Fiction in Translation

A major, retrospective launch of Roberto Bolaño's work - now published as a Vintage Classics author for the first time. When Oscar Amalfitano begins an affair with one of his students, he has no idea where it will lead. More than his turbulent revolutionary past, or the death of his beautiful wife, the scandalous exposure of this relationship will change...

A major, retrospective launch of Roberto Bolaño's work - now published as a Vintage Classics author for the first time. Amidst the seedy hotels and deserted campsites of the Costa Brava, someone has gone missing. A detective sets out to find them. They search among the hapless girls, failed poets, and shifty policemen that populate this dream world - but...

A major, retrospective launch of Roberto Bolaño's work - now published as a Vintage Classics author for the first time. Auxilio Lacouture is trapped. For twelve days she hides alone in a lavatory on the fourth floor of her university. Staring at the floor, she begins a heartfelt and feverish tale - she is the Mother of Mexican poetry. A...

The first volume of the award-winning romantic comedy manga—now also a hit anime series—with over a million copies in print in Japan! Girl meets boy the old-fashioned way—in an online game. The first volume of the popular manga that inspired the anime series! College student Akane has just been dumped by her boyfriend. Heartbroken, she decides to quit the online...

A sparkling new translation of Pushkin's masterpiece. Eugene Onegin is the master work of the poet whom Russians regard as the fountainhead of their literature. Set in 1820s Russia, Pushkin's verse novel follows the fates of three men and three women. Engaging, full of suspense, and varied in tone, it contains a large cast of characters and offers the reader...

One of Japan's most treasured novels, new to Penguin Classics. Botchan is a modern young man from the Tokyo metropolis, sent to the ultra-traditional Matsuyama district as a Maths teacher after the death of his parents. Cynical, rebellious, and immature, Botchan finds himself facing several tests, from the pupils — prone to playing tricks on their new, naive teacher; the...

An electrifying story about love and new life from the international phenomenon, Karl Ove Knausgaard. Karl Ove Knausgaard's dazzling new novel, The Morning Star, is available to pre-order now. This is a book about leaving your wife and everything you know. It is about fresh starts, about love, about friendship. It is also about the earth-shattering experience of becoming a...

Set in the claustrophobic atmosphere of a dingy haberdasher's shop in the passage du Pont-Neuf in Paris, this powerful novel tells how the heroine and her lover, Laurent, kill her husband, Camille, but are subsequently haunted by visions of the dead man and prevented from enjoying the fruits of their crime. Published in 1867, this is Zola's most important work...

A new translation of Simenon's visceral, critically acclaimed classic. And always the dirty snow, the heaps of snow that look rotten, with black patches and embedded garbage. The white powder that occasionally peels off from the crust of the sky in little clumps, like plaster from a ceiling, is unable to cover the filth. Most people struggle to get by...

A tale of intense friendship and almost overwhelming grief amongst the frozen fjords of rural Norway. In winter, the black ice cracks like a gunshot across the lake, growing thicker and darker every night. Nearby, a frozen waterfall transforms into a fantastic, baroque structure with dripping buttresses, flying spurs of ice and translucent, sparkling towers. The schoolchildren call it the...

A sensational and mystical novel from one of the 20th century's greatest modernist writers. A Breath of Life is Clarice Lispector's final novel, "written in agony," which she did not live to see published. Sensual and mysterious, it is a mystical dialogue between a god-like author and the creation he breathes life into—the speaking, shifting, indefinable Angela Pralini. As he...

Kafka's chilling and darkly entertaining exploration of life's absurdity, now in Penguin Clothbound Classics. A terrifying psychological trip into the life of one Joseph K., an ordinary man who wakes up one day to find himself accused of a crime he did not commit, a crime whose nature is never revealed to him. Once arrested, he is released, but must...

A dazzling tale of mistaken motives, meddling nobles, and one villainess determined to rewrite her own ending. Juvelian's past is no longer a mystery, but she's running out of time in the present... This manhwa adaptation of Hong Heesu's webnovel is now available in English print for the first time. Juvelian's coming-of-age ceremony is finally happening, and the day is...

