Women in Translation

Explore voices from around the world by reading a work in translation. This list includes books by women writing in languages other than English.
Updated September 19, 2022
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Like Water for Chocolate
Laura Esquivel
Paper Book
El libro que ha inspirado una adaptación en MAX Terrenal, mágico y absolutamente encantador, este relato de la vida familiar en el México finisecular se convirtió, con la mezcla acertada de romance doloroso e ingenio agridulce, en un fenómeno de best-seller. La...
My Brilliant Friend
Elena Ferrante
Paper Book
A modern masterpiece from one of Italy¿s most acclaimed authors, My Brilliant Friend is a rich, intense, and generous-hearted story about two friends, Elena and Lila. Ferrante¿s inimitable style lends itself perfectly to a meticulous portrait of these two women that is also the story of a nation and...
The Vegetarian
Han Kang
Paper Book
A beautiful, unsettling novel in three acts, about rebellion and taboo, violence and eroticism, and the twisting metamorphosis of a soul. Winner of the 2016 Man Booker International Prize. WINNER OF THE 2024 NOBEL PRIZE IN LITERATURE.
Go, Went, Gone
Jenny Erpenbeck
Paper Book
Go, Went, Gone is the masterful new novel by the acclaimed German writer Jenny Erpenbeck, "one of the most significant German-language novelists of her generation" (The Millions). The novel tells the tale of Richard, a retired classics professor who lives in Berlin. His wife has died, and he lives a...
Transit
Anna Seghers
Paper Book
Anna Seghers's Transit is an existential, political, literary thriller that explores the agonies of boredom, the vitality of storytelling, and the plight of the exile with extraordinary compassion and insight.       Having escaped from a Nazi concentration...
The Books of Jacob
Olga Tokarczuk
Paper Book
A NEW YORKER "ESSENTIAL READ" "Just as awe-inspiring as the Nobel judges claimed." - The Washington Post "Olga Tokarczuk is one of our greatest living fiction writers. . . This could well be a decade-defining book akin to Bolaño's 2666." -AV Club<...
Celestial Bodies
Jokha Alharthi
Paper Book
This winner of the 2019 Man Booker International Prize and national bestseller is "an innovative reimagining of the family saga . . . Celestial Bodies is itself a treasure house: an intricately calibrated chaos of familial orbits and conjunctions, of the gravitational pull of...
The Ministry of Pain
Dubravka Ugrešić
Paper Book
Having fled the violent breakup of Yugoslavia, Tanja Lucic is now a professor of literature at the University of Amsterdam, where she teaches a class filled with other young Yugoslav exiles, most of whom earn meager wages assembling leather and rubber S&M clothing at a sweatshop they call the...
Waking Lions
Ayelet Gundar-Goshen
Paper Book
After one night's deadly mistake, a man will go to any lengths to save his family and his reputation. Neurosurgeon Eitan Green has the perfect life -- married to a beautiful police officer and father of two young boys. Then, speeding along a deserted moonlit road after an...
The Fox Was Ever the Hunter
Herta Müller
Paper Book
From the winner of the Nobel Prize hailed as the laureate of life under totalitarianism, a haunting early novel of surveillance and paranoia Romania--the last months of the Ceausescu regime. Adina is a young schoolteacher. Paul is a musician. Clara works in a wire factory....
Adèle
Leïla Slimani
Paper Book
"Fascinating . . . Adèle has glanced at the covenant of modern womanhood--the idea that you can have it all or should at least die trying--and detonated it." --The New York Times Book Review "[A] fierce, uncanny thunderbolt of a book." --Entertainment Weekly
The Queue
Basma Abdel Aziz
Paper Book
"Weird and wild." -BookRiot "An effective critique of authoritarianism." -NPR "Equal parts dystopia, satire, and allegory. -Los Angeles Review of Books Set against the backdrop of a failed political uprising in Egypt, this chilling debut evokes Orwellian dystopia,...

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