Every year, France, Japan, Brazil and more crown their best book. Spin the globe to see which ones you can read in English, and which are still waiting.
4,667 books · 44 prizes · 39 countries
Showing 19 of 114 books. 95 aren’t in English yet: show all.
Magnesia Litera 2024 · Winner
Rozložíš paměť
Marek Torčík · 30 when first published
Novel · 348 pages · Coming of age, Family, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:Woken at 3.37 a.m. by a phone call from his mother, a young man is pulled back into memories of growing up queer in a poor family in the conservative industrial Moravian town of Přerov.
Magnesia Litera 2023 · Shortlist
Život po Kafkovi
Magdaléna Platzová · 50 when first published
Novel · 256 pages · