August has slowly become my favourite time of the year for its joy in celebrating the weird, wacky, and wonderful women who are behind some of the most profound and heart-breaking novels across the globe. Not only does it celebrate stories across borders, but the translators — the unsung heroes of the publishing world — who have given books a second life by translating and conveying them in a new light. From an International Booker Prize shortlist title to first-time English debuts, these translated books are a must for your August TBR — and the rest of the year!

Belarus

An epic contained in a small volume, winner of the prestigious Jerzy Giedroyc Prize 2021.

Ryna comes home from abroad to the wake of her granny Darafeya in Nauhalnaye, a village in the drained marshlands near Lipen, in a remote corner of Belarus. That night as Ryna sits alone with the coffin, Darafeya, who lived to be a hundred, tells one last story. She and her grandmother, one-eyed Maryanka, known as the ‘whisperers’, managed to survive several brutal regimes, feared and respected by their neighbours for their powers of healing and witchcraft. Caustic; harrowing, yet leavened with black humour, What Now, Mr Wolf? offers an unforgettable oral testimony of the dark days of recent European history. Ryna, prisoner of her grandmother Darafeya’s memories of relentless violence, tries to make her peace with them and remake a life for herself in this troubled place.

Brazil

An exploration into the human condition through the life of Natalia and the people around her, set during the Brazilian dictatorship.

At nearly 100 years old, Natalia has lived a full life. A life defined by people: Vicente, her husband and fellow teacher; her best friend Sarah, the cookie seller; Jorge who offered tarot readings for humans and birds alike; and her friends who gathered each Sunday to eat bean stew and plot ways to resist Brazil’s dictatorship any way they could. But slowly, one after another, the people that made up this old woman’s life have disappeared, leaving her alone. Well, not entirely alone—she’s pretty sure a spy is tracing her every move, and her loved ones haven’t left her, not really. Now, with an unnamed external threat taking over the world, Natalia watches the days pass from inside her Rio de Janeiro apartment, awaiting the daily call from her adult daughter living somewhere faraway “on the upper ocean.” Walking the tenuous line between fact and fable, humour and horror, Exemplary Humans is an ambitious novel about memory and the human condition — past, present, and future..

Bulgaria

High in the Accursed Mountains, in a village ruled by the ancient laws of the Kanun, Bekja escapes an arranged marriage by becoming a sworn virgin, renouncing her womanhood to live as a man. Her decision sets off a brutal chain of events, destroying her family and separating her from the one she loves the most. Years later, as Bekija — now Matija — tells their story to a visiting journalist, long-buried truths come to light, along with the realisation of all that might have been.

Denmark

The award-winning Danish writer returns with a tender and piercing portrait of a mother and daughter, exploring all that is said and all that is not.

“They go for a walk by the playing fields, the anemones are out.” In the small Danish town of Rodby, a mother and her sixteen-year-old daughter live uneventfully, each day marked by routine and a quiet intimacy. Together, they are a family; complete, content — and fragile. When the mother begins to feel unwell, everything and nothing changes. They go about their lives, talk about anything but the diagnosis. The daughter takes tentative steps into adulthood. Still, illness — and the possibility of loss — cast an expansive shadow over the rituals of daily life. they is a tender and piercing exploration of a mother-daughter relationship, brought into startling focus by Helle Helle’s distinctive, immediate prose.

Eucador

A mesmerising lyrical debut from one of Latin America’s most electrifying voices immerses readers in the life of Ainhoa, a young girl coming of age in the vibrant Afro-descendant community of Esmeraldas, Ecuador, during the turbulent 1990s.

Sheltered within her grandmother’s fiercely protective household, Ainhoa blossoms under the guidance of her constellation of aunts — women who become her teachers, guardians, and spiritual anchors. Through Ainhoa’s keen observant eyes, readers experience how music and dance — particularly during the explosive energy of Carnaval – don’t merely entertain but form the very heartbeat of existence, a pulsing testament to Afro-Ecuadorian identity and resistance. Yet beneath this tapestry of warmth and celebration, Carnaval Fever fearlessly confronts the shadows: crushing economic hardship, the heartbreak of migration, and the ever-present threat of male violence hovering at the community’s edges. At its luminous core, however, this novel stands as a defiant celebration of women’s resilience, collective power, and the unbreakable bonds of sisterhood that sustain communities through generations.

