Lily Meyer

Chinese novelist Yan Lianke treats the deities of China's major religions as quiet, omnipresent participants in the novel's events, which range from slapstick comedy to shocking violence.

On a Woman's Madness and Forbidden Notebook have been highly lauded in their original languages for decades but, like the more recent Black Foam, inaccessible to English readers — until now.

Concerning My Daughter, Hugs and Cuddles and Freeway: La Movie do not pretend to be easy reads, yet they are all completely consuming.

Iraqi poet Faleeha Hassan's memoir War and Me, Mexican novelist Brenda Lozano's Witches, and Uyghur novelist and social critic Perhat Tursun's The Backstreets have a few broad commonalities.

Mutt-Lon's The Blunder, Pina by Titaua Peu, and Thuận's Chinatown all come from different continents and deal, glancingly or in depth, with French colonialism.

The protagonist of Clare-Louise Bennett's novel is a determinedly unfixed and unrooted person who marks time by which writers she has read.

The novel is simultaneously wise and silly, moving and inscrutable. It is also indisputably working hard to be new.

Novelist John Darnielle — also singer-songwriter with the Mountain Goats — has a hero who wants to honor the victims he's writing about but doesn't much like them.

Sometimes, it's not the author you choose, it's the translator. So we've picked three novels where the translation will help you discover new things about the text, even if you can read the original.

Jon McGregor's new novel follows an expedition guide who suffers a stroke in the middle of an Antarctic ice storm and loses the ability to speak — and the people around him at a loss for what to say.