This month we're reading fiction translated from: Korean, German, Swedish, Italian, Japanese and Spanish!
We Do Not Part
Han Kang, translated from Korean by e. yaewon & Paige Aniyah Morris
One morning in December, Kyungha receives a message from her friend Inseon saying she has been hospitalized in Seoul and asking that Kyungha join her urgently. The two women have last seen each other over a year before, on Jeju Island, where Inseon lives and where, two days before this reunion, she has injured herself chopping wood. Airlifted to Seoul for an operation, Inseon has had to leave behind her pet bird, which will quickly die unless it receives food. Bedridden, she begs Kyungha to take the first plane to Jeju to save the animal.
Unfortunately, a snowstorm hits the island when Kyungha arrives. She must reach Inseon's house at all costs, but the icy wind and snow squalls slow her down as night begins to fall. She wonders if she will arrive in time to save Inseon's bird – or even survive the terrible cold that envelops her with every step. Lost in a world of snow, she doesn't yet suspect the vertiginous plunge into the darkness which awaits her at her friend's house.
Read our staff review here.
Eurotrash
Christian Kracht, translated from German by Daniel Bowley
Realising he and she are the very worst kind of people, our unnamed middle-aged narrator embarks on a highly dubious road trip through Switzerland with his terminally ill and terminally drunken mother. They try unsuccessfully to give away or squander the fortune she has amassed from investing in armament industry shares. Along the journey they bicker endlessly over the past, throw handfuls of francs into a ravine and exasperate the living daylights out of their long-suffering taxi driver. The crimes of the twentieth century are never far behind, but neither is the need for more vodka.
Eurotrash is a bitterly comic, vertiginous mirror-cabinet of familial and historical reckoning. Kracht's novel is a narrative tour-de-force of the tenderness and spite meted out between two people who cannot escape one another.
Colony
Annika Norlin, translated from Swedish by Alice E. Olsson
One morning, Emelie can't get out of bed. Her therapist calls it burnout. Her neighbour calls it the tiny work death. She needs to get away from the brightness of the city lights, the noise of the people, the constant demands, so she goes to the woods, pitches her tent overlooking the lake, breathes. And that's where she sees them, the Colony.
Who are they? What do they mean to each other? And why do they behave in such strange ways: thanking the fish they eat, sleeping under a tree, singing off key, dancing without music?
As Emelie becomes more and more drawn to the Colony, she begins to re-evaluate her own lifestyle. Wouldn't it be nice to live as they do? Apart from society and its expectations. But groups always have their dynamics and roles. Which are you? And what if you want to change?
The Café with No Name
Robert Seethaler, translated from German by Katy Derbyshire
It is 1966, and Robert Simon has just fulfilled his dream by taking over a cafe on the corner of a bustling Vienna market. He recruits a barmaid, Mila, and soon the customers flock in. Factory workers, market traders, elderly ladies, a wrestler, a painter, an unemployed seamstress in search of a job, each bring their stories and their plans for the future. As Robert listens and Mila refills their glasses, romances bloom, friendships are made and fortunes change. And change is coming to the city around them, to the little cafe, and to Robert's dream.
A story of the hopes, kindnesses and everyday heroism of one community, The Café with No Name has charmed millions of European readers. It is an unforgettable novel about how we carry each other through good and bad times, and how even the most ordinary life is, in its own way, quite extraordinary.
Counterattacks At Thirty
Won-pyung Sohn, translated from Korean by Sean Lin Halbert
Jihye is an ordinary woman who has never been extraordinary. In her administrative job at the Academy, she silently tolerates office politics and the absurdities of Korean bureaucracy. Forever only one misplaced email away from career catastrophe, she effectively becomes a master of the silent eye-roll and the tactical coffee run. But all her efforts to endure her superiors and the semi-hostile work environment they create are upended when a new intern, Gyuok Lee, arrives.
Like a pacifist version of V in V for Vendetta, Gyuok recruits a trio of office allies to carry out plans for minor revenge. Together, these four “rebels” commit tiny protests against those in more powerful positions through spraying graffiti, throwing eggs, and writing anonymous exposés. But as their attacks increase, the initial joy they felt at the release becomes something more and Jihye and the others will discover the beauty of friendship and the extraordinary power of unity against adversity.
Available from 19 March.
Perfection
Vincenzo Latronico, translated from Italian by Sophie Hughes
They have everything to make them happy. Expat couple Anna and Tom are living the dream in Berlin, in a bright, plant-filled apartment. Young, cool digital creatives, they enjoy slow cooking, Danish furniture, progressive politics, sexual experimentation and the city's twenty-four-hour party scene.
It's exactly the life they had imagined for themselves. But they begin to feel disillusioned, bored. Work becomes repetitive. Friends move away, have children, grow up. An attempt at political activism proves fruitless, since their direct action amounts to taking an Uber only if it is snowing, tipping in cash, never eating tuna.
Trapped in a lifestyle optimised for digital perfection, yearning for authenticity, they find themselves doing something they could never have predicted.
May You Have Delicious Meals
Junko Takase, translated from Japanese by Morgan Giles
In their Saitama office, Ashikawa is the kind of woman Nitani knows he will likely marry: sweet, obliging, and determined to wean him off his addiction to instant noodles. But he finds himself increasingly unable to respect her – or the sugary treats she shares around the workplace, winning their colleagues’ affection with baking rather than hard work.
Oshio is bolder and uninhibited – she is Nitani's drinking buddy. In the oppressive office atmosphere, the pair grows closer, both outsiders struggling with the rigid status quo.
Driven to behave in increasingly absurd ways by the workplace rules that govern their lives, they must navigate the tensions of modern life: between leisure and hard work; indulgence and restraint; the promise of delicious food, and the reality of a lonely pot noodle.
The Unworthy
Agustina Bazterrica, translated from Spanish by Sarah Moses
In the House of the Sacred Sisterhood, the unworthy live in fear of the Superior Sister's whip. Seething with resentment, they plot against each other and await who will ascend to the level of the Enlightened – and who will suffer the next exemplary punishment.
Risking her life, one of the unworthy keeps a diary in secret. Slowly, memories surface from a time before the world collapsed, before the Sacred Sisterhood became the only refuge.
Then Luca arrives. She, too, is unworthy – but she is different. And her arrival brings a single spark of hope to a world of darkness.
Available from 18 March.
Under the Eye of the Big Bird
Hiromi Kawakami, translated from Japanese by Asa Yoneda
In the distant future, humans are on the verge of extinction and have settled in small tribes across the planet under the observation and care of the Mothers. Some children are made in factories, from cells of rabbits and dolphins; some live by getting nutrients from water and light, like plants. The survival of the race depends on the interbreeding of these and other alien beings – but it is far from certain that connection, love, reproduction, and evolution will persist among the inhabitants of this faltering new world.
Unfolding over geological eons, Under the Eye of the Big Bird is at once an astonishing vision of the end of our species as we know it and a meditation on the qualities that, for better and worse, make us human.
