# Recent novels translated into English **URL:** \ **Category:** Cafe Society\ **Created:** [July 11, 2014, 5:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recent-novels-translated-into-english/692876 "2014-07-11T17:16:14Z")\ **Posts on this page:** 5\ **Page:** 1
**Author:** ![jtur88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e9c0ed/32.png) [@jtur88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jtur88)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2014, 5:16pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recent-novels-translated-into-english/692876/1 "2014-07-11T17:16:14Z")
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? ---
**Author:** ![Gordon\_Urquhart](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/g/db5fbb/32.png) [@Gordon\_Urquhart](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Gordon_Urquhart)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2014, 7:20pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recent-novels-translated-into-english/692876/2 "2014-07-11T19:20:16Z")
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). ---
**Author:** ![zombywoof](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/z/9e8a1a/32.png) [@zombywoof](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/zombywoof)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2014, 10:54pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recent-novels-translated-into-english/692876/3 "2014-07-11T22:54:40Z")
Karl Ove Knausgård’s multi-volume autobiographical novel seems to be getting a lot of attention at the moment. ---
**Author:** ![Erdosain](https://sea3.discourse-cdn.com/straightdope/user_avatar/boards.straightdope.com/erdosain/32/7284_2.png) [@Erdosain](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/Erdosain)\ **Post date:** [July 11, 2014, 11:10pm UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recent-novels-translated-into-english/692876/4 "2014-07-11T23:10:45Z")
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](http://www.rochester.edu/College/translation/threepercent/index.php?id=11212) ---
**Author:** ![jtur88](https://avatars.discourse-cdn.com/v4/letter/j/e9c0ed/32.png) [@jtur88](https://boards.straightdope.com/u/jtur88)\ **Post date:** [July 14, 2014, 1:09am UTC](https://boards.straightdope.com/t/recent-novels-translated-into-english/692876/5 "2014-07-14T01:09:10Z")
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.