Falling, which tackles what became of Colombia in the time of Pablo Escobar, is his best book to date.
    Book, 2012London : Bloomsbury, 2012. — FICTION VAS
  • One afternoon on a weekend in May, Dewi Ayu rose from her grave after being dead for twenty-one years.
    Book, 2015New York : New Directions, [2015] — FICTION KUR
  • The Door is an unsettling exploration of the relationship between two very different women.
    Book, 2005New York : New York Review Books, 2005. — FICTION SZA
  • Through these brilliantly imagined characters and stories, interwoven with haunting, playful, and revelatory meditations, Flights explores what it means to be a traveler, a wanderer, a body in motion not only through space but through time.…
    Book, 2018New York : Riverhead Books, 2018. — FICTION TOK
  • A prizewinning novel by "Baghdad's new literary star" ( The New York Times ), Frankenstein in Baghdad captures with white-knuckle horror and black humor the surreal reality of contemporary Iraq.
    Book, PB FICTION SAD