10 Books by Women in Translation

The Afghans: Three Lives Through War, Love and Revolt

In this searing panorama of Afghanistan, journalist Seierstad (The Bookseller of Kabul) surveys the tumultuous period from the rise of the Taliban in the mid-1990s through their ouster after the September 11 attacks, their long guerrilla war against the U.S.-backed government, and their return to power in 2021. She focuses on three protagonists: Jamila Afghani, who defied her family to get an education, eventually starting a women’s rights NGO and becoming a government official; Bashir, a Taliban commander who orchestrated bombings and kidnappings; and Ariana, a young law school graduate whose aspirations were stifled when the Taliban retook control. Seierstad gives an extraordinarily intimate portrait of the Taliban, who are motivated by ardent religious faith and endure agonizing sacrifices (Bashir was captured and brutally tortured by government forces). She also investigates the restrictions Afghan society places on women, who are denied education and careers, confined to the home, and sold in marriage (“Mahmoud rang every evening,” Seierstad writes of the obsequious yet domineering man whom Ariana’s parents are pressuring her to marry. “He was suffocating her with all his nattering” and “his constant refrain ‘I’m doing this for you, just tell me what you want, I will do everything you ask”). It’s a gripping, richly textured account of Afghanistan’s ordeal that humanizes all sides. (Aug.)

Chilco

Chilean writer Catrileo debuts with an impressive story of catastrophe and culture clash in near-future Chile. Mari, the 26-year-old narrator, has recently decamped with her partner, Pascale, from the overcrowded Capital City of her birth for Pascale’s homeland, the quiet and mysterious island of Chilco. Famous for its rebellious spirit and strong Indigenous communities, Chilco seems to move at a slower pace than the mainland, but that’s not the only thing Mari has a difficult time adjusting to. Pascale’s friends and neighbors don’t believe a city girl such as herself could ever fully appreciate or understand Chilco, though Mari is also of Indigenous descent. The narrative moves backwards in time, weaving in stories of Mari’s upbringing in a matriarchal household and the political unrest and natural disasters that begin to plague Capital City—from demonstrations in which houses are intentionally destroyed, to a series of sinkholes that devour pockets of the city—and finally force the couple to flee to Chilco. Though the dialogue often feels stiff, particularly in moments of tension, such as when Pascale and Mari debate whether to leave the city, Catrileo keeps the novel afloat with razor-sharp observations on the city’s exploitive colonial history and staggering decay. It’s a rewarding story of chosen family. (July)

Girl, 1983

A woman struggles to write about what she had long thought unwritable in this intense meditation on trauma and art from Ullmann (Unquiet). The narrator, a 55-year-old writer and translator in Oslo, recounts how at 16, while living in New York City, she met a 40-something fashion photographer in the elevator of her apartment building and accepted his invitation to a photo shoot in Paris, despite her mother’s objections. Looking back, she cautiously approaches describing what is clearly a traumatic episode, the details of which she gradually comes to terms with (“the never-ending night, a night whose scope, nearly forty years on, I struggle to comprehend”). In her halting attempts to bring order and precision to her “spiral of restlessness, forgetfulness and unfinished stories,” she finds inspiration and comfort in confessional writing by Sharon Olds, Annie Ernaux, and Anne Carson, each of whom “were here before me and who’ve been where I am now.” The solemn tone never wavers, which some readers may find stultifying, but the narrator’s vivid memories of her youth—colors, impressions, lacerating remarks—culminate in an unflinching description of the fateful encounter with the photographer. The result is a mesmerizing act of recollection and reconstitution. Agent: Sarah Chalfant, Wylie Agency. (July)

I’ll Never Call Him Dad Again: Turning Our Family Trauma of Sexual Assault and Chemical Submission into a Collective Fight

