In Translation

Test for no-sync function.

By the internationally acclaimed author of Cursed Bunny, in another thrilling translation from the Korean by Anton Hur, Your Utopia is full of tales of loss and discovery, idealism and dystopia, death and immortality. “Nothing concentrates the mind like Chung’s terrors, which will shrivel you to a bouillon cube of your most primal instincts” (Vulture), yet these stories are suffused with Chung's inimitable wry humour and surprisingly tender moments, too — often between unexpected subjects.

In ‘The Center for Immortality Research’, a low-level employee runs herself ragged planning a fancy gala for donors, only to be blamed for a crime she witnessed during the event, under the noses of the mysterious celebrity benefactors hoping to live forever. But she can’t be fired — no one can. In ‘A Song for Sleep’, a tender, one-sided love blooms in the AI-elevator of an apartment complex; as in, the elevator develops a profound affection for one of the residents. In ‘Seeds’, we see the final frontier of capitalism’s destruction of the planet and the GMO companies who rule the agricultural industry in this bleak future, but nature has ways of creeping back to life.

Chung’s writing is “haunting, funny, gross, terrifying — and yet when we reach the end, we just want more” (Alexander Chee). If you haven’t yet experienced the fruits of this singular imagination, Your Utopia is waiting.

Tonight is the opening night. There are birds perched everywhere, on the power lines, the guy ropes, the strings of light that festoon the tent … when I think of all those little bodies suspended between earth and sky, it makes me smile to remind myself that for some of them, their first flight begins with a fall.

Nathalie arrives at the circus in Vladivostok, Russia, fresh out of fashion school in Geneva. She is there to design the costumes for a trio of artists who are due to perform one of the most dangerous acts of all: the Russian Bar.

As winter approaches, the season at Vladivostok is winding down, leaving the windy port city empty as the performers rush off to catch trains, boats, and buses home; all except the Russian bar trio and their manager. They are scheduled to perform at a festival in Ulan Ude, just before Christmas.

What ensues is an intimate and beguiling account of four people learning to work with and trust one another. This is a book about the delicate balance that must be achieved when flirting with death in such spectacular fashion, set against the backdrop of a cloudy ocean and immersing the reader in Dusapin’s trademark dreamlike prose.

LONGLISTED FOR THE 2020 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE
AN OBSERVER BOOK OF THE YEAR

‘That night Stasia took an oath, swearing to learn the recipe by heart and destroy the paper. And when she was lying in her bed again, recalling the taste with all her senses, she was sure that this secret recipe could heal wounds, avert catastrophes, and bring people happiness. But she was wrong.’

At the start of the twentieth century, on the edge of the Russian Empire, a family prospers. It owes its success to a delicious chocolate recipe, passed down the generations with great solemnity and caution. A caution which is justified: this is a recipe for ecstasy that carries a very bitter aftertaste …

Stasia learns it from her Georgian father and takes it north, following her new husband, Simon, to his posting at the centre of the Russian Revolution in St Petersburg.  Stasia’s is only the first in a symphony of grand but all too often doomed romances that swirl from sweet to sour in this epic tale of the red century.

Tumbling down the years, and across vast expanses of longing and loss, generation after generation of this compelling family hears echoes and sees reflections. Great characters and greater relationships come and go and come again; the world shakes, and shakes some more, and the reader rejoices to have found at last one of those glorious old books in which you can live and learn, be lost and found, and make indelible new friends.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE

International Booker–nominated virtuoso Hwang Sok-yong is back with another powerful story — an epic tale that threads together a century of Korean history.

In contemporary Seoul, a laid-off worker stages a months-long sit-in atop a sixteen-storey factory chimney. During the long and lonely nights, he talks to his ancestors, chewing on the meaning of life, on wisdom passed down the generations.

Through the lives of those ancestors, three generations of railroad workers, Mater 2-10 vividly portrays the struggles of ordinary Koreans, starting from the Japanese colonial era, continuing through Liberation, and right up to the twenty-first century. It is at once a gripping account of a nation’s longing to be free from oppression, a lyrical folktale that reflects the blood, sweat, and tears shed by modern industrial labourers, and a culmination of Hwang’s career — a masterpiece thirty years in the making.

A true voice of a generation, Hwang shows again why he is unmatched when it comes to depicting the roots and reality of a divided nation and bringing to life the trials and tribulations of the Korean people.

This dazzling novella from a rising star of Indonesian literature explores generational legacies, lost loves, the damage that war does to men, and the damage that men do to women.

In today’s Jakarta, an unnamed man tells the story of his lifelong friend Nastiti, and what happened on the day she vanished. In the Dutch East Indies’ Semarang, a young Indo-Dutch girl, Rukmini, is captured by the Japanese military and is forced into prostitution. Years later, Arini travels to the Netherlands to share her mother’s dark past with a researcher.

