Reading recommendations

Best translated fiction books 2026: twelve novels first published in English this year, with every translator named

Start with The Witch if you want the year’s most decorated translation in under 150 pages, Sisters in Yellow if you want a long novel to sink into, or Boudoir for a book almost no list has picked up. Twelve novels follow, from ten languages, grouped by what they are about and in no order of merit. Each was first published in English in 2026, and each entry names the translator. Updated 11 October 2026.

Edition and source checks: 11 October 2026.

What Highstreett returned for “the best new fiction translated into English and first published in 2026”

  • The City and Its Uncertain Walls, Haruki Murakami
  • The Singularity, Balsam Karam
  • The Memory Police, Yoko Ogawa
  • The Books of Jacob, Olga Tokarczuk
  • The Book of Disappearance, Ibtisam Azem
  • The Employees, Olga Ravn

See this result · Run 11 October 2026. One request, without re-prompting.

Editor’s verdict: Six real translated novels, none of them first published in English in 2026. The search’s own notes concede that two are older translations back in new editions, and it calls three others 2026 English publications when they are not: Murakami’s novel, for one, came out in English in 2024. Its checker did its job on the titles, dropping six, four of them for missing or mismatched editions, but nothing checks a claim about the year a translation appeared. Book search is good at the translated books that already have a reputation and weak on this year’s, which is why the twelve below were each checked against a publisher record by hand.

The rule for this page: a novel first published in English translation in 2026, in Britain or America, and out by 11 October. The original can be from any year: The Witch was written in 1996, and this is its first English edition. A new edition of an older translation does not count, and neither does a translation first published in Britain in 2025 that reached America this year. Story collections, poetry and nonfiction are left out.

The prizes are mostly about other years’ books. Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from Mandarin by Lin King, won the International Booker Prize on 19 May 2026; its English translation was first published in 2024, when it won the National Book Award for Translated Literature in America, so it is not on this list. Marie NDiaye’s The Witch, on the same shortlist, is. The National Book Award finalists for translated literature, announced on 6 October 2026, include two books here, Pure Men and Night of a Thousand Hells, and the winner is named on 18 November. The Warwick Prize for Women in Translation longlist includes Body Double; its shortlist is due on 26 October.

Families you cannot get out of

A witch and her daughters, a son who has stopped seeing his parents, a teenager running a bar to keep her mother afloat, and two sisters left behind. Four countries, the same trap.

1. The Witch, Marie NDiaye (2026)

translated from the French by Jordan Stump · shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026 · 144 pages in the US edition

Lucie is a witch of modest gifts in an unhappy marriage, and she sets out to pass her powers to her twin daughters, Maud and Lise, who quickly outgrow her. What follows is a family coming apart, told in NDiaye’s calm, unsettling sentences, where the strange things are reported as flatly as the ordinary ones. NDiaye wrote it in 1996; this is its first English translation, by her long-time translator.

Edition source: Hachette UK paperback, 7 April 2026; Vintage US paperback, 7 April 2026 (ISBN 9798217006809). ISBN 9781529449389.

2. The Anniversary, Andrea Bajani (2026)

translated from the Italian by Geoffrey Brock · winner of the Strega Prize 2025 · 144 pages

A son marks ten years since he last saw his parents, and goes back over the house he left: a father who ruled it by intimidation and a mother who went along. It is a short, controlled book about whether anyone can get free of where they come from, and in Italy it was both a bestseller and the winner of the country’s biggest literary prize.

Edition source: Penguin Classics paperback (Penguin International Writers), 2 July 2026; Other Press in the US, 25 August 2026. ISBN 9780241766507.

3. Sisters in Yellow, Mieko Kawakami (2026)

translated from the Japanese by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio · 1990s Tokyo · 448 pages

Hana is fifteen, poor and living with her young mother when an older girl, Kimiko, helps her open a bar called Lemon in the back alleys of Sangenjaya. The bar gives her work, friends and money, and the book follows how far she will go to keep them. It is the longest novel here and the easiest to race through, from the author of Breasts and Eggs.

Edition source: Picador UK hardback, 19 March 2026; Knopf in the US, 17 March 2026. ISBN 9781035024131.

4. Night of a Thousand Hells, Intan Paramaditha (2026)

translated from the Indonesian by Stephen J. Epstein and Tiffany Tsao · gothic · National Book Award finalist 2026

The youngest of three sisters becomes a suicide bomber, and the two left behind start uncovering their family’s secrets and their grandmother’s prophecies, in Indonesia, the United States and Australia. The publisher calls it a feminist gothic novel, and it mixes Indonesian folklore, Islamic mysticism and horror with politics. It is the newest book here, out this month.

Edition source: Europa Editions paperback, October 2026 (6 October per the distributor’s listing; the publisher’s page gives the year), 384 pages. ISBN 9798889662129.

