Summer reading: Fiction in translation

The Bamboo Stalk, by Saud Alsanousi, translated by Jonathan Wright, Bloomsbury Qatar Foundation, RRP£16.99

The second novel by Kuwaiti-born Alsanousi won critical acclaim, including the 2013 International Prize for Arabic Fiction, for engaging with themes seldom dealt with in fiction from the Gulf — notably, the fate of the region’s migrant underclass, and the ethical conundrums its existence creates for some of the more liberal-minded citizens.

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June, by Gerbrand Bakker, translated by David Colmer, Harvill Secker, RRP£12.99

On the same day in 1969 when the Netherlands’ Queen Juliana visits a Dutch village, a reckless driver runs over a local girl called Hanne. In Bakker’s tender and compassionate examination of memory, the reverberations of that tragic event are still felt 35 years later, as Hanne’s now middle-aged brothers struggle to come to terms with the damage caused all those years ago.

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Seiobo There Below, by László Krasznahorkai, translated by Ottilie Mulzet, Tuskar Rock Press, RRP£16.99/New Directions, RRP$17.95

A series of interlinking stories are at the heart of this novel by the winner of the 2015 Man Booker International Prize. From a young Renaissance painter completing a commission to a group of conservators painstakingly restoring a 14th-century statue of the Buddha, one of Hungary’s most outstanding authors creates moving meditations on beauty and our responses to it.

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The Four Books, by Yan Lianke, translated by Carlos Rojas, Chatto & Windus, RRP£16.99/Grove Press, RRP$27

Banned in mainland China, Yan’s novel is set in a “re-education camp” in northern China between 1958 and 1962 — the years when Mao’s Great Leap Forward led to the collapse of agriculture and the death of over 40m people from starvation. A powerful satire on ideology, veering between the grotesque and the horrific.

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The Dirty Dust: Cré na Cille, by Máirtín Ó Cadhain, translated by Alan Titley, Yale University Press, RRP£16.99/$25

Hailed by Colm Tóibín not only as “the greatest novel to be written in the Irish language” but also “among the best books to come out of Ireland in the twentieth century”, this long-overdue translation of Ó Cadhain’s classic revels delightfully in the gossip of village life as a cemetery’s inhabitants engage in lively conversation.

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When the Doves Disappeared, by Sofi Oksanen, translated by Lola M Rogers, Atlantic Books, RRP£12.99

Award-winning Finnish-Estonian novelist Oksanen offers an excoriating dramatisation of the deceits and betrayals that occurred as the Soviet Union, then Germany, then the Soviet Union again occupied and controlled the Baltic states during and after the second world war. What moral compromises are individuals capable of, she asks readers, when survival is at stake?

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The All Saints’ Day Lovers, by Juan Gabriel Vásquez, translated by Anne McLean, Bloomsbury, RRP£16.99

The latest offering by Colombia’s Impac Prize-winning author is a collection of short stories mostly set in the Belgian Ardennes. The location may be unexpected for someone whose earlier work concentrated on his home turf, but these stories of adultery, thwarted intimacy and loss pulsate as ever with regret, desire and barely contained violence.

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Wolf, Wolf: A Novel, by Eben Venter, translated by Michiel Heyns, Scribe, RRP£14.99

A familiar narrative setting — a patriarch lies dying as his estranged children squabble over his inheritance — is given some added twists in a scathing work by one the most highly regarded Afrikaans novelists. There are few sympathetic characters in this study of the new South Africa.