Estonia

One of Estonia’s greatest prose writers of today, translated into English for the first time.

In the dog days of an Estonian summer, Liine flees to the countryside to put a conclusive end to her toxic 14-year relationship. She undergoes every stage of separation in a lone farmstead amid forests. A lot of physical labour and gardening help her withstand her ex-partner’s threats, the incredulity of friends and family, and her own anguish. Dread is pervasive in this novel. Set in the near future, it is filled with vivid depictions of the threat of climate change. No less menacing is the presence of an expanding NATO base close to the cottage at the Russian border. The world’s largest military alliance is practicing for an attack. Explosions and shots ring in the distance while Liine tries to recover from fourteen years of violence. Yet she simply follows the rhythm of nature as summer unfolds. While her environment changes around her, Liine-always in the garden chopping wood, weeding, sowing-undergoes profound transformations, too. The Cut Line is a story of fear, self-blame, grief, numbness, and anger ultimately giving away to hope and healing, joy and lightness.

Iceland

Spanning across five decades, follow an Islandic woman’s existence across the farm to the city to the skies.

Teddy lives with her parents on a farm in the Icelandic wilderness. It’s 1962, and the world is changing, although you wouldn’t know it from the stark quiet of the lava fields and mountains that mark the boundaries of the young woman’s existence. But after two chance encounters, Teddy’s dreams of a world beyond begin to crystallise, albeit in strange and unexpected ways, as we follow one woman’s life over five decades, from farm to city to the skies. Taking us from the grandeur of rural Iceland to the glossy, sticky world of 1970s air travel, via check fraud, thwarted ambition and lost astronauts, Boudoir is a novel about reinvention, dislocation, and the forceful gravity of the lives and selves we think we’ve left behind.

Italy

Winner of the Prix Femina des Lycéens 2024, Prix Millepages 2024, and Prix Sils Maria 2025.

One afternoon in May, 8-year-old Ilaria gets into the car with her father, expecting to go out to dinner with her mother and sister. Instead, she is taken across the border, on a whirlwind road trip around Italy with her father, from Trieste to Rome and Sicily, sleeping in roadside hotels and singing to the radio. But Ilaria’s father is unpredictable, and she never knows which version of him she will get: charming and funny, or volatile and drunk. Torn between her life in Geneva with her mother and this strange shifting adventure on the road, Ilaria doesn’t know who to side with in her parents’ acrimonious separation. Throughout her travels, Ilaria meets a rag-tag cast of characters, learns how to light a cigarette, discovers when is best to keep quiet around her father, and finds comfort in her lovable teddy bear Birillo. Ilaria’s voice is singular and powerful. Based on the author’s own experience, this deeply moving novel captures the blurred lines between love and harm, memory and reality, fear and wonder. Ilaria is a haunting, intimate coming-of-age story about a girl who is forced to grow up too soon, and about the fragile moments of beauty she finds along the way.

Two women far apart in time, a mysterious unsellable mansion in Milan that connects them: two lives that start to overlap as impossible parallels are revealed in this story of passion, betrayal, and selfish desire.

In the round house on Via Saterna in Milan, its Palladian square exterior nothing but a trompe-l’oeil, the sun pierces through the central skylight. Its rays pass three floors unobstructed, before reaching the circle below at the heart of the house: four fingers of water filling a little silver basin. It is here that young Lidia dies, setting an end to her clandestine love affair with the ambitious architect. It is this house that real-estate agent Irene is asked to sell, decades later, as the climate catastrophe escalates, cloaking the divided city in a permanent orange haze. As she faces this new Milan, Irene throws herself into the impossible sale, getting to know Via Saterna intimately-this space that is as unsettling as it is hostile, with the slowly emerging traces of Lidia’s interrupted life. In every room of the house, the burden of a mysterious, unresolved past can be felt, remnants of a selfish and manipulative love. The Perfect Circle is a subtly disturbing page-turner, every new page adding a layer and twist.

Japan

A new action manga from the creator of Otoman.