Bodies, doubles and altered states

Four books in which the body, or a borrowed one, is the story: a woman who is disappearing, an illness no doctor can name, a festival on a volcano, and a man who clears the dead from the road.

5. Body Double, Hanna Johansson (2026)

translated from the Swedish by Kira Josefsson · surreal thriller · Warwick Prize longlist 2026

A young woman types up strangers’ recorded voices for a ghostwriter, until she hears a message on the tapes meant only for her. Across the city, Laura and Naomi swap coats in a department-store café, and Laura moves in and slowly takes over Naomi’s life. Meanwhile the transcriber finds she is starting to disappear. Short and eerie, about the selves we show and the ones we hide.

Edition source: Scribe UK paperback, 12 March 2026, 224 pages; Catapult published it in the US in April 2026. ISBN 9781917189514.

6. My Dreadful Body, Egana Djabbarova (2026)

translated from the Russian by Lisa C. Hayden · debut · 144 pages · National Book Award longlist 2026

A young woman grows up in a traditional Azerbaijani community in Russia with a neurological condition that causes pain and slurs her speech and that no doctor can diagnose. The people around her treat her body as damaged goods, and the illness becomes, against the odds, her way out of what is expected of her. Frank and short, in what its publisher calls the confessional feminist tradition.

Edition source: New Vessel Press paperback, April 2026 (Publishers Weekly gives the month; booksellers give 7 April); no separate UK edition found. ISBN 9781954404410.

7. Electric Shamans at the Festival of the Sun, Mónica Ojeda (2026)

translated from the Spanish by Sarah Booker · Ecuador · psychedelic · 240 pages

Two best friends from Guayaquil, Noa and Nicole, go to a week-long music festival at the foot of an active volcano. Noa loses herself in drugs and dancing to hide why she really came; Nicole senses something wrong under the celebration. Ojeda writes it as chant, hallucination and ritual, and it is about girlhood and violence underneath. The strangest book on this page.

Edition source: Coffee House Press paperback, 12 May 2026; Granta in the UK, April 2026 (9 April per booksellers; Granta’s page refused our reader). ISBN 9781566897556.

8. Bury Your Dead, Ana Paula Maia (2026)

translated from the Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan · Brazil · last of a trilogy, readable alone

Edgar Wilson clears roadkill from the highways of rural Brazil. When vultures gather in the woods he goes to see what they have found, and a day-long journey turns up defrocked priests, abandoned bodies and a gang trading in body parts. It closes the loose trilogy that began with Of Cattle and Men and continued in On Earth As It Is Beneath, shortlisted for this year’s International Booker, but the books share a world rather than a plot.

Edition source: Charco Press paperback, August 2026 (UK booksellers give 11 August; Charco’s page gives no date), £11.99. ISBN 9781917260343.

Growing up against the rules of a place

A teacher in Dakar, a boy in Indonesia who will not pray, two students in Hong Kong after the protests, and a farm girl leaving Iceland. Each book is about what a society expects and what it costs to refuse.

9. Pure Men, Mohamed Mbougar Sarr (2026)

translated from the French by Lara Vergnaud · Senegal · 208 pages · National Book Award finalist 2026

A viral video shows a crowd in Dakar digging up a grave and dragging out the corpse. Ndéné, a literature teacher, sets out to learn who the dead man was, and finds he was a góor-jigéen, the Wolof term for gay men and others outside accepted gender roles. The search takes him far from his family’s strict faith and starts to unsettle his own certainties. Sarr won the Prix Goncourt in 2021 for The Most Secret Memory of Men; this is the shorter novel he wrote before it.

Edition source: Other Press paperback, 2 June 2026; no UK edition found. ISBN 9781635424706.

10. The Dog Meows, the Cat Barks, Eka Kurniawan (2026)

translated from the Indonesian by Annie Tucker · coming of age · 128 pages · comic

Sato Reang’s father wants a pious son. Sato stops praying, runs with the wild boys, drinks, fights and steals, then sets about corrupting Jamal, his devout classmate, with darker results than he expects. It is the funniest book here and one of the shortest, from the author of Beauty Is a Wound.

Edition source: Pushkin Press paperback, 21 May 2026; New Directions in the US, March 2026 (ISBN 9780811239769). ISBN 9781805334897.

11. Everyday Movement, Gigi L. Leung (2026)

translated from the Chinese by Jennifer Feeley · Hong Kong · debut · 288 pages

Two college roommates, Ah Lei and Panda, wake up in Hong Kong the morning after a protest against the national security law. Ah Lei is frightened for her city; Panda gets ready for brunch. The novel follows how the unrest seeps into family visits, work and dates, and it is as much about the comfort of ordinary life as about politics.