The daughter of Dominique Pelicot, whose 2024 trial in France made international news, debuts with a chilling memoir. Darian documents the year following the 2020 discovery by police that for a decade her father had drugged her mother Gisèle and raped her while she was unconscious, and invited more than 70 men from an online sex forum to also sexually assault her. Organized like a diary, the book’s earliest entry recounts Darian’s final communication from her father—an innocuous Facebook comment—the day before his arrest for “trying to film up women’s skirts.” The horrific extent of her father’s crime unfolds in Darian’s day-by-day account like a waking nightmare: the “over twenty-thousand pornographic photos and videos,” many of her mother, found on his hard drive; the grotesque new explanation for her mother’s “episodes of amnesia”; and the unearthing of naked photographs of Darian herself. Darian makes visceral her “crushing double burden” as child of both “victim” and “tormenter,” which strains her relationship with Gisèle, who struggles to accept that Darian might also have been drugged and raped by Pelicot. Writing that such “chemical submission” in the “familial sphere” is more widespread than many realize, Darian advocates for better care for survivors. This is a courageous effort to bring “unsayable” abuses to light. (Mar.)

The Lake’s Water Is Never Sweet

Adolescent ache and confusion abound in Caminito’s first-rate English-language debut. Teenage Gaia’s headstrong mother, Antonia, moves the family from the bleak industrial outskirts of Rome to the seemingly peaceful lakeside town of Anguillara Sabazia, where their low class status feels glaring to Gaia. Redheaded like her mother and big-eared, Gaia has a paralyzed father, an anarchist older brother, and two twin brothers six years her junior. She doesn’t feel much at home anywhere. At once violent and sensitive, afraid and brave, she deals with the wealthy boys and girls at her new school by embracing her otherness. She eventually befriends Carlotta, Agata, and Iris, but they become constant reminders of what she does not possess. Tragedy strikes after a betrayal and Gaia retreats further into herself and her studies. When she’s betrayed again, she turns to another friend to help her torch an ex-boyfriend’s car. Caminito casts Gaia and her family in stark relief, from the unflinching portrait of Gaia’s dim prospects following her graduation to the wrenching depiction of the family’s sudden return to Rome’s dusty outskirts. It’s a memorable coming-of-age tale. (July)

The Midnight Shift

Seon-ran (A Thousand Blues) crafts an intricate vampire mystery set in contemporary Korea that explores profound themes of loneliness, queer desire, and moral ambiguity. Detective Suyeon finds herself disturbingly alone in investigating a series of apparent suicides at a dilapidated rehabilitation hospital in Incheon. Her suspicions of foul play grow when she repeatedly runs into the enigmatic Violette at the crime scene. A Korean adoptee raised in France and now attempting to reclaim her heritage, Violette purports to be hunting the vampire that, she insists, murdered the elderly victims. Meanwhile, Nanju, a nurse struggling with debt, becomes dangerously entangled with the very monster Suyeon seeks. As bodies drained of blood continue to pile up, Suyeon and Violette must uncover the truth while confronting their own hidden traumas and desires. Cheon skillfully toggles between her three heroines, building impressive emotional depth through their interwoven narration. The darkly romantic flashbacks to 1980s France—highlighting Violette’s formative experiences with Lily, a charismatic vampire—are particularly mesmerizing, echoing classic gothic tales with a fresh, queer twist. Though the worldbuilding occasionally feels inconsistent, Cheon’s nuanced exploration of loneliness and isolation resonates. K-drama fans, especially those drawn to moody supernatural thrillers and complex, character-driven plots, will eagerly devour this genre-blurring tale. (Aug.)

