This month we’re reading novels translated from Italian, Swedish, French and Hindi.

The Lovers by Paolo Cognetti (translated from Italian by Stash Luczkiw)

The Lovers is a love story set in a tiny village high in the Italian Alps. Its protagonists, Fausto and Silvia, meet in winter, their relationship becoming a refuge in all senses, and the seasons, as well as the mountains, an integral part of their story together. It has a classic, enduring appeal, a cinematic feel, a captivating backdrop, and a romantic sensibility underpinned by a spare, powerful prose style.

Across both fiction and non-fiction, Cognetti’s writing seeks to understand human interactions with landscape, interpreting what our obsessions with extremes of beauty, endurance and isolation tell us about ourselves and our relationships with others.

A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding by Amanda Svensson (translated from Swedish by Nichola Smalley)

In October 1989, a set of triplets is born, and it is this moment their father chooses to reveal his affair. Pandemonium ensues.

Over two decades later, Sebastian is recruited to join a mysterious organisation, the London Institute of Cognitive Science. Meanwhile, Clara has travelled to Easter Island to join a doomsday cult, and the third triplet, Matilda, is in Sweden, trying to escape from the colour blue.

Then something happens that forces the triplets to reunite. Their mother calls with worrying news: their father has gone missing and she has something to tell them, a twenty-five-year secret that will change all their lives …

Three by Valerie Perrin (translated from French by Hildegarde Serle)

1986: Adrien, Etienne and Nina are 10 years old when they meet at school and become inseparable. They promise each other they will one day leave their provincial backwater, move to Paris, and never part.

2017: A car is pulled up from the bottom of the lake, a body inside. Virginie, a local journalist with an enigmatic past, follows the case. Step by step she reveals the extraordinary bonds that unite the three childhood friends. How is the car wreck connected to their story? Why did their friendship fall apart?

And the recent winner of the International Booker Prize is back in stock!

Tomb of Sand by Geetanjali Shree (translated from Hindi by Daisy Rockwell)

In northern India, an eighty-year-old woman slips into a deep depression at the death of her husband, then resurfaces to gain a new lease on life. Her determination to fly in the face of convention - including striking up a friendship with a hijra person - confuses her bohemian daughter, who is used to thinking of herself as the more ‘modern’ of the two.

To her family’s consternation, Ma insists on travelling to Pakistan, simultaneously confronting the unresolved trauma of her teenage experiences of Partition, and re-evaluating what it means to be a mother, a daughter, a woman, a feminist.