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April 2026 Special edition dedicated to the International Booker Prize list 2026 |
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We Are Green and Trembling (Spanish)
by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara; Translated by Robin Myers
Deep in the wilds of the New World, Antonio de Erauso begins to write a letter to his aunt, the prioress of the Basque convent he escaped as a young girl. Since fleeing a dead-end life as a nun, he's become Antonio and undertaken monumental adventures: he has been a cabin boy, mule driver, shopkeeper, soldier, and conquistador; he has wielded his sword and slashed with his dagger. Now, caring for two Guaraní girls he rescued from enslavement and hounded by the army he deserted, this protean protagonist contemplates one more metamorphosis ... Based on the life of Antonio de Erauso, a real figure of the Spanish conquest, We Are Green and Trembling is a queer baroque satire that blends elements of the picaresque with surreal storytelling. Its rich and wildly imaginative language forms a searing criticism of conquest, colonialism, and religious tyranny, as well as of the treatment of women and indigenous people. It is a masterful subversion of Latin American history with a trans character at its center, finding in the rainforest a magically alive space where transformation is not only possible but necessary.
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The Remembered Soldier (Dutch)
by Anjet Daanje; Translated by David McKay
An extraordinary love story and a captivating novel about the power of memory and imagination: Flanders 1922. After serving as a soldier in the Great War, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Countless women, responding to a newspaper ad, visit him there in the hope of finding their spouse who vanished in battle. One day a woman, Julienne, appears and recognizes Noon as her husband, the photographer Amand Coppens, and takes him home against medical advice. But their miraculous reunion doesn't turn out the way that Julienne wants her envious friends to believe. Only gradually do the two grow close, and Amand's biography is pieced together on the basis of Julienne's stories about him. But how can he be certain that she's telling the truth? In The Remembered Soldier, Anjet Daanje immerses us in the psyche of a war-traumatized man who has lost his identity. When Amand comes to doubt Julienne's word, the reader is caught up in a riveting spiral of confusion that only the greatest of literature can achieve.
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The Deserters (French)
by Mathias Enard; Translated by Charlotte Mandell
A filthy and exhausted soldier emerges from the Mediterranean wilderness - he is escaping from an unspecified war, trying to flee incessant violence and find refuge in solitude. Meanwhile, on September 11, 2001, aboard a small cruise ship, a scientific conference takes place to pay tribute to the renowned East German mathematician Paul Heudeber, a committed communist, anti-fascist, and a survivor of Buchenwald.
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The Director (German)
by Daniel Kehlmann; Translated by Ross Benjamin
G.W. Pabst, one of cinema's greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him. When he receives word that his elderly mother is ill, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. Pabst, his wife, and his young son are suddenly confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. So, when Joseph Goebbels--the minister of propaganda in Berlin--sees the potential for using the European film icon for his directorial genius and makes big promises to Pabst and his family, Pabst must consider Goebbels's thinly veiled order.
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The Wax Child (Danish)
by Olga Ravn; Translated by Martin Aitken
In seventeenth-century Denmark, Christenze Kruckow, an unmarried noble- woman, is accused of witchcraft. She and several other women are rumored to be possessed by the Devil, who has come to them in the form of a tall headless man and gives them dark powers: they can steal people's happiness, they have performed unchristian acts, and they can cause pestilence or even death. They are all in danger of the stake. The Wax Child, narrated by a wax doll created by Christenze Kruckow, is an unsettling horror story about brutality and power, nature and witchcraft, set in the fragile communities of premodern Europe. Deeply researched and steeped in visceral, atmospheric detail, The Wax Child is based on a series of real witchcraft trials that took place in Northern Jutland in the seventeenth century. Full of lush storytelling and alarmingly rich imagination, Olga Ravn weaves in quotes from original sources such as letters, magical spells and manuals, court documents, and Scandinavian grimoires.
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Taiwan Travelogue (Mandarin Chinese)
by Shuang-Zi Yang; Translated Lin King
May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She's been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste as much of its authentic cuisine as her famously monstrous appetite can bear. Soon a Taiwanese woman -- who is younger even than she is, and who shares the characters of her name -- is hired as her interpreter and makes her dreams come true. The charming, erudite, meticulous Chizuru arranges Chizuko's travels all over the Land of the South and also proves to be an exceptional cook. Over scenic train rides and braised pork rice, lively banter and winter melon tea, Chizuko grows infatuated with her companion and intent on drawing her closer. But something causes Chizuru to keep her distance. It's only after a heartbreaking separation that Chizuko begins to grasp what the "something" is. Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, this novel was a sensation on its first publication in Mandarin Chinese in 2020 and won Taiwan's highest literary honor, the Golden Tripod Award. Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships.
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When I Sing, Mountains Dance (Catalan)
by Irene Solà; Translated by Mara Lethem
A spellbinding novel that places one family's tragedies against the uncontainable life force of the land itself. Near a village high in the Pyrenees, Domènec wanders across a ridge, fancying himself more a poet than a farmer, to reel off his verses over on this side of the mountain. He gathers black chanterelles and attends to a troubled cow. And then storm clouds swell, full of electrifying power. Reckless, gleeful, they release their bolts of lightning, one of which strikes Domènec. He dies. The ghosts of seventeenth-century witches gather around him, taking up the chanterelles he'd harvested before going on their merry ways. So begins this novel that is as much about the mountains and the mushrooms as it is about the human dramas that unfold in their midst.
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My Cat Yugoslavia (Finnish)
by Pajtim Statovci; Translated by David Hackston
In 1980s Yugoslavia, a young Muslim girl is married off to a man she hardly knows, but what was meant to be a happy match goes quickly wrong. Soon thereafter her country is torn apart by war and she and her family flee. Years later, her son, Bekim, grows up a social outcast in present day Finland, not just an immigrant in a country suspicious of foreigners, but a gay man in an unaccepting society. Aside from casual hookups, his only friend is a boa constrictor whom, improbably--he is terrified of snakes--he lets roam his apartment. But during a visit to a gay bar, Bekim meets a talking cat who moves in with him and his snake. It is this witty, charming, manipulative creature who starts Bekim on a journey back to Kosovo to confront his demons, and make sense of the magical, cruel, incredible history of his family. And it is this that, in turn, enables him finally, to open himself to true love--which he will find in the most unexpected place.
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She Who Remains (Bulgarian)
by Rene Karabash; Translated by Izidora Angel
She Who Remains, Rene Karabash's landmark Bulgarian queer novel, secrets readers into a rural Albanian village where, to this day, the Kanun of Lekë Dukagjini--a collection of archaic laws--looms over the lives of villagers with the same haunting presence of the surrounding mountains. Bekija, painfully aware of why she cannot have what she most wants, chooses to become a sworn virgin, setting off a bloody and heartbreaking chain of events that shatters a family and destroys a cherished relationship, but also reveals how trauma can lead to vital, if uncomfortable, truths. Karabash's poetic stream of consciousness traces gender evolution with innovative grace. This bold exploration of what it means to be a woman in a world defined by the violence of ancient patriarchal traditions has resonated with readers across Europe and beyond, and now English-language readers won't soon forget Izidora Angel's award-winning translation.
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Mercer County Library System
2751 Brunswick Pike Lawrenceville, New Jersey 08648 609-882-9246
https://mcl.org
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