A special hardback edition of Murakami's mesmerising and evocative classic, After Dark. Published in this new gift edition, with an introduction from the author. A beautifully packaged hardback edition of Haruki Murakami's mesmerizingly evocative classic, now with a new introduction by the author. Eyes mark the shape of the city. The midnight hour approaches in an almost-empty diner. Mari sips...

In this cautionary tale, a ruthless businessman finally gets his comeuppance. When a wealthy wine merchant is shot and killed in Paris, Inspector Maigret must investigate a long list of family, colleagues, and lovers to uncover just who could have committed the crime. Delving into the depths of the man's personality, Maigret discovers that the victim may have made one...

Imagine waking up in a cosy photo studio in the mountains, between this world and the next. A kind man hands you a hot drink and a stack of photographs, one from every day of your life. There are hundreds, even thousands of them. They capture your best days and your worst, memories you treasure and those you try to...

You can't love someone without knowing their whole story . . . Fleeing a pitch-dark past, Emilia Innocenti arrives in a tiny village deep in the mountains of Piedmont, Northern Italy, with one aim: to hide away from the world. Surrounded only by a handful of inhabitants, the looming Alps, and the weight of her own terrible crime, Emilia is...

A masterpiece of German modernism and one of the greatest novels of the twentieth century. Doctor Faustus tells the story of Adrian Leverkühn, a young man destined for success. He is a composer—creative and brilliant—but he will stop at nothing to achieve greatness. Intentionally contracting syphilis in order to deepen his creative potential through madness, Adrian makes his pact with...

THERE ARE TWO SIDES TO EVERY STORY. WHICH ONE WILL YOU BELIEVE? 'Addictively readable. Absorbing, bittersweet' Pandora Sykes Gripping and emotional, The Divorce explores the unravelling of a marriage from first the wife, then the husband's point of view. Together for more than thirty years, Bea and Niklas live a comfortable life in Stockholm. But one evening, following a trivial...

There is no rest for Inspector Maigret when his seaside holiday leads him to a troubling discovery. At what point in the day could the note have been slipped into his pocket, his left breast pocket? It was an ordinary sheet of glazed squared paper, probably torn out of an exercise book. The words were written in pencil, in a...

The Engineer of Human Souls spins its own story from the torn entrails of Central Europe. Yet what emerges is comedy—clack, grimacing and explosively funny, as peculiarly middle European as the despairing wit of Prague's own Franz Kafka. Time

A new translation of this gripping novel set in an insular fishing community, part of the new Maigret series. It was indeed a photo, a picture of a woman. But the face was completely hidden, scribbled all over in red ink. Someone had tried to obliterate the head, someone very angry. The pen had bitten into the paper. There were...

The Saint-Fiacre Affair by Georges Simenon features Maigret returning to his home town in a new translation of this thrilling novel, part of the new Maigret series. The Countess of Saint-Fiacre dies from heart failure during mass on All Soul's Day, exactly when the police had been forewarned that a crime would occur.

A key novel from the 2008 Nobel Prize-winner for literature. War - in the mind of the fragile Bea B., in the infinite icy landscape she journeys through, in Vietnam, in 10,000 years of human history. The war of the title is not merely a war of arms but a generalised state of violence permeating every atom of Le Clezio's...

A new translation of this tragic tale of lost identity, part of the Maigret series. What was the woman doing here? In a stable, wearing pearl earrings, her stylish bracelet and white buckskin shoes! She must have been alive when she got there because the crime had been committed after 10 in the evening. But how? And why? And no...

A key novel from the 2008 Nobel Prize-winner for literature Upon an immense stretch of flat ground at the mouth of a river bathed in sunlight rises Hyperpolis. It stands there, surrounded by its four asphalt car-parks, to condemn us - a huge enveloping supermarket. Each of us will see ourselves reflected in the characters who move mindlessly about Hyperpolis,...

'A perpetual feast to the reader. Her prose is rich, flawless, intricate, audacious and utterly beautiful' - Raymond Mortimer Set in pre-war Paris, Julie de Carneilhan tells of the complex relationship between the proud but impoverished Julie and her former husband, the Comte d'Espivant, who has remarried a wealthy widow. Julie de Carneilhan was the last full-length novel Colette was...