Edition source: Riverhead US hardback, February 2026 (Publishers Weekly gives the month; Penguin’s Australian listing gives 24 February); no UK edition found. ISBN 9780593855379.

12. Boudoir, Sigrún Pálsdóttir (2026)

translated from the Icelandic by Lytton Smith · five decades · 224 pages

In 1962 Teddý lives with her parents on a farm among the lava fields of rural Iceland. Two chance meetings set her off on a life that runs across five decades and takes in cheque fraud, thwarted ambition and lost astronauts. It is a novel about reinvention and the pull of the lives we leave, and none of the lists we checked has picked it up.

Edition source: Peirene Press paperback, 7 April 2026. ISBN 9781916806146.

The editions behind these choices

The ISBN beside each book is the edition whose page we read on 11 October 2026: the UK publisher’s page where we could read one, otherwise the American publisher’s. The Hachette page for The Witch does not name the translator; Jordan Stump is credited on the International Booker shortlist and the US edition. Where the publisher’s page gave no exact day (Night of a Thousand Hells, My Dreadful Body, Everyday Movement, Bury Your Dead, the UK Electric Shamans) the entry says where the day comes from. Pure Men, My Dreadful Body and Everyday Movement have no British edition that we could find, so UK readers will be buying the American one. Prices and UK shop stock were not checked.

The honest bit

This is a checked list, not a ranking. A current-year list can only say what is out and what publishers and early reviewers say about it; none of these books has had time to settle, which is why there are no scores. Translators are named because a translation is a version, and the same book can read very differently in other hands.

Several books on prize lists this year are left off because their English translation is not new. Taiwan Travelogue was first published in English in 2024. Karl Ove Knausgaard’s The School of Night, a National Book Award finalist after its American publication this year, was first published in Britain by Harvill Secker in November 2025. Centroeuropa by Vicente Luis Mora, another finalist, was first published in English by Peninsula Press in London in 2023. On Earth As It Is Beneath, Ana Paula Maia’s Booker-shortlisted novel, came out from Charco Press in 2025, which is why her new book is here instead.

We also kept the spread of languages wide, so some good 2026 translations are not here: All My Love by Agnes Lidbeck (Swedish) and The Family by Sara Mesa (Spanish), both from Peirene, Eden at Dawn by Karim Kattan (French, Restless Books) and White Moss by Anna Nerkagi (Russian, Pushkin Press).

Still to come: The Mystery of What Befell in the Ditch by Thure Erik Lund, translated from the Norwegian by David M. Smith (And Other Stories, due 20 October), Gjak by Dimosthenis Papamarkos, translated from the Greek by Siân Valvis (Peirene, 27 October), To the East of the East by Ping Lu, translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang (World Editions, 3 November) and Dams by Irene Solà, translated from the Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem (Graywolf, 3 November; Granta, 5 November). We will look at them when we next check this list, in early November.

Questions

What won the International Booker Prize in 2026?

Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, translated from Mandarin Chinese by Lin King, announced on 19 May 2026. Its English translation was first published in 2024, so it is not on this list of 2026 translations; The Witch by Marie NDiaye, from the same shortlist, is.

Is Mieko Kawakami’s Sisters in Yellow out in English?

Yes. Picador published it in the UK on 19 March 2026 and Knopf in the US on 17 March 2026, translated from the Japanese by Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio.

What is a short translated novel from 2026 to start with?

The Dog Meows, the Cat Barks by Eka Kurniawan (128 pages, from the Indonesian) if you want something funny, or The Witch by Marie NDiaye or The Anniversary by Andrea Bajani (both 144 pages) if you want something stranger or sadder.

Book search is better at the translated books that already have a reputation than at this year’s. Describe what you want, such as a short novel from a language you have never read, or Japanese fiction that is not about cats, and it will look across the backlist.

Describe the translated fiction you want next

Best literary fiction books 2026: The year’s new literary novels written in English, including the Booker Prize shortlist, are there rather than here.

Books like Before the Coffee Gets Cold: Older Japanese and Korean fiction in translation, from Kawabata to Yu Miri, if Sisters in Yellow sends you looking for more.

How the comparison was bounded

Checked 11 October 2026 against four lists that could be read: Book Riot’s most anticipated books in translation of 2026 (January 2026; names The Witch, Sisters in Yellow, Everyday Movement, Electric Shamans and The Dog Meows, the Cat Barks), Words Without Borders’ most anticipated books of 2026 (January 2026; Pure Men, My Dreadful Body, Electric Shamans), the Center for the Art of Translation’s fall 2026 preview (The Anniversary) and CLMP’s reading list for National Translation Month (31 August 2026; My Dreadful Body). Body Double, Night of a Thousand Hells, Bury Your Dead and Boudoir appear on none of the four. We found no critic’s list of the best translated books of 2026 so far, so none is counted.