August is already preparing to knock on our doors and we know what this means, right? It’s Women In Translation Month, the time when we discover – and re-read (he, he, he!) outstanding women whose work has been translated into English from every corner of our beautiful planet. These are the books I’ve read and adored this year.
Title: Kim Jiyoung, Born 1982
Writer: Cho Nam – Joo
Translated by: Jamie Chang
Country: South Korea
Rating: 5 stars
Do you find the strength to stand up or do you let yourself be smothered by habit and shameless direct and indirect blackmailing and abusing? This outstanding novel leaves little room for hope…
Title: The Lost Soul
Writer: Olga Tokarczuk, illustrations by Joanna Concejo
Translated by: Antonia Lloyd-Jones
Country: Poland
Rating: 5 stars
Olga Tokarczuk creates a beautiful fable about a young man who realizes he has lost the only thing that really matters. His soul.
Title: A Sunday in Ville- d’Avray
Writer: Dominique Barbéris
Translated by: John Cullen
Country: France
Rating: 5 stars
I wanted to live inside this book. I cannot praise it enough. The beauty, the nostalgia, the melancholy, the quiet, the simplicity and elegance make you grateful for being alive and blessed to read such literary marvels, such works that are made of whatever our souls are made of.
Title: The Dangers of Smoking In Bed
Writer: Mariana Enriquez
Translated by: Megan McDowell
Country: Argentina
Rating: 5 stars
Mariana Enriquez’s stories are merciless. They are brutal, raw, savage. They haunt you, they violate your mind and your soul. They are full of terrors, despair, obsession. Ghosts are desperate. Humans are cruel. Teenage dreams are burnt, children are threatened, women and men find themselves in limbo. This is the marriage of the macabre, the lyrical, the violent. This is a cry and a howl. A dance of demons staring into our souls. And it is magnificent.
Title: Wild Swims
Writer: Dorthe Nors
Translated by: Misha Hoekstra
Country: Denmark
Rating: 5 stars
In 14 stories, set in Denmark, Norway, England, Canada and the USA, Dorthe Nors explores the entire spectrum of the human soul with exquisite clarity and a wondrous mixture of compassion and honesty. These aren’t extraordinary people put in extreme situations. They are women and men that have loved and hated, believed and expected.
Title: There Once Lived A Mother Who Loved Her Children Until They Moved Back In
Writer: Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
Translated by: Anna Summers
Country: Russia
Rating: 5 stars
Ludmilla Petrushevskaya’s stories in this volume are part of an absurd, nightmarish universe. Except that this ‘’universe’’ is very, very real. This is the living Hell of the Soviet society, built on lies, treachery, corruption and violence.
Title: Island
Writer: Siri Ranva Hjelm Jacobsen
Translated by: Caroline Waight
Country: Denmark/ The Faroe Islands
Rating: 5 stars
Stories of witches and phantom whalers, of the hulder folk and the myths about the islands, tales of the stories and the moss, of the mists and the fjords, of floating islands and secretive places like Mykines, of the festivities of Midsummer’s Eve, in the scorching wind and the midnight sun, a woman is trying to explore questions of identity and belonging in a contemporary, lyrical Norse Odyssey.
TBR LIST FOR AUGUST 2021
Title: It Shall Be of Jasper and Coral and Love-Across-A-Hundred-Lives
Writer: Werewere Liking
Translated by: Marjolijm de Jager
Country: Cameroon
”The West African writer, painter, playwright, and director Werewere Liking is considered one of the best literary interpreters of the postcolonial condition in Africa. Her first work to be translated into English, these two novels spare nothing in their satirical portraits of the patriarchal view of African society as they experiment radically with the novel form.”
Title: Moonbath
Writer: Yanick Lahens
Translated by: Emily Gogolac
Country: Haiti
”The award-winning saga of a peasant family living in a small Haitian village, recounting through stories of tradition and superstition, voodoo, romance, and violence, the lives of four generations of women struggling to hold the family together in a volatile , roiling landscape of political turmoil and economic suffering.”
Title: Things We Lost In The Fire
Writer: Mariana Enriquez
Translated by: Megan McDowell
Country: Argentina
”In these wildly imaginative, devilishly daring tales of the macabre, internationally bestselling author Mariana Enriquez brings contemporary Argentina to vibrant life as a place where shocking inequality, violence, and corruption are the law of the land, while military dictatorship and legions of desaparecidos loom large in the collective memory.”
Title: Earthlings
Writer: Sayaka Murata
Translated by: Ginny Tapley Takemori
Country: Japan
”Natsuki isn’t like the other girls. She has a wand and a transformation mirror. She might be a witch, or an alien from another planet. Together with her cousin Yuu, Natsuki spends her summers in the wild mountains of Nagano, dreaming of other worlds. When a terrible sequence of events threatens to part the two children forever, they make a promise: survive, no matter what.”
Title: There Once Lived a Girl Who Seduced Her Sister’s Husband, and He Hanged Himself
Writer: Ludmilla Petrushevskaya
Translated by: Anna Summers
Country: Russia
”In these dark, dreamlike love stories with a twist, Ludmilla Petrushevskaya tells of strange encounters in claustrophobic communal apartments, ill-fated holiday romances, office trysts, schoolgirl crushes, tentative courtships, rampant infidelity, tender devotion and terrifying madness. ”
Title: Hurricane Season
Writer: Fernanda Melchor
Translated by: Sophie Hughes
Country: Mexico
”The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse – by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals – propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumours and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Fernanda Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.”
Title: Strange Weather In Tokyo
Writer: Hiromi Kawakami
Translated by: Allison Markin Powell
Country: Japan
”Tsukiko is in her late 30s and living alone when one night she happens to meet one of her former high school teachers, ‘Sensei’, in a bar. He is at least thirty years her senior, retired and, she presumes, a widower. After this initial encounter, the pair continue to meet occasionally to share food and drink sake, and as the seasons pass – from spring cherry blossom to autumnal mushrooms – Tsukiko and Sensei come to develop a hesitant intimacy which tilts awkwardly and poignantly into love. ”
The Opinionated Reader 
These sound amazing. I’m particularly intrigued by Islands. I’ve always been curious about the Faroes.
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