Women in Translation Month: 12 women writers to read in translation from 12 European languages

The Employees: A Workplace Novel of the 22nd Century, Olga Ravn, translated from the Danish by Martin Aitken

The near-distant future. Millions of kilometres from Earth.

The crew of the Six-Thousand ship consists of those who were born and those who were created. Those who will die, and those who will not. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew is perplexed to find itself becoming deeply attached to them, and human and humanoid employees alike find themselves longing for the same things: warmth and intimacy. Loved ones who have passed. Our shared, far-away Earth, which now only persists in memory.

Gradually, the crew members come to see themselves in a new light, and each employee is compelled to ask themselves whether their work can carry on as before – and what it means to be truly alive.

Lost Luggage, Jordi Puntí, translated from the Catalan by Julie Wark

Christof, Christophe, Christopher, and Cristòfol are four brothers – sons of the same father and four very different mothers – yet none of them knows of the other’s existence. They live in four different cities: Frankfurt, Paris, London, and Barcelona. Unbeknownst to them, they have one thing in common: Gabriel Delacruz – a truck driver – abandoned them when they were little and they never heard from him again.

Then one day, Cristòfol is contacted by the police: his father is officially a missing person. This fact leads him to discover that he has three half-brothers, and the four young men come together for the first time. Two decades have passed since their father last saw any of them. They barely remember what he was like, but they decide to look for him to resolve their doubts. Why did he abandon them? Why do all four have the same name? Did he intend for them to meet?

We Trade Our Night For Someone Else’s Day, Ivana Bodrožić, translated from the Croatian by Ellen Elias-Bursać

The city of Vukovar, situated on Croatia’s easternmost periphery, across the Danube River from Serbia, was the site of some of the worst violence in the wars that rocked ex-Yugoslavia in the early 1990s. It is referred to only as “the city” throughout this taut political thriller from one of Europe’s most celebrated young writers. In this city without a name, fences in schoolyards separate the children of Serbs from those of Croats, and city leaders still fight to free themselves from violent crimes they committed – or permitted – during the war a generation ago. Now, it is left to a new generation–the children, now grown up, to extricate themselves from this tragic place, innocents who are nonetheless connected in different ways to the crimes of the past.

Nora is a journalist assigned to do a puff piece on the perpetrator of a crime of passion – a Croatian high school teacher who fell in love with one of her students, a Serb, and is now in prison for having murdered her husband. But Nora herself is the daughter of a man who was murdered years earlier under mysterious circumstances. And she wants, if not to avenge her father, at least to bring to justice whoever committed the crime. There’s a hothouse intensity to this extraordinary noir page-turner because of how closely the author sets the novel within the historical record. This city is unnamed, the story is fictional, so it can show us what actually happened there.

Why I Killed My Best Friend, Amanda Michalopoulou, translated from the Greek by Karen Emmerich

A young girl named Maria is lifted from her beloved Africa and relocated to her native Greece. She struggles with the transition, hating everything about Athens: the food, the air, the school, her classmates, and the language. Just as she resigns herself to misery, Anna arrives. Though Anna’s refined, Parisian upbringing is the exact opposite of Maria’s, the two girls instantly bond over their common foreignness, becoming inseparable in their relationship as each other’s best friend, but also as each other’s fiercest competition – be it in relation to boys, talents, future aspirations, or political beliefs.

From Maria and Anna’s grade school days in the 1970s, post-dictatorship Greece, to their adult lives in the present, Michalopoulou charts the ups, downs, and fallings-out of the powerful self-destructive bond only true best friends can have.

Death in Spring, Mercè Rodoreda, translated from the Spanish by Martha Tennent

Death in Spring tells the story of the bizarre and destructive customs of a nameless town – burying the dead in trees after filling their mouths with cement to prevent their soul from escaping or sending a man to swim in the river that courses underneath the town to discover if they will be washed away by a flood – through the eyes of a 14-year-old boy who must come to terms with the rhyme and reason of this ritual violence, and with his wild, child-like, and teenaged stepmother, who becomes his playmate. It is through these rituals, and the developing relationships between the boy and the townspeople, that Rodoreda portrays a fully articulated, though quite disturbing, society.