One ill-fated high schooler takes on the underworld to bring his best friend back from death in this shonen manga bursting with giants of Greek legend! One Bite and You Can Never Go Back. Ever since the day Seiji climbed down a creepy dark well as a kid to retrieve a wayward ball and picked up an odd-looking pomegranate, he’s had to dodge an unending stream of near-fatal “accidents” that push everyone around him away — everyone, that is, except for his best friend Haru. But all that changes when their high school bus crashes, killing everybody on board but Seiji. Suddenly, rumours from his childhood about that fateful well reaching into the depths of the underworld take on a whole new light, and Seiji is launched into an epic adventure to save his friend — and his own soul. The journey into the underworld of Greek legend as never seen before begins in this darkly thrilling action-adventure, perfect for fans of Jujutsu Kaisen, Demon Slayer, Attack on Titan, Chainsaw Man, and Bleach!

Lativa

An all new edition of the Latvian bestseller.

Spanning fifty years of in the life of a nation, from the end of World War Two to the fall of the Berlin wall, Soviet Milk gives voice to a Latvian mother and daughter swept up in the tide of history. The mother, a gifted fertility specialist, is exiled to a rural village after defending a patient from abuse by a Soviet officer. Stripped of her career, she sinks into depression. Her daughter grows up with her grandparents, struggling with her mother’s distance and the pressure of a society that leaves little room for autonomy. Finding hope in poetry and her dreams of a better future, the daughter moves towards both personal and national liberation, even as her mother slips further into despair. This is the story of three generations of women marked by Soviet rule and the love between a mother and daughter.

Lebanon

A novel that captures the collective pain of a nation through the stories of four Lebanese women.

Iman Humaydan’s saga recalls the voices of four generations of women from one family in the imaginary village of Kasura, in Mount Lebanon. Its narrator, Asmahan, named after the beloved Syrian singer, has devoted her adult life to recovering the stories of her ancestors, who persisted in the shadows of male supremacy, war, military occupation, and impoverishment. Her mother, Layla, disappeared when Asmahan was still a teenager. Her grandmother, Yasmine, died giving birth. And her great-grandmother, Shahira, struggled through two world wars, famine, and suffocating gender norms to win an education for her children and eke out a better life for her family. Asmahan is determined to protect her daughter and break out of the cycle of intergenerational violence and wounds that the women who came before her suffered. She packs up her daughter to emigrate after a divorce, when her husband takes their son away frfrom her on his seventh birthday, during the darkest days of the 1982 Israeli invasion. These women’s legacies span and echo the scarred history of an abused homeland, from the eve of the first World War to the 1982 Lebanon War. In honouring their unfulfilled lives, Iman Humaydan insistently perserves intimate stories of abundant tenacity, generosity, sacrifice—and songs, provisions sorely needed for dark times.

Mexico

A powerful yet lyrical new novel from the internationally acclaimed author of Fury.

Silencio tells the story of Agueda, a young woman mourning the death of her mother. When the townspeople deny her a grave in the local cemetery, the mother’s body vanishes. Agueda knows her father is hiding it, and when she confronts him, he punishes her defiance with confinement. Serving her sentence in a house, Agueda lives within those walls as if in a second maternal womb one that will transform her. In chapters alternating between the real and the imaginary, she mourns the destroyed futures of those who were silenced as she listens to her neighbours’ stories of loss — a child worker; a boy from the Tacuate community; and Mexican refugees in Canada. Through the walls, she senses the world: birds in dialogue, the beauty of the arid landscape, experiences of love and devastation. She comes to realise that in this mountain region that resembles the author’s hometown of Oaxaca, where organised crime holds sway, many — like her — mourn their dead and search for the disappeared.

Netherlands

A stunning chronicle of Suriname from Roemer, whose On a Woman’s Madness is a finalist for the 2023 National Book Award.

In 1966 Suriname, the Vanta family, an intricate blend of Creole, Maroon, French, Indian, Indigenous, British, and Jewish heritage, is led by Grandma Bee, a proud, cigar-smoking matriarch facing her final days. As she reflects on her scattered family and the loss of her favourite granddaughter, Heli, exiled to the Netherlands for an affair with her white teacher, Bee grapples with one question: What truly binds a family? Off-White offers a moving exploration of Bee’s legacy amid themes of male violence, colonialism, and the dismantling of racial identity, marking the return of a celebrated Surinamese author after two decades.

Pakistan

Winner of the Armory Square Prize for South Asian Literature in Translation.