Thomas Bernhard is one of the masters of contemporary European fiction. After Kafka's and Canetti's, his sensibility is one of the most acute, the most capable of exemplary images and gestures, in modern literature." — George Steiner, Times Literary Supplement Roithamer, a character based on Wittgenstein, has committed suicide having been driven to madness by his own frightening powers of...

A new translation of this gripping novel, originally intended as the last in the Maigret series, which sees the inspector brought out of his peaceful retirement. Maigret shrugged his shoulders, buried his hands in his pockets and went off without answering. He had just spent one of the most wretched days in his life. For hours, in his corner, he...

A devastating tale of misfortune, betrayal and the weakness of family ties, newly translated for the Maigret series. Instead of the detail filling itself in and becoming clearer, it seemed to escape him. The face of the man in the ill-fitting coat just misted up so that it hardly looked human. In theory, this mental portrait was good enough, but...

A new translation of this novel in which Maigret's leave in the Dordogne is disrupted by some sinister happenings. He recalled his travelling companion's agitated sleep—was it really sleep—his sighs, and his sobbing. Then two dangling legs in their patent leather boots and hand-knitted socks... A lacklustre face. Glazed eyes. And Maigret was not surprised to see a grey beard...

Exiled from Paris, Maigret discovers some disturbing secrets in a sleepy coastal town. A short, sprightly man appeared in the doorway, looked left and right, and went back into the passage. A moment later, the improbable happened. The little man reappeared, bent over, clinging to a long mass that he now started dragging through the mud. It must have been...

Imperious, clever, mysterious—Maigret meets his match in the alluring form of Felicie. In his mind's eye, he would see that slim figure in the striking clothes, those wide eyes the colour of forget-me-not, the pert nose, and especially the hat: that giddy, crimson bonnet perched on the top of her head with a bronze-green feather shaped like a blade stuck...

Through tight dialogue and absurd settings Franz Kafka creates a maze-like prose to mimic the bureaucracy of early twentieth-century Germany, trapping his protagonist in an unlawful conviction that alters the path of his life. Part of the Macmillan Collector's Library, a series of stunning, clothbound, pocket-sized classics with gold-foiled edges and ribbon markers. These beautiful books make perfect gifts or...

The rediscovered magical-realist classic by a bestselling poet for fans of Banana Yoshimoto and Kawaguchi's Before the Coffee Gets Cold A JAPANESE MODERN CLASSIC Discover the original and moving literary gem for fans of Banana Yoshimoto and Kawaguchi's Before the Coffee Gets Cold. What if you could come back after death to watch over your loved one, installing yourself in...

Return to the world of The Samurai Detectives, the multi-million copy bestselling series of thrilling adventure and inscrutable mystery. In the months since their last perilous quest, a fragile calm has settled over Edo. Daijiro dedicates his days to training the first pupil of his quiet riverside dojo, while his father Kohei—a famed swordsman whose name still inspires awe—drifts through...

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO RETURNS "Even more gripping and astonishing than the first" Sunday Times Lisbeth Salander can be viciously violent. Mikael Blomkvist knows it - and owes his life to it. When a criminologist and a journalist who works with Blomkvist at Millennium magazine are killed on the brink of publishing a brutal expose of human trafficking,...

THE GIRL WITH THE DRAGON TATTOO RETURNS "Not just the extraordinary conclusion to the trilogy, but a work that contains its own fully-rounded plot . . . Brilliant" Val McDermid Lisbeth Salander is a threat to national security. Since she was thirteen, shady government forces have conspired to keep her quiet. Prone to violence, deemed mentally disturbed, she has had...

Yosep was the only thing in the world, and Yosep's pain was the world's pain . . . Yosep is the passion of everyone's dreams. An impossibly beautiful K-Pop idol who inspires religious mania among his millions of fans, he seems so perfect he might not be of this world at all. Sacred, angelic: a Holy Boy. His devoted followers...

A woman is unnerved when a sinister package arrives in the post—containing her old diary entries. Strange and gripping, this is the unmistakable work of Marlen Haushofer, mistress of sustained dread and author of the cult classic, The Wall. An Austrian housewife sits in her loft intent on her drawings of birds and insects. The loft is a retreat where...

