There's a Book for That: Women in Translation Month
Before we say goodbye to August, we want to honor Women in Translation Month (#WITMonth). Launched in 2014 by book blogger Meytal Radzinski, Women in Translation Month focuses on women’s writing from across the globe. Penguin Random House imprints and PRHPS clients publish some of the most lauded translated fiction by women in the world. Here is a sampling:
From the award-winning, psychologically astute author of The Memory Police, Mina’s Matchbox is a hypnotic, introspective novel about an affluent Japanese family navigating buried secrets, and their young house guest who uncovers them. With the magic and mystery of youthful experience, Mina’s Matchbox is an evocative snapshot of a moment frozen in time—and a striking depiction of a family on the edge of collapse.
From the author of Drowned, a passionate psychological drama where questions of power and sexuality are brought to a head.
From the National Book Award winning author, an extraordinary, ground-breaking, epic multi-generational novel about a Korean family living under Japanese occupation. The End of August is a poetic masterpiece.
A quirky group of seniors attempts to solve one murder while covering up another—with the help of an enterprising tortoise—in this twisty, darkly funny mystery from the author of Three Bags Full.
The heroine of Marie NDiaye’s new novel is Maître Susane, a quiet middle-aged lawyer living a modest existence in Bordeaux, known to all as a consummate and unflappable professional. But when Gilles Principaux shows up at her office asking her to defend his wife, who is accused of a horrific crime, Maître Susane begins to crack. Told in a slow seethe recalling the short novels of Elena Ferrante and the psychological richness of Patricia Highsmith’s work, Vengeance Is Mine is a dreamlike portrait of a woman afflicted by failing memories and a tortured uncertainty about her own past that threatens to become her undoing.
An Italian master’s magnum opus about three generations of women and their unhappy marriages, now in the first-ever unabridged English translation.
A woman’s mysterious death puts her husband and son on a collision course with her demonic family in the first novel to be translated into English by the International Booker Prize–shortlisted author of The Dangers of Smoking in Bed—“the most exciting discovery I’ve made in fiction for some time” (Kazuo Ishiguro). Moving back and forth in time, from London in the swinging 1960s to the brutal years of Argentina’s military dictatorship and its turbulent aftermath, Our Share of Night is a novel like no other: a family story, a ghost story, a story of the occult and the supernatural, a book about the complexities of love and longing with queer subplots and themes–this is the masterwork of “one of Latin America’s most exciting authors” (Silvia Moreno-Garcia).
WINNER OF THE 2022 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE
The Young Man is Annie Ernaux’s account of her passionate love affair with A., a man some 30 years younger, when she was in her fifties. The relationship pulls her back to memories of her own youth and at the same time leaves her feeling ageless, outside of time— together with a sense that she is living her life backwards. Amidst talk of having a child together, she feels time running its course, and menopause approaching. The Young Man recalls Ernaux as the “scandalous girl” she once was, but is composed with the mastery and the self-assurance she has achieved across decades of writing.
A woman in Tokyo avoids harassment at work by perpetuating, for nine months and beyond, the lie that she’s pregnant in this prizewinning, thrillingly subversive debut novel about the mother of all deceptions. Surreal and absurdist, and with a winning matter-of-factness, a light touch, and a refreshing sensitivity to mental health, Diary of a Void will keep you turning the pages to see just how far Ms. Shibata will carry her deception for the sake of women, and especially working mothers, everywhere.
The Nobel Prize–winner’s richest, most sweeping and ambitious novel yet follows the comet-like rise and fall of a mysterious, messianic religious leader as he blazes his way across eighteenth-century Europe. In a nod to books written in Hebrew, The Books of Jacob is paginated in reverse, beginning on p. 955 and ending on p. 1 – but read traditionally, front cover to back.
The stories in Igifu summon phantom memories of Rwanda and radiate with the fierce ache of a survivor. A National Book Award finalist who Zadie Smith says, “rescues a million souls from the collective noun genocide” Scholastique’s writing eclipses the great gaps of time and memory; in one scene she is a child sitting squat with a jug of sweet, frothy milk and in another she is an exiled teacher, writing down lists of her dead. As in all her work, Scholastique sits up with them, her witty and beaming beloved.
SHORTLISTED FOR THE MAN BOOKER INTERNATIONAL PRIZE
While on a writer’s residency, a nameless narrator focuses on the color white to creatively channel her inner pain. Through lyrical, interconnected stories, she grapples with the tragedy that has haunted her family, attempting to make sense of her older sister’s death using the color white. From trying to imagine her mother’s first time producing breast milk to watching the snow fall and meditating on the impermanence of life, she weaves a poignant, heartfelt story of the omnipresence of grief and the ways we perceive the world around us.
For more on these titles visit the collection Women in Translation Month
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