10 Translated Novels That Prove the Best Books Aren't Written in English

Only about 3% of books published in English are translations. That means 97% of what fills your local bookshop comes from a single linguistic tradition. If you only read in English, you're reading with blinkers on. These ten translated novels are proof of what you've been missing.

1. My Brilliant Friend — Elena Ferrante (2011, Italy)

The first volume of the Neapolitan Quartet follows Elena and Lila from childhood in a poor Naples neighbourhood through adolescence and beyond. Ferrante writes about female friendship with a ferocity that English-language fiction rarely matches — the love, the envy, the competition, the devotion. The prose is direct and compulsive. Most readers finish all four volumes within a month. You've been warned.

2. The Memory Police — Yoko Ogawa (1994, Japan)

On an unnamed island, things disappear. Not physically at first — the concept of the thing vanishes from people's minds, and then they destroy the physical objects. Roses. Photographs. Birds. A young novelist watches her world shrink as the Memory Police enforce each disappearance. Ogawa wrote a quiet, devastating allegory about censorship, loss, and the fragility of memory. It reads like Orwell rewritten by someone gentler and sadder.

3. The Dinner — Herman Koch (2009, Netherlands)

Two couples meet at a restaurant for dinner. Over five courses, the real reason for the dinner emerges: their teenage sons have done something terrible. Koch ratchets the tension with each course, peeling back the polished surface of bourgeois Amsterdam to reveal the violence underneath. It's a page-turner that asks uncomfortable questions about how far parents will go to protect their children.

4. Convenience Store Woman — Sayaka Murata (2016, Japan)

Keiko has worked at a convenience store for 18 years. She's content. Everyone around her thinks this is a problem. Murata wrote a razor-sharp satire about conformity and the tyranny of "normal" that's both very Japanese and completely universal. At 163 pages, it's a single-sitting read that'll make you question every assumption you have about what a successful life looks like.

5. Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead — Olga Tokarczuk (2009, Poland)

Janina is an eccentric retired woman living in a remote Polish village. When local hunters start turning up dead, she suspects the animals are taking revenge. Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize for Literature, and this novel shows why — it's a murder mystery, an ecological manifesto, and a character study of a woman the world dismisses as crazy. The Blake-inspired title isn't decorative; the book is genuinely angry about how we treat the natural world.

6. A Gentleman in Moscow — Amor Towles (2016, Russia-set, American author)

Alright, this one's originally in English, but its subject is so deeply Russian I'm including it as an honorary entry. Count Rostov is sentenced to house arrest in Moscow's Metropol Hotel for the rest of his life. Over 30 years, he builds a full, rich existence within the hotel's walls. Towles writes with warmth and wit, and the Count is one of the most charming protagonists in modern fiction. If you love Russian literature but find Dostoevsky heavy going, start here.

6 (actual). Fever Dream — Samanta Schweblin (2014, Argentina)

A woman lies dying in a rural clinic. A boy who is not her son sits beside her, guiding her through the story of what happened. It's 180 pages of pure dread — Schweblin creates an atmosphere of wrongness that builds until you're reading with your hands over your eyes. It's about environmental poisoning, motherhood, and the horror of not being able to protect your child. The translation by Megan McDowell is flawless.

7. The Vegetarian — Han Kang (2007, South Korea)

Yeong-hye stops eating meat after a violent dream. Her husband is embarrassed. Her father is furious. Her brother-in-law becomes obsessed with her. In three devastating novellas, Han Kang traces what happens when a woman's simple refusal escalates into a crisis that consumes her family. It won the International Booker Prize and reads like a fable about bodily autonomy and the violence of patriarchal control.

8. My Year of Rest and Relaxation — Ottessa Moshfegh (2018, USA)

Another English-language book — I'm cheating again. But this novel about a beautiful young woman in pre-9/11 New York who decides to sleep for an entire year feels translated from some colder, more honest literary tradition. Moshfegh's protagonist is repellent and magnetic in equal measure. The black humour is European in its bleakness. It's a satire of privilege, depression, and the American belief that the right product can fix anything.

8 (actual). 1Q84 — Haruki Murakami (2009, Japan)

Aomame steps off the highway, climbs down an emergency staircase, and enters a parallel Tokyo with two moons. Meanwhile, Tengo is asked to ghostwrite a strange novel by a teenage girl. Their stories converge across 1,000 pages of Murakami's most ambitious work. It's long, but it's Murakami — the pages turn themselves. The translation by Jay Rubin and Philip Gabriel preserves the hypnotic, deadpan rhythm that makes his prose so distinctive.

9. The White Book — Han Kang (2016, South Korea)

A meditation on the colour white, on death, on a sister who lived for only two hours. Han Kang writes in fragments — some a paragraph, some a single sentence — that accumulate like snow. It's not a novel exactly, more a work of mourning rendered in prose and image. At 80 pages, you can read it in under an hour, but you'll carry it with you much longer than that.

10. My Name Is Red — Orhan Pamuk (1998, Turkey)

Set in 16th-century Istanbul, this is a murder mystery narrated by multiple voices — including a corpse, a dog, a tree, a coin, and the colour red itself. Ottoman miniaturists are being murdered, and the investigation becomes a philosophical debate about art, representation, and the tension between tradition and innovation. Pamuk won the Nobel Prize, and this novel is the reason. It's intricate, playful, and rewards rereading.

Start reading wider

Reading in translation isn't an obligation — it's an expansion. Each of these books offers a way of seeing the world that you won't find in English-language fiction, not because English writers are worse, but because every language carries its own rhythms, assumptions, and silences. The best way to become a more interesting reader is to read from more places.