Kiss of the Spider Woman is described as 'a visionary work that breathed life into certain dimensions of human possibility long before society at large was prepared to imagine them,' according to Carolina de Robertis from the Los Angeles Review of Books. Valentin and Molina seemingly share little other than a cell in this queer classic ahead of its time....

VINTAGE EARTH - A series of transformative novels with the environment at their heart. The Man Who Planted Trees 'And so, with great care, he planted his hundred acorns.' While hiking through the wild lavender in a wind-swept, desolate valley in Provence, a man comes across a solitary shepherd called Elzeard Bouffier. Staying with him, he watches Elzeard sorting and...

Shogun meets Sherlock Holmes! Over 24 million copies have been sold of this beloved samurai adventure. It has been half a year since Akiyama Daijiro became a samurai; half a year since he left his father Kohei - the wisest swordsman in the land - to set up his own blade school by the cool of the river. Ever since,...

Final Exam is Julio Cortázar's bitter and melancholy allegorical farewell to an Argentina from which he would soon be permanently self-exiled. In a fog-drenched Buenos Aires, Juan and Clara should be preparing for their final exam. Instead, they roam the city with friends, drifting through cafés, encountering strange happenings, and unravelling life's mysteries. All the while, they are shadowed by...

The Menu of Happiness, translated from Japanese by Jesse Kirkwood, is the third book in the bestselling, delightful Japanese sleuthing series for fans of Before the Coffee Gets Cold. Welcome to the Kamogawa Diner, where every meal is a mystery ready to be solved. This unique establishment is run by a father-daughter duo who offer more than just mouth-watering meals....

September 1905. At the heart of the Ottoman Empire, in the ancient city of Smyrna, Scheherazade is born to an opium-dazed mother. At the very same moment, an Indian spy sails into the golden-hued, sycamore-scented city with a secret mission from the British Empire. When he leaves, 17 years later, it will be to the smell of kerosene and smoke...

VINTAGE QUARTERBOUND CLASSICS - Bound to be beautiful A beautiful hardback edition of the great Italian classic. 'Historical fiction at its best' – The Week It is the spring of 1869 and there is talk of revolution in Sicily. Fabrizio, the charismatic Prince of Salina, still rules over thousands of acres and hundreds of people, including his own numerous family,...

"One of contemporary fiction's most gifted sentence builders" Beejay Silcox, Guardian Behind the ornate doors of 30, rue du Metal in Brussels, twenty students begin their apprenticeship in the art of decorative painting - that art of tricksters and counterfeiters, where each knot in a plank of wood hides a secret and every vein in a slab of marble tells...

“My pen is the wing of a bird; it will tell you those thoughts we are not allowed to think, those dreams we are not allowed to dream” My Pen Is the Wing of a Bird showcases the rich literary history of Afghanistan. However, chronic instability and the current crisis have kept women's voices hidden. This anthology results from over...

Like Ursula K. Le Guin rewriting The Lord of the Flies for the quantum age — NPR Cixin Liu is the author of your next favourite sci-fi novel — WIRED Eight years ago and eight light years away, a supermassive star died. Tonight, a supernova tsunami of high energy will finally reach Earth. Dark skies will shine bright as a...

A satirical fable, a political allegory and an ecological warning from the author of The Three-Body Problem. On an otherwise ordinary day in the late Cretaceous, the seeds of Earth's first and greatest civilization were sown in the grisly aftermath of a Tyrannosaurus' lunch. From humble tooth-picking origins, ants and dinosaurs – two species so unalike and yet so complementary...

A major celebration of the French short story, spanning three centuries. The short story has a rich tradition in French literature. This feast of an anthology celebrates its most famous practitioners, as well as newly translated writers ready for rediscovery. The first volume spans 400 years, taking the reader from the sixteenth century to the 'golden age' of the fin...

The first novel from one of Italy's most innovative writers of the 20th century. 'The seething cauldron of life, the infinite stratification of reality, the inextricable tangle of knowledge are what Gadda wants to depict.' – Italo Calvino At the height of Fascist rule in Italy, and following the death of his mother, Carlo Emilio Gadda began work on his...

