Before we say goodbye to August, we’d like to recognize Women in Translation Month (#WITMonth). Started in 2014 by book blogger Meytal Radzinski, Women in Translation Month focuses on literature by women from around the world. Penguin Random House publishers and PRHPS clients publish some of the most acclaimed translations of novels by women around the world. Here are a selection:
From the award-winning, psychologically astute author of The Memory Police, Mina’s Matchbox is a hypnotic, introspective novel about a wealthy Japanese family grappling with hidden secrets and their young house guest who uncovers them. With the magic and mystery of youthful experience, Mina’s Matchbox is a striking snapshot of a frozen moment – and a striking portrayal of a family on the brink of collapse.
From the author of Drowneda passionate psychodrama in which questions of power and sexuality are taken to extremes.
From the National Book Award-winning author, an extraordinary, groundbreaking, multigenerational epic novel about a Korean family living under Japanese occupation. End of August is a poetic masterpiece.
A quirky group of seniors try to solve one murder while covering up another – with the help of an enterprising turtle – in this twisted, darkly comic crime novel from the author of Three pockets full.
The heroine of Marie NDiaye’s new novel is Maître Susane, a quiet middle-aged lawyer who leads a modest life in Bordeaux and is known to all as a consummate and unflappable professional. But when Gilles Principaux turns up at her office and asks her to defend his wife, who is accused of a gruesome crime, Maître Susane begins to break down. Told in a slow, seething style reminiscent of the short novels of Elena Ferrante and the psychological richness of the works of Patricia Highsmith, Vengeance is my is the dreamlike portrait of a woman suffering from fading memory and a tormenting uncertainty about her own past, which threatens to become her downfall.
An Italian master’s masterpiece about three generations of women and their unhappy marriages, now in the first unabridged English translation.
A woman’s mysterious death puts her husband and son on a collision course with their demonic family in the first novel translated into English by the International Booker Prize-nominated author. The dangers of smoking in bed– “the most exciting discovery I have made in fiction for a long time” (Kazuo Ishiguro). Our Share of Night moves back and forth in time, from London in the Swinging Sixties to the brutal years of the Argentine military dictatorship and its turbulent aftermath. It is a novel like no other: a family story, a ghost story, a story of the occult and the supernatural, a book about the complexity of love and longing with queer subplots and themes – this is the masterpiece of “one of Latin America’s most exciting authors” (Silvia Moreno-Garcia).
WINNER OF THE NOBEL PRIZE FOR LITERATURE 2022
The young man is Annie Ernaux’s account of her passionate love affair with A., a man some 30 years younger than she was in her fifties. The relationship evokes memories of her own youth while leaving her feeling both ageless and timeless – along with a sense of living her life backwards. As she talks about having a child together, she feels time passing and menopause approaching. “The Young Man” remembers Ernaux as the “scandalous girl” she once was, but it is composed with the mastery and confidence she has acquired over decades of writing.
A woman in Tokyo escapes workplace harassment by maintaining the lie that she is pregnant for nine months and more. In this award-winning, thrillingly subversive debut novel about the mother of all deceptions. Surreal and absurd, with a winning objectivity, a light touch and a refreshing sensitivity to mental health, Diary of an Emptiness will captivate you to learn how far Ms. Shibata takes her deception for the benefit of women, and especially working mothers, around the world.
The Nobel Prize winner’s richest, most comprehensive and most ambitious novel to date follows the meteoric rise and fall of a mysterious, messianic religious leader as he makes his way through 18th-century Europe. In a nod to books written in Hebrew, The Books of Jacob is reverse paginated, beginning on p. 955 and ending on p. 1 – but is traditionally read from front to back.
The stories in Igifu conjures phantom memories of Rwanda and radiates the passionate pain of a survivor. A National Book Award finalist who, according to Zadie Smith, “saves millions of souls from collective genocide.” Scholastique’s writing spans the great gaps of time and memory; in one scene she is a child crouched with a pitcher of sweet, frothy milk, and in another she is an exiled teacher scribbling down lists of her dead. As in all her work, Scholastique sits with them, their witty and radiant lover.
Shortlisted for the Man Booker International Prize
During a writer’s residency, an unnamed narrator focuses on the color white to creatively channel her inner pain. In lyrical, interconnected stories, she grapples with the tragedy that has struck her family and tries to understand the death of her older sister through the color white. She tries to imagine her mother producing breast milk for the first time, watches the snow fall and meditates on the transience of life, spinning a poignant, emotive story about the omnipresence of grief and the way we perceive the world around us.
For more information about these titles, see the Women in Translation Month collection.
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Posted: August 22, 2024