The Door, Magda Szabó, translated from the Hungarian by Len Rix

Emerence is a domestic servant – strong, fierce, eccentric, and with a reputation for being a first-rate housekeeper. When Magda, a young Hungarian writer, takes her on she never imagines how important this woman will become to her. It takes 20 years for a complex trust between them to be slowly, carefully built. But Emerence has secrets and vulnerabilities beneath her indomitable exterior which will test Magda’s friendship and change the complexion of both their lives irreversibly.

Family Lexicon, Natalia Ginzburg, translated from the Italian by Jenny McPhee

Giuseppe Levi, the father, is a scientist, consumed by his work and a mania for hiking – when he isn’t provoked into angry remonstration by someone misspeaking or misbehaving or wearing the wrong thing. Giuseppe is Jewish, married to Lidia, a Catholic, though neither is religious; they live in the industrial city of Turin where, as the years pass, their children find ways of their own to medicine, marriage, literature, and politics. It is all very ordinary, except that the background to the story is Mussolini’s Italy in its steady downward descent to race law and world war. The Levis are, among other things, unshakeable anti-fascists. That will complicate their lives.

Tristan, Clarence Boulay, translated from the French by Teresa Lavender Fagan

After a seven-day journey on the South Atlantic Ocean aboard a lobster boat servicing Cape Town, Ida arrives on the island of Tristan. In the little island community, a village nestled on the slopes of a volcano whose only limits are the immense sky and the ocean, her bearings are gradually shifted as time slowly begins to expand.

When a cargo ship runs aground near a neighbouring island, spilling massive amounts of oil, there is suddenly frantic activity in the town. Ida eagerly joins a team of three men who go to the small island to rescue oil-drenched penguins. One night, one of the men walks her back to the cabin where she is staying. They experience a night of love that continues to grow on the secluded island. For two weeks away from the world – the sea is rough, no boat can come to pick them up – the dance of their bodies and their all-consuming love is their only horizon.

Hana, Alena Morntajnová, translated from the Czech by Julia Sherwood and Peter Sherwood

It’s 1954 and nine-year-old Mira’s life is about to change forever. After a typhoid outbreak rages through her town, robbing her of her parents and siblings, the orphaned child is forced to live with her mysterious, depressive Aunt Hana, a figure both frightening and fragile. Gradually, Mira uncovers the secrets of their troubled family history and begins to understand why her aunt is so incapable of trusting herself and the world around her.

Jacob’s Ladder, Ludmila Ulitskaya, translated from the Russian by Polly Gannon

Jacob’s Ladder is a family saga spanning a century of recent Russian history. Jumping between the diaries and letters of Jacob Ossetsky in Kiev in the early 1900s and the experiences of his granddaughter Nora in the theatrical world of Moscow in the 1970s and beyond, the novel records some of the most turbulent times in the history of Russia and Ukraine and draws suggestive parallels between historical events of the early 20th century and those of more recent memory. Spanning the seeming promise of the prerevolutionary years, to the dark Stalinist era, to the corruption and confusion of the present day, Jacob’s Ladder is a pageant of romance, betrayal, and memory.

Your Story, My Story, Connie Palmen, translated from the Dutch by Eileen J Stevens and Anna Asbury

In 1963 Sylvia Plath took her own life in her London flat. Her death was the culmination of a brief, brilliant life lived in the shadow of clinical depression – a condition exacerbated by her tempestuous relationship with mercurial poet Ted Hughes. The ensuing years saw Plath rise to martyr status while Hughes was cast as the cause of her suicide, his infidelity at the heart of her demise. For decades, Hughes never bore witness to the truth of their marriage – one buried beneath a mudslide of apocryphal stories, gossip, sensationalism, and myth. Until now.

Connie Palmen tells his side of the story, previously untold, delivered in Ted Hughes’s own uncompromising voice. A

High As the Waters Rise, Anja Kampmann, translated from the German by Anne Posten

One night aboard an oil drilling platform in the Atlantic, Waclaw returns to his cabin to find that his bunkmate and companion, Mátyás, has gone missing. A search of the rig confirms his fear that Mátyás has fallen into the sea.

Grief-stricken, he embarks on an epic emotional and physical journey that takes him to Morocco, to Budapest and Mátyás’s hometown in Hungary, to Malta, Italy, and finally to the mining town of his childhood in Germany. Waclaw’s encounters along the way with other lost and yearning souls – Mátyás’s angry, grieving half-sister; lonely rig workers on shore leave; and a truck driver who watches the world change from his driver’s seat.

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