This month we’re reading novels translated from Japanese, Korean, Spanish, and Danish. The works themselves are diverse in content – from thrilling crime, to science fiction, to historical epic, and some incisive social commentary to boot!

Scattered All Over the Earth by Yoko Tawada (translated from Japanese by Margaret Mitsutani)

Welcome to the not-too-distant future: Japan, having vanished from the face of the earth, is now remembered as the land of sushi. Hiruko, its former citizen and a climate refugee herself, has a job teaching immigrant children in Denmark with her invented language Panska (Pan-Scandinavian). As she searches for anyone who can still speak her mother tongue, Hiruko soon makes new friends. Scattered All Over the Earth is another Yoko Tawada masterwork.

Violets by Kyung-Sook Shin (translated from Korean by Anton Hur)

We join San in 1970s rural South Korea, a young girl ostracised from her community. She meets a girl called Namae, and they become friends until one afternoon changes everything. We next meet San, aged twenty-two, as she starts a job in a flower shop. There, we are introduced to a colourful cast of characters. A story of desire and violence about a young woman who everyone forgot, Violets is a captivating and sensual read, full of tragedy and beauty.

Easy Reading by Cristina Morales (translated from Spanish by Kevin Gerry Dunn)

Ángela, Patricia, Marga and Nati are cousins living together in Barcelona. As women branded as disabled who share a state-subsidised flat, they must fight every day to retain their independence and find new and inventive ways - from dance to underground zines - to stop the state from managing every aspect of their lives. Funny and furious, Easy Reading is an indictment of the institutions that stigmatise individuals as disabled and of the language that marginalises them.

The Colony of Good Hope by Kim Leine (translated from Danish by Martin Aitken)

1728: The doomed Danish King Fredrik IV sends a governor to Greenland to establish a colony, in the hopes of exploiting the country’s allegedly vast natural resources. The missionary priest Hans Egede has already been in Greenland for several years when the new colonists arrive. Soon unsanitary conditions, illness and death bring the colony to its knees. In The Colony of Good Hope, Kim Leine explores what happens when two cultures confront one another. In a distant colony, under the harshest conditions, the overwhelming forces of nature meet the vices of man.

Three Assassins by Kotaro Isaka (tranlsated from Japanese by Sam Malissa)

A propulsive new thriller from the prizewinning author of Bullet Train. Suzuki is just an ordinary man until his wife is murdered. When he discovers the criminal gang responsible he seeks revenge. What he doesn’t realise is that he’s about to get drawn into a web of unusual professional assassins, each with their own agenda. Suzuki must take each of them on, in order to try to find justice and keep his innocence in a world of killers.