A story of the Jews in Eastern Europe in the 19th century through the eyes of a gentile peasant girl, from one of the greatest writers of Holocaust fiction. The teenage Katerina flees her abusive home in a poor, Christian village in the 1880s, finding work and shelter in the home of a Jewish family. In the warmth of their...

A deliciously deranged thriller about supernatural vengeance and postwar guilt, by one of Austria's most celebrated writers. Alexander Jessiersky, Austrian aristocrat and shipping magnate, finds the Nazis distasteful. However, in war and in business, distaste can lead to negligence. When Jessiersky's board of directors sends his mysterious neighbour, Count Luna, to a concentration camp on trumped-up charges in order to...

The Soviet Don Quixote, Chevengur is now seen by many Russian writers as Russia's greatest novel of the last century. 'Platonov is an extraordinary writer, perhaps the most brilliant Russian writer of the twentieth century' - New York Review of Books Chevengur is recognised as a pinnacle of Russian literature. This is the first English version to truly convey its...

The epic 1968 Malian novel that scandalised a generation, by the first African winner of the Prix Renaudot. Envisioned as a criticism of and insider's guide to African history, this dark, pugnacious epic, spanning the thirteenth to the twentieth centuries, recounts the fate of the imaginary empire of Nakem. With its acerbic pen portraits of the dynasty of devious, asp-wielding...

A woman settles in a remote Polish village. It has few inhabitants now, but it teems with the stories of its living and its dead. There’s the drunk Marek Marek, who discovers that he shares his body with a bird, and Franz Frost, whose nightmares come to him from a newly discovered planet. There’s the man whose death—with one leg...

A major, retrospective launch of Roberto Bolaño's work - now published as a Vintage Classics author for the first time. In this neighbourhood, only the dead go out for a walk... A young party animal collapses in a Parisian disco and dies on the dance floor, only to watch his soul departing his body. Two embittered police detectives debate their...

A powerful, poignant novel about three half-sisters in post-war Japan, from the Nobel Prize-winning author of Snow Country. With the Second World War only a few years in the past, and Japan still reeling from its effects, two half-sisters—born to the same father but different mothers—struggle to make sense of the new world in which they are coming of age....

The Penguin Book of Italian Short Stories is Jhumpa Lahiri's rich and varied selection of the greatest Italian writing of the twentieth century, now available as a Penguin Classics paperback. This landmark collection brings together forty writers, reflecting over a hundred years of Italy's vibrant and diverse short story tradition, from the birth of the modern nation to the end...

Elegant novellas-in-translation, VINTAGE EDITIONS celebrate the audacity and ambition of the written word, transporting readers to wherever in the world literary innovation may be found. From the bestselling author of The Adversary One morning, a man shaves off his long-worn moustache, hoping to amuse his wife and friends. But when nobody notices, or pretends not to have noticed, what started...

Discover Haruki Murakami's first two novels. Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 are Haruki Murakami's first two novels, and here they are together in one edition. Now I think it's time to tell my story. Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973 are Haruki Murakami's first two novels. Home from college on his summer break, the narrator spends his...

A funny, frightening and richly lyrical philosophical thriller, this new reissue sees Cortázar's The Winners back in print for the first time in decades. When a group of Argentinians win a mysterious lottery, their prize—a luxury cruise—seems too good to question. But as the voyage unfolds, strange and unsettling events begin to mount. The passengers find themselves trapped aboard a...

Vintage Classics WEIRD GIRLS: Dive into the depraved, delectable depths of women’s weird fiction. A lonely teenage girl falls in love with her foster-brother as she watches him leap from a high diving board into a pool, sparking an unspoken infatuation that draws out darker possibilities. A young woman records the daily moods of her pregnant sister in a diary,...

The award-winning, bestselling Japanese phenomenon. A propulsive, prophetic novel about the beauty of language and the nature of identity in the age of AI. Welcome to the Japan of tomorrow. Here, the practice of a radical sympathy toward criminals has become the norm - and a grand skyscraper in the heart of Tokyo is planned to house wrongdoers in compassionate...

A story of friendship and family secrets in 1970s Japan, from the prizewinning author of The Memory Police. On sleepless nights, I open the matchbox and reread the story of the girl who gathered shooting stars. After the death of her father, twelve-year-old Tomoko is sent to live for a year with her uncle in the coastal town of Ashiya....