After the American occupation of Japan in WWII ends, a former war photographer revisits his memories of Hanako, the wife of a traumatised ex-Imperial soldier, but can’t escape his own darkness. And in present-day Osaka, a young Indonesian woman, Dara, haunted by her past and struggling to conceive, becomes obsessed with a Japanese porn star.

Full of surprising turns, and in stunning prose, Birth Canal tells the interwoven stories of women that span time and history.

Two women's lives and identities are intertwined — through World War II and the Korean War — revealing the harsh realities of class division in the early part of the 20th century.

Can't I Go Instead follows the lives of the daughter of a Korean nobleman and her maidservant in the early 20th century. When the daughter’s suitor is arrested as a Korean Independence activist, and she is implicated during the investigation, she is quickly forced into marriage to one of her father’s Japanese employees and shipped off to the United States. At the same time, her maidservant is sent in her mistress's place to be a comfort woman to the Japanese Imperial army.

Years of hardship, survival, and even happiness follow. In the aftermath of WWII, the women make their way home, where they must reckon with the tangled lives they've led, in an attempt to reclaim their identities, and find their places in an independent Korea.

‘We don’t exist in this world. Here we’re neither Germans nor refugees; we aren’t newsreaders or experts. We’re some kind of joker in the pack, and they don’t know if they can use us for anything.’

Kasih, Hani, and Saya have shared a deep friendship since school and the years they lived in the same public housing estate. Kasih and Hani still live in the same city, but now Saya is returning and they have a lot to catch up on. Yet amid the laughter and determination of their sisterhood, it’s clear to the three young women that they haven’t escaped the racism that has accompanied their daily lives since childhood: the glances, the chatter, and the outright right-wing terror.

Sisters in Arms is a lyrical, explosive novel about the importance of friendship — the kind of extraordinary friendship that brings stability to an unstable world. Until one dramatic night that will change everything for the three women, propelling Kasih to tell the tale of themselves.

A professor falls in love with a mechanical ballerina in a mordant and uncanny fable of contemporary Hong Kong.

In the mountainous city of Nevers, there lives a professor of literature called Q. He has a dull marriage and a lacklustre career, but also a scrumptious collection of antique dolls locked away in his cupboard. And soon Q lands his crowning acquisition: a music box ballerina named Aliss who tantalisingly springs to life. Guided by his mysterious friend Owlish and inspired by an inexplicably familiar painting, Q embarks on an all-consuming love affair with Aliss, oblivious to the sinister forces encroaching on his city and the protests spreading across the university that have left his classrooms all but empty.

Thrumming with secrets and shape-shifting geographies, Dorothy Tse’s extraordinary debut novel is a boldly inventive exploration of life under repressive conditions.

Winner of the Uruguayan National Literature Prize for Fiction, the Bartolomé-Hidalgo Fiction Prize, and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Literature Prize.

A port city is in the grips of an ecological crisis. The river has filled with toxic algae, and a deadly ‘red wind’ blows through its streets; much of the coast has been evacuated as the wealthy migrate inland to safety, leaving the rest to shelter in abandoned houses as blackouts and food shortages abound.

The unnamed narrator is one of those who has stayed. She spends her days trying to disentangle herself from the two relationships that had once meant everything to her, and looking after the young boy who’s been placed in her care. As the world in which they move becomes smaller, she reflects on the collapse of the other emotional ties in her life and the emergence of a radical yet tender solitude.

With striking prose and vivid characters, the multi-award-winning Pink Slime offers profound reflections on motherhood, marriage, and caregiving, set against the backdrop of a crumbling city.

LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE

Are we free to create our own destinies or are we just part of a system beyond our control?

A joyful family saga about free will, forgiveness, and how we are all interconnected.

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, where he meets Laura Kadinsky, a patient whose inability to see the world in three dimensions is not the only thing about her that intrigues him. 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 …

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE AND WINNER OF A PEN/HEIM TRANSLATION GRANT.

A woman is haunted by her own bodily waste. A pregnant woman is told she must find a father for her unborn baby or face horrific consequences. A young monster, forced to fight, discovers the extent of his power.

This genre-defying collection of short stories blurs the lines between magical realism, horror, and science fiction. Using elements of the fantastic and surreal, Chung exposes the very real horrors and cruelties of patriarchy and capitalism in modern society, gliding effortlessly from terrifying to wryly humorous in a skilful translation by the acclaimed Anton Hur.

SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE

What if one half of a pair of twins no longer wants to live? What if the other can’t live without them?

This question lies at the heart of Jente Posthuma’s deceptively simple What I’d Rather Not Think About. The narrator is a twin whose brother has recently taken his own life. She looks back on their childhood, and tells of their adult lives: how her brother tried to find happiness, but lost himself in various men and the Bhagwan movement, though never completely.

