August is Women in Translation Month and is the perfect time to travel all across the world while soaking up the sun in a park or at the beach. We have put together a list of books written by women that have been translated from Japanese, Finnish, French, Icelandic, and more. Try a humorous short story collection of the weird and wonderful or find your next Italian coming-of-age novel. Get your hygge on and read a Nordic short story set around Christmas or watch toxic and passionate relationships begin and end. These thirteen books will grab hold of you and make you get out your passport so you can see exactly where they take place.

 

Life Ceremony by Sayaka Murata, translated from Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori

With Life Ceremony, the incomparable Sayaka Murata is back with her first collection of short stories ever to be translated into English. Across the twelve stories in the collection, Murata mixes an unusual cocktail of humor and horror to portray both the loners and outcasts as well as turning the norms and traditions of society on their head to better question them. In these strange and wonderful stories of family and friendship, sex and intimacy, belonging and individuality, Murata asks above all what it means to be a human in our world and offers answers that surprise and linger.

“Murata’s prose, in this translation from the Japanese by Ginny Tapley Takemori, is generally so cool you could chill a bottle of wine in it.”—Dwight Garner, New York Times

 

Kitchen by Banana Yoshimoto, translated from Japanese by Megan Backus

Kitchen is an enchantingly original and deeply affecting book that juxtaposes two tales about mothers, love, tragedy, and the power of the kitchen and home in the lives of a pair of free-spirited young women in contemporary Japan. In a whimsical style that recalls the early Marguerite Duras, “Kitchen” and its companion story, “Moonlight Shadow,” are elegant tales whose seeming simplicity is the ruse of a very special writer whose voice echoes in the mind and the soul.

“A meditation on the transience of beauty and love… melancholy and lovely.” —The Washington Post Book World

 

Brightly Shining by Ingvild Rishøi, translated from Norwegian by Caroline Waight

Out 11/19/2024.

Christmas is just around the corner, and Ronja and Melissa’s dreamer of a father is out of work again. Ten-year-old Ronja hears about a job at a Christmas tree stand and their fridge is once again filled with food, their father returning home with money in his pocket and a smile on his face. But one evening he disappears to his favorite local pub, so Melissa and Ronja take his place and dream of a brighter place of kindness and plenty. Brightly Shining is skillfully told, evoking the delight, misunderstandings, and innocence of a child’s voice.

“There is real magic in this charming novel about care, community, and the kindness of strangers. It is a deeply affecting story, beautifully told, that is sure to touch the hearts of many readers.”—Douglas Stuart, Booker Prize-winning author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo

 

Lost on Me by Veronica Raimo, translated from Italian by Leah Janeczko

In this irreverent and hilariously inverted bildungsroman, award-winning and bestselling Italian author Veronica Raimo transforms neurosis, sex and family disaster into brilliant comedy reminiscent of Fleabag and Natalia Ginzburg’s Family Lexicon. Rome from the 1980’s through the early aughts comes to life as our heroine Vero delights in her own devious schemes and fumbles through the uncertain enterprise of becoming a woman.

“Raimo weaves together a series of nonlinear vignettes with a deft hand, connecting seemingly disparate moments through themes of longing, loneliness, identity, and, perhaps most profoundly, the concept of memory itself . . . A witty and complex portrait of a woman becoming herself.”—Kirkus Reviews

 

Animal Life by Auður Ava Ólafsdóttir, translated from Icelandic by Brian FitzGibbon

In the days leading up to Christmas, Dómhildur delivers her 1,922nd baby. As a terrible storm races towards Reykjavik, Dómhildur discovers decades worth of letters and manuscripts hidden amongst her grandaunt’s clutter in the apartment she inherited. Fielding calls from her anxious meteorologist sister and visits from her curious new neighbor, Dómhildur escapes into her grandaunt’s archive and uncovers strange and beautiful reflections on birth, death and human nature.

“A subtle and stunning work for anyone who has felt the impact of an ancestor, who has lost themselves to a past that feels like their own.”—Ploughshares

 

Reptile Memoirs by Silje Ulstein, translated from Norwegian by Alison McCullough

Obsessed with the idea of buying a pet snake after seeing a python on an Australian nature show, Liv gets Nero. As she bonds with the baby Burmese python, Liv feels extremely protective, like a caring mother, and she is struck by a desire that surprises her with its intensity. Finally she is safe. Thirteen years later, Mariam Lind takes her eleven-year-old daughter, Iben, shopping and then storms off and drives home after Iben asks for a magazine one too many times. Mariam is the prime suspect, but there is much more to this case and these characters than their outer appearances would suggest.