The heartbreaking story of two orphans fighting for survival at the end of World War Two, published in English for the first time. In the dying days of the War, Seita and Setsuko must fend for themselves. Firebombs have obliterated their home in Kobe, leaving them searching for shelter and scrambling to survive in the depths of the countryside. But,...

A Wild Sheep Chase, Haruki Murakami's third novel, is the mystery hybrid which completes the odyssey begun in Hear the Wind Sing and Pinball, 1973. The man was leading an aimless life, time passing, one big blank. His girlfriend has perfectly formed ears, ears with the power to bewitch, marvels of creation. The man receives a letter from a friend,...

In 1970s Paris, a group of revolutionaries plot the daring kidnapping of a powerful Latin American official. But among them is Andrés, a man adrift in a world of high-stakes politics. As Andrés spirals into a crisis of identity, Cortázar intersects the group’s story with real-life documents, newspaper clippings, and personal reflections to construct a compelling mosaic that explores the...

The bestselling novel by cult writer Wang Xiaobo, a satire of the Cultural Revolution, in its first full English translation. ‘Life is but a slow, drawn-out process of getting your balls crushed.’ Twenty-one-year-old Wang Er, stationed in a remote mountain commune, spends his days herding oxen, napping, and dreaming of losing his virginity. His dreams come true in the shape...

A dreamlike, chimerical masterpiece from a lost pre-war Europe—critically acclaimed and rightly revered. Baron Bagge, a cavalry officer stationed in Eastern Europe during the First World War, receives orders to ride into a platoon of Russian machine guns. But instead of meeting certain death, he and his brigade pass, unscathed, into a bizarrely peaceful land where festivities are in full...

First published in 1877, these three stories are dominated by questions of doubt, love, loneliness, and religious experience, and together form a triumphant conclusion to Flaubert's literary career. With elegant simplicity, A Simple Heart relates the story of Felicite - an uneducated serving-woman who retains her Catholic faith despite a life of desolation and loss. Inspired by a stained-glass window...

The Sun on My Head is a collection of thirteen short stories set in Rio's largest favela, Rocinha. The collection gravitates around the childhoods and teenage years of boys who, in spite of having to deal with the anguish and difficulties inherent to their age, also struggle with the violence involved in growing up on the less favoured side of...

An updated translation of this risqué and comic account of three travellers. The Satyricon is one of the most outrageous and strikingly modern works to have survived from the ancient world. Most likely written by an advisor of Nero, it recounts the adventures of Encolpius and his companions as they travel around Italy, encountering courtesans, priestesses, con men, brothel-keepers, and...

One of Poland's most significant twentieth-century epics, by the 1924 winner of the Nobel Prize for Literature. In the village of Lipce, scandal, romance, and drama crackle in every hearth. Boryna, a widower and the village's wealthiest farmer, has taken the young and beautiful Jagusia as his bride - but she only has eyes for his impetuous son Antek. Over...

The final nail-biting instalment in the critically acclaimed Hidden Iceland series. 1987. An isolated farmhouse in the east of Iceland. The snowstorm should have shut everybody out. But it didn't. The couple should never have let him in. But they did. An unexpected guest, a liar, a killer. Not all will survive the night. And Detective Hulda Hermannsdóttir will be...

A major, retrospective launch of Roberto Bolaño's work - now published as a Vintage Classics author for the first time. 'If you're going to say what you want to say, you're going to hear what you don't want to hear...' A rat policeman comes to the startling realisation that each rat is out for themselves. An elderly judge gives up...

One of the most startling literary debuts of all time, now in Penguin Black Classics. As the First World War reaches its final year, an illicit love affair begins between a sixteen-year-old boy and a young woman married to a soldier at the front. They meet secretly in her flat on the outskirts of Paris, in cornfields and on river...

Welcome to Buenos Aires, a place of nightmares and twisted imaginings, where missing children come back from the dead and unearthed bones carry terrible curses. Thrumming with murderous intentions, family betrayals, and morbid desires, these stories shine a light on a violent city gripped by urban madness; giving voice to the lost, the oppressed, and the forgotten. Lucid and darkly...