15 Translated Novels You Should Read This Winter and Spring

The first half of 2026 is shaping up to be a particularly strong season for translated fiction. We move through queer Tokyo nightlife, militarized Estonian farmland, Parisian attics full of exiles, music festivals at the foot of Andean volcanoes, and even other galaxies. What links these books isn’t geography or genre so much as their attention to people living at the edge of systems—trying to disappear, to belong, or to start over as the ground keeps shifting beneath them. Below is some of the most exciting fiction in translation being released in the months to come.

Japan

Jackson Alone by Jose Ando, translated from Japanese by Kalau Almony

From Akatugawa Prize-winning author Jose Ando, Jackson Alone is a darkly comedic debut about four queer, mixed-race men who are all being discriminated against by their bosses, boyfriends, and society at large. Coming together by chance, they concoct a plan to switch identities and exact revenge on each other’s behalf by playing tricks on the people who have wronged them—people who can’t tell them apart anyways. Full of satire and bite, Ando tackles Japan’s cultural and corporate identity, hiding sharp social criticism under humor and wit. 

Sisters in Yellow by Mieko Kawakami, translated from Japanese by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio

The newest novel from bestselling Japanese author Mieko Kawakami, Sisters in Yellow follows a group of friends in 1990s Tokyo. Hana, a fifteen-year-old living with her hostess mother in a tiny apartment, is tired of her lack of agency and hungry for independence, when she meets Kimiko, who is older than her mother yet feels younger. Taking Hana under her wing, the two are thrown together with two other young women and together, all four set up a bar called Lemon. Could this be the way to gain financial and existential freedom and, ultimately, remake their lives? In a clash of teenage aspirations and the cruelties of the adult world, this new release by Kawakami promises a pacy story of friendship, longing, and betrayal.

Moldova

The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes by Tatiana Țîbuleac, translated from Romanian by Monica Cure

Tatiana Țîbuleac, a former journalist and UNICEF worker, is one of Moldova’s most celebrated authors. In The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes, we meet Aleksy who, at the advice of his psychiatrist, revisits his memories from the summer he was 18. Eager to head into adulthood on his own, he feels trapped spending the summer alone with his mother in Northern France. Still struggling with the death of his sister a few years earlier, the already strenuous summer takes another turn for the worse when his mother announces that she is dying. Exploring themes of grief and memory, The Summer My Mother Had Green Eyes looks at a fraught mother-son relationship and the possibility of reconciliation.

Estonia

The Cut Line by Carolina Pihelgas, translated from Estonian by Darcy Hurford

The first book translated into English written by Estonian poet, author, and editor Carolina Pihelgas, The Cut Line is a compact story about Liine, a woman who has just left a toxic relationship after 14 years. To make the decision final, she removes herself to the countryside in the heat of summer. At a quiet farmstead amongst the trees, she undergoes all the stages of separation, putting her body to work on the farm while her mind is preoccupied with what this means for her future. At the same time, climate change makes itself known in the form of drought and close to the cottage, just by the Russian border, a NATO base is practicing defensive drills. As Liine goes through an emotional transformation, the landscape around her shifts in this compact novel about where to draw the line and how to maintain that line once it’s drawn.

Poland

White Nights by Urszula Honek, translated from Polish by Kate Webster

Longlisted for the International Booker Prize, White Nights by poet Urszula Honek is set in a remote village in the Polish countryside. Through 13 interconnected stories, we follow families and characters in the village who all go through their own personal tragedies, heartbreaks, and disappointments. Whether suffering through poverty or facing violence, the characters are connected by the overwhelming sense of futility that they all feel. And yet, in the midst of it all, White Nights is also about the hope that keeps us going.

Algeria

The Fertility of Evil by Amara Lakhous, translated from Arabic by Alexander E. Elinson

In the coastal city of Oran, a criminal investigation is underway which must turn to the larger history of postcolonial Algeria in search of answers. A former National Liberation Front fighter and Algerian power broker has been found dead. It’s Independence Day, and Colonel Soltani of the Anti-Terrorism Unit is pulled in from his vacation to close the high profile case as quickly as possible. Digging into the victim’s past, Soltani and his team discover the secrets of a revolutionary cell whose three remaining members have become prime suspects. Flinging us between the dilapidated historic quarters and the shiny new districts of Oran, Amara Lakhous portrays a world full of corruption and deceit in this literary thriller.

Mexico

Eating Ashes by Brenda Navarro, translated from Spanish by Megan McDowell

Soon to be a major motion picture, Eating Ashes is an award-winning novel by Mexican writer Brenda Navarro that’s split across Spain and Mexico. With her brother’s ashes in her hand, a narrator returns to Mexico, recounting the events that eventually lead to his death in Spain. From struggling to raise her brother on her own while their mother earns a living across the globe to leaving their home country behind for a new life in Spain, the narrator retraces the siblings’ separation and ultimate confrontation. Through their story, Navarro confronts the intimate and systemic struggles that migrants face and asks what it means to live a life worth living in this novel about alienation and courage.