“Extraordinary and terrifying, Reptile Memoirs sinks teeth into you from page one. Through relentless and, at times, almost unbearable tension, Ulstein delivers a menacingly layered thriller unlike any you’ve read before.”—P. J. Vernon, author of Bath Haus

 

Magma by Thora Hjörleifsdóttir, translated from Icelandic by Meg Matich

Twenty-year-old Lilja is in love. She meets and quickly becomes smitten with an intelligent, beautiful young man from school. Before she knows it, she’s moved in with him. As the newfound intimacy fuels her desire to please him, his acts of nearly imperceptible abuse continue to mount undetected, and in order to meet his every need she starts to lose her sense of self. With astounding clarity and restraint, Hjörleifsdóttir sheds light on the commonplace undercurrents of violence that so often go undetected in romantic relationships.

“Hjörleifsdóttir’s narrator pulls us into the tale of her near undoing and her struggle to find her own value. It is the masterful writer who can shock us and make it ring so true.”—Lily King, author of Writers and Lovers

 

Destroy, She Said by Marguerite Duras, translated from French by Barbara Bray and Helen Lane Cumberford

In this classic novel by the best-selling author of The Lover, erotic intrigue masks a chillingly deceptive form of madness. Elisabeth Alione is convalescing in a hotel in rural France when she meets two men and another woman. The sophisticated dalliance among the four serves to obscure an underlying violence, which, when the curtain of civilization is drawn aside, reveals in her fellow guests a very contemporary, perhaps even new, form of insanity.

 

 

 

Daughter of the River by Hong Ying, translated from Chinese by Howard Goldblatt

This remarkable memoir follows the life of Hong Ying, who was born in the Great Famine of the early 1960s and grew up in a slum on the bank of the Yangtze River, as she unravels some of the enigmas that had troubled her all her life. Hong Ying’s search for truth led to the discovery of family secrets that changed her life–and her perceptions of her parents, her sister, and herself–tragically and irrevocably. With raw intensity and fearless honesty, Daughter of the River follows China’s trajectory through one woman’s life, from the Great Famine through the Cultural Revolution to Tiananmen Square.

“As you read [her] lacerating story, you feel that you have entered into the deepest truths of a tormented psyche, and into the truths as well of a bruised generation otherwise almost impossible for us to know.” —Richard Bernstein, The New York Times

 

The Core of the Sun by Johanna Sinisalo, translated from Finnish by Lola Rogers

Set in an alternative historical present, in a “eusistocracy”—an extreme welfare state—that holds public health and social stability above all else, The Core of the Sun follows Vanna, a young woman part of a new human sub-species called eloi, bred to be solely for sex and procreation. Her growing addiction to and involvement in buying and selling illegal chili peppers leads her on an adventure into a world where love, sex, and free will are all controlled by the state and to a strange religious cult that has her questioning everything.

 

 

The Piano Teacher by Elfriede Jelinek, translated from German by Joachim Neugroschel

Erika Kohut, piano teacher at the very prestigious, very stuffy Vienna Conservatory, is a quiet woman in her mid-thirties devoted to Bach, Beethoven, Schumann, and her domineering mother. Together they live a tedious life fueled by television movies, neurotic possessiveness, and a dying dream of a concert career. Enter Walter Klemmer—handsome, arrogant, athletic, out to conquer the secret of art and Erika’s affections with all the rancid bravado of youth—and suddenly the dark and dangerous passions roiling under the piano teacher’s subdued exterior explode in a release of sexual perversity and long-buried violence.

“Extraordinary linguistic zeal . . . [Jelinek’s] musical flow of voices and countervoices in novels and plays . . . reveal the absurdity of society’s clichés and their subjugating power.”—Royal Swedish Academy of Sciences, Nobel Prize address, 2004

 

Purge by Sofi Oksanen, translated from Finnish by Lola Rogers

When Aliide Truu, an older woman living alone in the Estonian countryside, finds a disheveled girl huddled in her front yard, she suppresses her misgivings and offers her shelter. Zara, a young sex-trafficking victim on the run from her captors, carries a photo that makes it clear that her arrival is no coincidence. Survivors both, Aliide and Zara engage in a complex arithmetic of suspicion and revelation to distill each other’s motives; gradually, their stories emerge, the culmination of a tragic family drama of rivalry, lust, and loss that played out during the worst years of Estonia’s Soviet occupation.

“By examining the toll of history on a close, personal level, Oksanen . . . makes the cost of mere survival sickeningly palpable. . . . Evoking both noir and fairy tales . . . Purge is an engrossing read.” —Oscar Villalon, NPR.org

 

The White City by Karolina Ramqvist, translated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel

Karin knew what she was getting herself into when she fell for John, a high-flying wheeler-dealer. What she didn’t expect was John disappearing, and all the parties, money, and social status with him, leaving her with the mansion he bought for her and the child she swore not to bring into their dangerous world. With authorities zeroing in on organized crime, Karin is forced to take drastic measures to claim what she considers rightfully hers so that she can start over.

“A stirring portrait of human melancholy that fills a Swedish winter with fear, grace, and urgency.” —Rebecca Dinerstein, author of The Sunlit Night