Recent novels translated into English

Cafe Society
1

I posed this in another thread, but it;'s been dormant for a year and a half.

Where can I find recommendations for ** Books by modern writers in other languages, translated into English.** (Currently popular writers still releasing new titles.)

I’ve read Muriel Barbery, Peter Hoeg, Stieg Larson, Herta Müller, Per Petterson, Bernhard Schlink, and several Japanese authors. Where can I find recommendations for others that I might be missing? Surely, European writers must be writing some good novels in their own languages?

2

John Ajvide Lindqvist’s *Låt den rätte komma in *(2004) was translated from Swedish into Let the Right One In (and made into a Swedish film that was later remade in the United States). Lindqvist’s bibliography has more than a dozen titles, and the latest book was released this year.

Let the Right One In is superficially about a vampire, but it’s really so much more than that – an excellent book (and really effective movies, too – the Swedish version is much better than the U.S. version, but the latter’s not bad by any means).

3

Karl Ove Knausgård’s multi-volume autobiographical novel seems to be getting a lot of attention at the moment.

4

What genre are you looking for? Crime, thrillers, literary fiction? Those are probably the most translated. Plenty of smaller presses publish almost exclusively translated fiction; the bigger hits get scooped up by divisions of the Big 5 publishers.

If you go here, you’ll get a list of every book translated into English for the first time in 2014 (they also have lists for previous years):

http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=11212

5

My question is predicated on certain assumptions:

  1. Europe has a larger non-English speaking population than that of the English-speaking population of the USA/UK.

  2. Their education standards are comparable to ours.

  3. They write books (I guess)…

I listed a few authors of general contemporary fiction (of no particular genre) that I was familiar with, which you may use as a clue about the kinds of literature I am talking about.

I had hoped that someone here would be sufficiently familiar with some of them to offer a few recommendations.

Thank you for the link to the translation site. It is exhaustive and daunting, and I can’t find a user-friendly way to make it useful to a casual reader looking for a few recent best-sellers worthy of note.