In Fortress of the Forgotten Ones, Fahmida Riaz transports readers to fifth-century Ctesiphon, the zenith of the Sassanian Empire, in a brilliant historical novel that blends rich cultural memory with striking political relevance. Set against the backdrop of fire worshippers, Parsi kings, and the ancient Avesta, this ambitious tale follows Mazdak, the first socialist revolutionary in history, as he challenges the power structures of his time. With vivid depictions of the Great Palace of King Qobad, the lands of the White Huns, and the impoverished masses, Riaz delves deep into the forces of history that shaped Mazdak’s quest for social justice. A masterpiece of historical fiction, Fortress of the Forgotten Ones is a powerful meditation on erasure, cultural identity, and the fight for justice that resonates with our contemporary world.

Portugal

A definitive collection of all the late stories of the Portuguese master of the short form, translated into English for the first time.

In her usual, incisive prose, Carvalho returns to what really threatens us, not the sea or witchcraft or a lion with watchful eyes, but people and time. She has visions of an empty future of machines and no more art, a vision that looks more and more prophetic. And she tangles with aging, all the regrets over things people wanted but her characters weren’t capable of, or didn’t want to, give. And How Have You Been? reckons with what it means to be human over a lifetime, the small triumphs that recede into the mist of memory, the losses that stay razor-sharp. And always, Carvalho writes with unexpected candour and without apologies.

South Korea

A short story collection revolving around different Korean lives which blend and intertwine between each other.

Each story in Swell launches from the common but pivotal moments that determine the course of everyday life, but they’re often filtered through the perspective of someone else: documentarians, novelists, storytellers, gossips. Then, as the stories build atop one another and intertwine, they begin to shift and destabilise. Characters return but their histories are changed, alternate timelines open, and no one is ever who they were. Like an optical illusion this book offers two complete pictures. Viewed as individual stories, contemporary Korean lives are rendered with sensitivity and realism-relationships tatter and bereaved loved-ones search for ways to move on. Viewed as a complete collection, though, a stranger narrative emerges, in which there is perhaps some invisible logic behind everything, incomprehensible to us. Wholly original, Swell, translated by Janet Hong, is a book full of trap doors, hidden passageways, and the unsolvable mystery behind everyday life.

Spain

An unexpected portrait of Madrid through the lives of three women.

In a single apartment building in Madrid, the lives of three women intersect. On the fourth floor, Oliva’s passionate relationship has given way to abuse, her lover seeming more and more like an animal, her apartment more and more like a cage. On the third, Damaris, who emigrated from Colombia after a devastating earthquake, spends each day working as the nanny to two privileged children while hoping her efforts will provide a better life for her own. And in the tiny, disused apartment on the ground floor, Horia, a Moroccan woman who first came to Spain as a seasonal agricultural laborer, works as the building’s caretaker while searching for her missing son. Through the stories of these women, award-winning author Lara Moreno paints a vivid portrait of urban isolation and societal marginalisation. With unflinching, propulsive prose, The City plunges down the paths that led these women to and through a metropolitan landscape shaped by inequality and cultural division. With three closely-drawn character portraits and the pacing of a thriller, Moreno’s novel offers a geography of resilience and despair in a city marked by social and cultural division.

Award-winning Spanish writer Perezagua’s powerful stream-of-consciousness paints a vivid portrayal of the highs and lows of motherhood.

“My mother lingered on the threshold between my life and my death, inhabitating it with the levity and nonchalance that had always marked her treatment of me.” After going into premature labour, an unnamed protagonist reflects on her troubled relationship with her mother and its role in her traumatic birth experience. Mother takes readers on a journey of motherhood, present and past, weaving gracefully between painful flashbacks, intertextual allusions and heartbreaking descriptions of nurses and doctors fighting to keep the protagonist and her baby alive. All the while the ocean lingers, raising the question: What happened at the beach? Based on Perezagua’s postpartum experience, Mother is an evocative and vulnerable novel exploring motherhood, loss and grief from a deeply personal perspective.

Sweden

Agnes Lidbeck is back with another tour de force of a novel.

Petra and Johannes seem made for one another. A lawyer and a doctor. Well brought up, ambitious. Their friends Julia and Axel are different – from them, and from each other. Julia fights for her convictions. Axel manoeuvres his way to political power. Desire moves like an undertow between them all, dangerous and destabilising. Inconvenient truths are buried, but can only stay that way for so long. Meanwhile, the country around them changes. Laws tighten. Freedoms are curtailed. People begin to disappear. The personal and the political collide. It is easier, at first, to look away than to let the facts in. Until they arrive at the door.