Bolivia

The Invisible Years by Rodrigo Hasbún, translated from Spanish by Lily Meyer

After over two decades of separation, Andrea and Julian, the main characters of The Invisible Years by Bolivian author Rodrigo Hasbún, reconnect in Houston. Brought together by a shocking phone call, the two unravel their past and the truth about what happened on the fateful night of their senior year that would end up marring their friend group forever. Julian, an author stuck in an unhappy marriage, has already been trying to turn his past into a novel in order to make sense of it. But now he must face it head on in this coming-of-age tale about the tipping point between adolescence and adulthood.

Russia

The Disappearing Act by Maria Stepanova, translated from Russian by Sasha Dugdale

Maria Stepanova’s The Disappearing Act follows a writer in exile as the war her home country wages on a neighboring state renders her native language nearly unusable. Cut off from home and stalled in the present, the writer, M., drifts through life filled with shame and uncertainty about the future. When she’s accidentally left stranded in an unfamiliar city, she sees it as a chance to slip away. But memory intrudes and soon a fleeting encounter with a group of circus performers opens the possibility of reinvention. Existing somewhere between dream and reality, The Disappearing Act is a meditation on exile, identity, and the allure of disappearing completely from one of contemporary Russia’s most critical voices.

Brazil

Diorama by Carol Bensimon, translated form Portuguese by Zoë Perry and Julia Sanches

In Carol Bensimon’s Diorama, we follow Cecília, a Brazilian migrant living in Northern California and working as a taxidermist. Despite her profession, Cecília struggles to properly reconstruct her own past until her father’s failing heart threatens to draw her home. With this possibility looming on the horizon, she is forced to confront a murder that shaped her childhood: the 1988 assassination of a beloved Porto Alegre congressman. Shifting between Brazil’s transition from dictatorship to democracy and Cecília’s present-day, Diorama blends the momentum of true-crime with the intimacy of a queer coming-of-age story.

Hong Kong

City Like Water by Dorothy Tse, translated from Chinese by Natascha Bruce

Dorothy Tse’s City Like Water imagines a city that has quietly slipped beneath the surface, and sunk to the bottom of the ocean. Amongst its winding streets, people vanish without explanation. Classmates, neighbors, even family members are absorbed into protests, television screens, or the tightening machinery of surveillance. As the once familiar city becomes more and more disorienting, the police go undercover to construct a violent labyrinth where the city dwellers are left wondering what it all means. City Like Water is a dystopian dispatch from a submerged city that is not so different from yours.

Iran

Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime by Reza Ghassemi, translated from Persian by Michelle Quay

In Reza Ghassemi’s Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime, Iranian expatriate Yadollah is trying to make ends meet in 1990s Paris, barely surviving in a crumbling attic apartment he shares with friends and fellow drifters. When a new neighbor known only as the Prophet moves into their apartment block, everyday precarity gives way to something stranger: Yadollah is confronted by angels of death and forced to investigate the circumstances of his own murder. Part metaphysical exploration, part whodunnit, Woodwind Harmony in the Nighttime ponders what displacement does to people stuck between homelands, languages, and realities.

Sweden

Event Horizon by Balsam Karam, translated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel

Event Horizon, written by Swedish Kurdish author Balsam Karam and translated by award-winning translator Saskia Vogel, is a story set in the stars of a galactic empire. Seventeen-year-old Milde comes from the Outskirts, where women live stripped of rights and recognition, surviving in a forbidding social landscape. When she takes part in an act of rebellion against the city’s authorities, Milde is made a scapegoat, imprisoned, and tortured—then offered a final choice: public execution or exile into the Mass, a black hole used for state experimentation. She chooses the void. Blending political allegory with existential inquiry, Event Horizon traces how resistance persists amid oppression and isolation.

Mauritius

All Flesh by Ananda Devi, translated from French by Jeffrey Zuckerman

Ananda Devi’s All Flesh is a coming-of-age novel about a teenage narrator who is relentlessly shamed for her body by a society obsessed with beauty and control. At home, she is smothered by a father who indulges her excesses and nurtures a darker family myth, and at school, she faces humiliation from both classmates and teachers. Caught between shame and fetishization, she struggles to imagine a self not defined by the shape of her body. Hungry for revenge on her tormentors, she is pushed to take drastic measures. Excavating the moral fantasies we build around bodies, desire, and gender, All Flesh asks where the line is drawn between being self-possessed and self-destructive.

Ecuador

Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun by Mónica Ojeda, translated from Spanish by Sarah Booker 

From the author of Jawbone, Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun by Mónica Ojeda follows Noa and her friend Nicole as they escape the city for an eight-day festival in the Andean páramo. Nestled next to a volcano, they enter a place alive with shamanic ritual, underground music, and indigenous belief. Noa’s true aim, however, is to find her father, who abandoned her as a child. As the festival unfolds, she begins sleepwalking and speaking in voices not her own, blurring the line between the living and the dead, trauma and ecstasy. A hallucinatory journey reminiscent of Juan Rulfo’s Pedro Páramo, Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun promises a heartfelt meditation on love, family, and kinship, set to the natural rhythms of the land.