Solitaria

Afro-Brazilian novelist Cruz makes her English-language debut with a taut and deeply felt tale of class tension. It’s told in three parts, beginning with Mabel Pereira da Silva, 13, who works with her mother, Eunice, as a live-in maid for Ms. Lúcia’s family in a luxury high-rise. On one of Mabel’s first days there, Ms. Lúcia’s toddler nephew nearly drowns in the pool and the blame falls on an underage nanny employed by the child’s mother. The incident plants the seeds of discontent in Mabel: at the ways the rich in her unnamed Brazilian city are allowed to be careless, perpetual children while the poor are denied any childhood at all. But when a teenage pregnancy threatens Mabel’s dreams of medical school, it’s Lúcia who helps her get an abortion. In the novel’s second part, Eunice struggles to keep her family together. Thanks to Mabel’s influence, she chooses dignity and leaves Lúcia and her alcoholic husband to make a better life for herself. However, when Mabel needs money for textbooks and Lúcia offers her a substantial sum for one day of work, she accepts, only to witness yet another tragedy born of carelessness. As the truth comes out, the novel builds to a fiery anthem against injustice. This bildungsroman has plenty of bite. (Aug.)

The Third Reich of Dreams: The Nightmares of a Nation

In this spare but haunting compendium, originally published in 1966 and newly translated by Searls, journalist Beradt (1907–1986) questions everyday Germans in the 1930s about their dreams, which they relay to her in interviews or provide her in written accounts. Beradt presents these records—“not diaries but nightaries, you might say”—along with her own commentary, which points to astonishing patterns in the dreams of disparate people at different ends of the political and social spectrum. She sorts their dreams into categories, most notably “bureaucratic atrocity stories,” in which dreamers do not, or are helpless to, resist the creep of fascism, and, opposingly, the dreams of “active doers” who resisted “the schizophrenic nature of totalitarian reality” both in waking and dreaming life. Beradt gathered her dream material until 1939, when she—as a Jew, a communist, and a journalist—fled the country herself. Her research demonstrates how thoroughly the rise of fascism—a “distorted, distorting environment” of “disintegrating values”—infected the minds of those who lived through it, while maintaining a probing focus on the choice between acquiescence and resistance. It’s a concise but powerful exploration of well-trod history that feels remarkably new. (Apr.)

The Unworthy

This heartrending postapocalyptic tale from Bazterrica (Tender Is the Flesh) examines religious devotion and the search for tenderness in a world torn apart by climate collapse. As a member of the Sacred Sisterhood, a monastic order cloistered within the decaying walls of what used to be a church, the nameless heroine keeps a secret diary detailing the horrors she and the other members of the “unworthy” caste suffer at the hands of the Superior Sister, a whip-wielding despot who stands in for a hidden god. When a nearly starved woman named Lucía finds her way to the convent, the protagonist’s recollections of life before the Sacred Sisterhood become sharper, and she rediscovers the ability to feel emotions other than terror and resignation. But the bond between her and Lucía is tested as the Superior Sister brings her terrible ministrations to bear, and each must hold tight to the other if they hope to find something worth surviving for. Moses’s translation is marvelous, capturing the lush lyricism with which Bazterrica describes the most harrowing extremes of human experience. Calling to mind Cormac McCarthy and Chelsea G. Summers, this is as beautiful as it is brutal. Agent: Barbara Graham, Schavelzon Graham Agencia. (Mar.)

Women, Seated

A nanny for a powerful Beijing family wavers during a kidnapping plot in this suspenseful and layered novel from Yueran (Cocoon). Yu Ling has planned a picnic in the countryside for Kuan Kuan, her seven-year-old charge, while his mother is in Hong Kong. The family’s regular driver is unavailable, and Yu Ling’s friend arrives to take them in a van without plates. As they are leaving the city, a news report on the radio reveals that the boy’s grandfather, a Communist Party official, is under investigation. Yu Ling’s calls to the boy’s parents go unanswered, thwarting her plan to hold the boy for ransom. “Their money belongs to the people, and we’re the people,” her accomplice reminds her. Eventually, the trio returns to Beijing, where the boy’s father is missing, and Yu Ling is torn between leaving the boy with his relatives or continuing to care for him, which would mean further entwining herself with a family she resents. Thanks to Yueran’s astute storytelling, characters that first appear to be villains become more complex as the years of disappointment and fractured ambitions that have shaped them come to light. This gripping drama offers an intimate view into contemporary China’s class dynamics. (Aug.)