This is my second year of participating in the Books in Translation Reading Challenge, hosted by Jen of the Introverted Reader.
2025 was a particularly interesting year for reading since my local library situation changed over the course of the year: I moved from the fourth-largest city in the Netherlands, where my public library contained an extensive collection of books translated into English, to a town of less than eight thousand people in the southern United States, with a beautiful and much smaller library. Fortunately--three cheers for amazing librarians--my access to translated books continued uninterrupted, and I actually read more translated fiction after moving.
In 2025, I read twelve books, arriving (to my surprise) at the Linguist level of the challenge...
Serendipity was my preferred method of finding books for this reading challenge. All of the books on the list below were chosen by browsing the shelves of my local library looking for books with "translated by" on the cover or title page, and a blurb or cover that appealed.
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| Books in Translation Reading Challenge |
1. Voices of the Lost by Hoda Barakat, translated from Arabic by Marilyn Booth (London, 2021)
A story told in parts, I remember this as being good but not extraordinary.
2. Good Will Come From the Sea by Christos Ikonomou, translated from Greek by Karen Emmerich (Brooklyn, 2019)
A collection of longish and rather bleak short stories, this was an enjoyable opportunity to visit a place and culture totally new to me.
3. A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare, translated from Albanian by John Hodgson (London, 2023)
A short, dense concept novel--the plot centers around a famous 1934 phone call between the dictator Josef Stalin and the novelist Boris Pasternak.
4. The Alphabet of Birds by SJ Naudé translated from Afrikaans by the author (London, 2015)
Another short story collection; though none of the stories rewired my brain or lingered in memory, it was overall a pleasant reading experience.
5. Terminal Boredom: Stories by Izumi Suzuki, translated from Japanese by Polly Barton, Sam Bett, David Boyd, Daniel Joseph, Aiko Masubuchi, and Helen O’Horan (London, 2021)
This was the last book I read before an international move; I remember liking it a lot, but none of the stories have specifically stuck with me.
6. Memories of My Melancholy Whores by Gabriel García Márquez translated from Spanish by Edith Grossman (New York, 2005)
A short novel about an elderly Lothario of a journalist who falls passionately in love with a very young prostitute. I didn't enjoy this and wouldn't recommend it, but if you're looking for a very short translated novel, it is that.
7. The Three-Body Problem by Cinxin Liu, translated from Chinese by Ken Liu (New York, 2014)
I know almost nothing about China's Cultural Revolution and its aftermath, so the setting alone would have fascinated me regardless, but this is genuinely a gripping and original novel about vengeance and alien contact with humanity. Also, the translation is genuinely terrific. Will very likely read the rest of the trilogy just to find out what happens.
8. Fresh Water for Flowers by Valérie Perrin, translated from French by Hildegarde Searle (New York, 2021)
I loved the first two-thirds of this book (and its plot twist), as well as the fact that it has short chapters. Definitely something to look into if you enjoy gentle, optimistic books about people living good lives after great loss.
9. Your Utopia by Bora Chung, translated from Korean by Anton Hur (New York, 2024)
My personal favourite book on this list, and the one I most want other people to read and love so I have someone else to shout with about how good and weird and devastating some of these stories are. "Your Utopia"; "Maria gratia plena"; "the Centre for Immortality Research"; "the end of the voyage"; perhaps it's just that I read it late in the year and haven't had the chance to forget it yet, but so many of these stories were among the best I read in 2025. Not to be missed if you have any interest at all in speculative fiction.
10. The Call of the Toad by Günter Grass, translated from German by Ralph Manheim (New York, 1992)
Parts of this novel I really loved--it features an elderly German widower (an art history professor) and a Polish widow (a conservator specialising in gilding) meeting, falling in love, and going into the cemetery business together. Overall, it was marred by a pretentious and unpleasant narrator, whose frame story I very much could have done without.
11. Whereabouts by Jhumpa Lahiri, translated from Italian by the author (New York, 2021)
I absolutely loathed this book: for me its anonymous narrator was solipsistic, deeply unpleasant, and utterly tedious to read about. Did not live up to the hype, or my previous experiences of enjoying work by this author.
12. The Plotters by Un-Su Kim, translated from Korean by Sora Kim-Russell (New York, 2018)
I was very happy to close out my year of reading translated books on such a high note. Of all the books on this list, this is the one I would recommend most highly to other readers of translated novels--if you like thrillers and don't mind some gore and violence, this is a genuinely fun and propulsive read. This is the first novel of Un-Su Kim's to be translated into English and it makes me want to seek out more Korean crime fiction in 2026.
I hope this post makes plain the great delight reading translated books brought me in 2025. Very much looking forward to taking part in 2026! I'd love to hear from other readers of translated books--do any of these sound like books you might try? What translated fiction would you recommend I read next?
