This month we're reading novels translated from German, Korean, Japanese and Bulgarian.

The Fire by Daniela Krien (translated from German by Jamie Bulloch)

How can two lovers find a way back to each other, when the pain of the past stands between them? With plans adrift after a fire burns down their rented holiday cabin, Rahel and Peter find themselves unexpectedly on an isolated farm where Rahel spent many a happy childhood summer. Suddenly, after years of navigating careers, demanding children and the monotony of the daily routine, they find themselves unable to escape each other’s company. With three weeks stretching ahead, they must come to an understanding on whether they have a future together.

What happens when love grows older and passion has faded? When what divides us is greater than what brought us together? And how easy is it to ask the fundamental questions about our relationships?

Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong Sora (translated from Korean by Kim-Russell trans & Young jae Josephine Bae)

Virtuoso Hwang Sok-yong is back with another powerful story — an epic, multi-generational tale that threads together a century of Korean history.

Centred on a family of rail workers, Mater 2-10 vividly depicts the lives of workers and common folk, starting from the Japanese colonial era, continuing through Liberation, and right up to the twenty-first century, rendering in elegant prose a history of modern Korea. A true voice of a generation, Hwang shows again why he is unmatched when it comes to depicting the grief of a divided nation and bringing to life the cultural identity and trials and tribulations of the Korean people.

Hit Parade of Tears by Izumi Suzuki (translated from Japanese by Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph and Helen O'Horan)

Izumi Suzuki had ideas of how things might be done differently, ideas that paid little the laws of physics, or the laws of the courts. In this new collection her skewed imagination is applied to some classic science fiction and fantasy.

A philandering husbands get bestial punishment from a wife who’d kept her own secrets; time-travelling pop music aficionados stir up temporal bother when their nostalgia carries them away; idle high school students find themselves dropped into a adventure in another dimension, but aren’t all that impressed; a misfit band of space pirates find their live on the stars amounts to space; Emma, the Bovary-like character from Terminal Boredom’s ‘Forgotten’, lands herself in another bizarre romantic pickle.

... and finally back in stock after a lengthy wait is this year's International Booker winner!

Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov (translated from Bulgarian by Angela Rodel)

In Time Shelter, an enigmatic flaneur 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.

As Gaustine’s assistant, the unnamed narrator is tasked with collecting the flotsam and jetsam of the past, from 1960s furniture and 1940s shirt buttons to scents and even afternoon light. But as the rooms become more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek out the clinic as a ‘time shelter’, hoping to escape from the horrors of our present - a development that results in an unexpected conundrum when the past begins to invade the present.