In brief, precise vignettes, full of gentle melancholy and surprising humour, Posthuma tells the story of a depressive brother, viewed from the perspective of the sister who both loves and resents her twin, struggles to understand him, and misses him terribly.

An incisive and deeply candid account that explores autistic women in culture, myth, and society through the prism of the author’s own diagnosis.

Until the 1980s, autism was regarded as a condition found mostly in boys. Even in our time, autistic girls and women have largely remained invisible. When portrayed in popular culture, women on the spectrum often appear simply as copies of their male counterparts — talented and socially awkward.

Yet autistic women exist, and always have. They are varied in their interests and in their experiences. Autism may be relatively new as a term and a diagnosis, but not as a way of being and functioning in the world. It has always been part of the human condition. So who are these women, and what does it mean to see the world through their eyes?

In The Autists, Clara Törnvall reclaims the language to describe autism and explores the autistic experience in arts and culture throughout history. From popular culture, films, and photography to literature, opera, and ballet, she dares to ask what it might mean to re-read these works through an autistic lens — what we might discover if we allow perspectives beyond the neurotypical to take centre stage.

Spring, summer, autumn, and winter: wherever you are, the seasons come and go, bringing changes both welcome and unexpected.

Japanese by birth, but transplanted to Europe in adulthood, Miki Sakamoto has spent a lifetime tending her garden and reflecting on its mysteries. Why do primulas bloom in snow? Do the trees really ‘talk’ to one another? What are the blackbirds saying today? And is there a mindful way to deal with an aphid infestation?

From rising early to walk barefoot on the grass each morning, to afternoons and evenings spent sipping tea in her gazebo or watching fireflies as she recalls her childhood in Japan, in Zen in the Garden Sakamoto shares observations from a life spent in contemplation — and cultivation — of nature. She shows us that you can create Zen in your life, wherever you live and whatever form your outdoor space takes.

A compelling and persuasive look at the social transformations needed to cope with our environmental crises.

As this major German bestseller reports, our world is at a tipping point, and we feel it every day. On the one hand, we have never been so well off; on the other hand, we find destruction and crisis everywhere we look. Whether throughout the environment or within society, our systems are under stress.

In this book, Maja Göpel, co-founder of the Scientists for Future initiative and a former secretary-general of the German Advisory Council on Global Change, explains that this new reality didn’t just happen overnight, but rather is a result of our continuous actions — actions propelled by principles and beliefs, which have shaped us as a society over generations. We do not solely face an environmental crisis, but also a social one. It’s time to question our principles, set new goals, and re-evaluate our priorities. It’s time to rethink our world, because if we want to keep our livelihoods, we need to find a way of living without draining our planet any further. We need a fair distribution of wealth and a way to reconcile the social with the ecological.

Critical, yet full of encouragement, Maja Göpel chooses surprising and enlightening examples to illustrate how we can leave behind our familiar ways of living to achieve a better future. With that, she invites us to look at this future we are shaping every day in a new and completely different way.

‘How better to honour the women who have fought for abortion rights, those who are still fighting around the world, those who have suffered from its illegality, those who still suffer from its limitations, than to continue to talk about it?’

In this timely essay, Pauline Harmange provides an intimate, detailed account of her abortion. Reminiscent of Annie Ernaux’s Happening, Abortion is nuanced, complex, honest, and precise. Harmange gives voice to the emotions, reflections, and contradictions that someone could experience when they choose to terminate a pregnancy.

At a time in which women’s reproductive rights are being called into question around the world, Abortion is a clarion call, a powerful personal testimony, and a resolutely political vision: to restore power to our experiences, all our experiences, by sharing them, and to transform society for the better.

The epic, page-turning history of how a group of physicists toppled the Newtonian universe in the early decades of the twentieth century.

Marie Curie, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and Albert Einstein didn’t only revolutionise physics; they redefined our world and the reality we live in. In The Age of Uncertainty, Tobias Hürter brings to life the golden age of physics and its dazzling, flawed, and unforgettable heroes and heroines. He immerses us in a half century of global turmoil against which some of humankind’s greatest and strangest scientific discoveries unfolded, expertly guiding us through the brilliant and mind-bending ideas that turned the world on its head.

The work of the twentieth century’s most important physicists produced scientific breakthroughs that led to an entirely new view of physics — and a view of the universe that is still not fully understood today, even as evidence for its accuracy is all around us. The men and women who made these discoveries were intellectual adventurers, renegades, dandies, and nerds, some bound together by deep friendship; others, by bitter enmity. But the age of relativity theory and quantum mechanics was also the age of wars and revolutions. The discovery of radioactivity transformed science, but also led to the horrors of Hiroshima and Nagasaki. Throughout The Age of Uncertainty, Hürter reminds us about the entanglement of science and world events, for we cannot observe the world without changing it.