Brush off your hiking boots, pack your bags and take my hand, because we’re going on a journey! Well, maybe not a literal one, but we are going to be exploring the world through some very special translated fiction coming out this month! There’s nothing like a bit of armchair travel to get some inspiration flowing. Hop on and join us as we take a peek at this month’s most anticipated books in translation.

Edge

by Koji Suzuki, translated by Camellia Nieh & Jonathan Lloyd-Davies
Vertical | 9781647293246 | PB | £14.99 | 06/02/2024

From bestselling author Koji Suzuki, best known for the Ring series, this is the new edition of a classic.

Koji Suzuki is an internationally recognised and lauded horror writer, often described as the Stephen King of Japan. And like King, Suzuki’s works have been adapted to both television and film around the world almost as soon as the ink dries on each new manuscript. Both Ring and Dark Water received the Hollywood treatment — the former’s success eliciting a sequel — and ‘Dream Cruise’ — another short story from Dark Water — was adapted as one of the episodes of Showtime’s Masters of Horror series in 2007. A massive shifting of the San Andreas fault and subsequent tumbling of California into the Pacific sets the tone of this thriller right from the get go. It isn’t long before the reader learns that this catastrophe is a mere blip on the cataclysmic scale as the reasons for its occurence come to light: something is adversely affecting the molecular stability of matter at the quantum level!

Where the Wind Calls Home

In this new novel by Syria’s most prominent writer of the National Book Award Finalist Planet of Clay, a wounded nineteen-year-old soldier in the Syrian Army remembers his life lived in the traditional Alawite way.

Ali, a nineteen-year-old soldier in the Syrian army, lies on the ground beneath a tree. He sees a body being lowered into a hole — is this his funeral? There was that sudden explosion, wasn’t there? While trying to understand the extend of the damage, Ali works his way closer to the tree. His ultimate desire is to fly up to one of its branches, to safety. Through rich vignettes of Ali’s memories, we uncover the hardships of his traditional Syrian Alawite village, but also the richness and beauty of its cultural and religious heritage. Yazbek here explores the secrets of the Alawite faith and its relationship to nature and the elements in a tight poetic novel dense with life, hope and love.

Tina, Mafia Soldier

A classic of Italian feminist mafia literature about a gender-bending mafiosa and the writer who becomes obsessed with telling her story.

Sicily, 1980s: When she was just eight years old, Tina watched as her father, a member of Cosa Nostra, was murdered in cold blood. Now a teenager, she terrorises her hometown of Gela, having made it her mission to join the mafia, an organisation traditionally forbidden to women as made members. Nicknamed ‘a masculidda’, or ‘the tomboy,’ Tina has taken charge of her own clan, and is notorious for her cruelty and reckless disregard for societal expectations. When a news article is published about Tina’s latest crimes, a teacher living in Rome feels compelled to write a novel about her — even though it means returning to her native Sicily to gather material. She and Tina circle around each other in a dangerous dance of obsession and violence until their first, and last, explosive meeting. This groundbreaking exploration of gender identity and clear-eyed presentation of an unseen side of the mafia is a landmark literary achievement by one of Italy’s feminist icons.

Point Zero

A triumph by Seicho Matsumoto, the master of Japanese mystery writing.

Tokyo, 1958. Teiko marries Kenichi Uhara, ten years her senior, an advertising man recommended by a go-between. After a four-day honeymoon, Kenichi vanishes. Teiko travels to the coastal and snow-bound city of Kanazawa, where Kenichi was last seen, to investigate his disappearance. When Kenichi’s brother comes to help her, he is murdered, poisoned in his hotel. Soon, Teiko discovers that her husband’s disappearance is tied up with the so-called ‘pan-pan girls’, women who worked as prostitutes catering to American GIs after the war. Now, ten years later, as the country is recovering, there are those who are willing to take extreme measures to hide that past.

Fury

In this devastating novel, Clyo Mendoza, a Mexican poet and novelist in her twenties, weaves together multiple narratives into a lyrical, shape-shifting existential reflection on love, violence, and the power of myth.

In a desert dotted with war-torn towns, Lázaro and Juan are two soldiers from opposing camps who abandon the war and, while fleeing, become lovers and discover a dark truth. Vicente Barrera, a salesman who swept into the lives of women who both hated and revered him, spends his last days tied up like a mad dog. A morgue worker, Salvador, gets lost in the desert and mistakes the cactus for the person he loves. Over the echoes of the stories of these broken men — and of their mothers, lovers and companions — Mendoza explores her characters’ passions in a way that simmers on the page, and then explodes with pain, fear and desire in a landscape that imprisons them.

About Uncle

The 2022 winner of the Swiss Literature Prize and ‘penetrating novel on disability, family relationships and modern times’ (Florence Bouchy).

In a small seaside town on the French coast lives Uncle. He shares his house with his niece and nephew, who look after him when they could be doing something — anything — else. A disabled veteran with odd habits, Uncle is prone to drinking, hoarding and gorging, not to mention the occasional excursion down into the plumbing, where he might disappear for days at a time. As the world begins to shut down, Uncle and his niece are forced even closer still. She starts to watch his every move — every bathroom break he takes, every pill he swallows — and finds herself relying on this man, her only companion.

The Secret Life of Saeed: The Pessoptimist

This award-winning novel-in-translation is clever tragicomedy that demonstrates the complex life of a Palestinian living in Israel.

Saeed is the comic hero, the luckless fool, whose tale tells of aggression and resistance, terror and heroism, reason and loyalty that typify the hardships and struggles of Arabs in Israel. An informer for the Zionist state, his stupidity, candour, and cowardice make him more of a victim than a villain; but in a series of tragicomic episodes, he is gradually transformed from a disaster-haunted, gullible collaborator into a Palestinian — no hero still, but a simple man intent on survival and, perhaps, happiness.

Ubu Royale

A modern adaption of Alfred Jarry’s groundbreaking play by Neil Bartlett.

Alfred Jarry’s riotous, ground-breaking play, was a sensation upon first staging. This modern adaptation, which formed the basis of a short film, Roi, directed by acclaimed author, Neil Bartlett, brings a modernist classic to a contemporary audience. This bonkers and hilarious new translation of Ubu Royale was produced during the fever dream of lockdown. It features bodily incident and function. It is gloriously chaotic but, as Neil Bartlett so rightly says,