At Platform, we’ve found ourselves gravitating incessantly towards books from various languages, translated into English. From Korean to Bulgarian, these books exemplify the immense diversity in literature that we’re lucky to find as readers today, and the need for more. So, we’ve put together a reading list of international translation novels that we’ve read, and re-read, recently and highly recommend for your reading as well. Explore our list below:
Time Shelter
Winner of the International Booker Prize 2023, in Time Shelter, an enigmatic flâneur named Gaustine opens a 'clinic for the past' that offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer's sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time. Intricately crafted, and eloquently translated by Angela Rodel from Bulgarian, Time Shelter cements Georgi Gospodinov's reputation as one of the indispensable writers of our times, a major voice in international literature.
Greek Lessons
Han Kang’s new novel takes you to a classroom in Seoul, where a young woman watches her Greek language teacher at the blackboard. She tries to speak but has lost her voice. Her teacher finds himself drawn to the silent woman, for day by day he is losing his sight. Soon they discover a deeper pain binds them. Greek Lessons is a tender love letter to human connection, a novel to awaken the senses, vividly conjuring the essence of what it means to be alive. It has been translated from Korean by Deborah Smith and Emily Yae Won.
Breast and Eggs; Heaven
On a hot summer’s day in a poor suburb of Tokyo we meet three women: thirty-year-old Natsuko, her older sister Makiko, and Makiko’s teenage daughter Midoriko. In Breasts and Eggs, Mieko Kawakami paints a radical and intimate portrait of contemporary working class womanhood in Japan, recounting the heartbreaking journeys of three women in a society where the odds are stacked against them. This is an unforgettable English language debut from a major new international talent, translated from Japanese by Sam Bett and David Boyd.
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2022, in Heaven, a fourteen-year-old boy is tormented for having a lazy eye. Instead of resisting, he chooses to suffer in silence. The only person who understands what he is going through is a female classmate, Kojima, who experiences similar treatment at the hands of her bullies. Unflinching yet tender, sharply observed, intimate and multi-layered, this simple yet profound novel stands as yet another dazzling testament to Mieko Kawakami’s uncontainable talent.
Flights
Flights, a novel about travel in the twenty-first century and human anatomy, is Olga Tokarczuk's most ambitious to date. It interweaves travel narratives and reflections on travel with an in-depth exploration of the human body, broaching life, death, motion and migration. With her signature grace and insight, Olga Tokarczuk guides the reader beyond the surface layer of modernity and towards the core of the very nature of humankind. Winner of International Booker Prize 2018, Flights was translated from Polish by Jennifer Croft.
Whereabouts
Exuberance and dread, attachment and estrangement: in this novel, Jhumpa Lahiri stretches her themes to the limit. The woman at the center wavers between stasis and movement, between the need to belong and the refusal to form lasting ties. One day at the sea, both overwhelmed and replenished by the sun's vital heat, her perspective will change. This is the first novel she has written in Italian and translated into English. It brims with the impulse to cross barriers. By grafting herself onto a new literary language, Lahiri has pushed herself to a new level of artistic achievement.
Winter in Sokcho
It’s winter in Sokcho, a tourist town on the border between South and North Korea. The Cold slows everything down. Bodies are red and raw, the fish turn venomous, beyond the beach guns point out from the North’s watchtowers. A young French Korean woman works as a receptionist in a tired guesthouse. One evening, an unexpected guest arrives: a French Cartoonist determined to find inspiration in this desolate landscape. The two form an uneasy relationship. An exquisitely-crafted debut, which won the Prix Robert Walser, Winter in Sokcho is a novel about shared identities and divided selves, vision and blindness, intimacy and alienation. The novel was translated from French by Aneesa Abbas Higgins.
Diary of a Void
A prizewinning, thrillingly subversive debut novel by Emi Yagi about a woman in Japan who avoids harassment at work by perpetuating, for nine months and beyond, the lie that she's pregnant. A surreal and wryly humorous cultural critique, Diary of a Void is bound to become a landmark in feminist world literature. It was translated from Japanese by David Boyd and Lucy North.
Empty Houses
Translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes, Empty Houses by Brenda Navarro is a kaleidoscopic inquiry into contemporary Mexico and a provocative exploration of motherhood. The novel unfolds in the aftermath of a child's disappearance. His mother is distraught. As her life begins to unravel, she is haunted by his absence but also by her own ambivalence: did she even want him in the first place?In a working-class neighbourhood on the other side of Mexico City another woman protects her stolen child. After longing desperately to be a mother, her life is violently altered by its reality. Alternating between these two contrasting voices, Empty Houses confronts the desires, regrets and social pressures of motherhood faced by both the mother who lost her child and the new one who risked everything to take him.
Date 29-06-2023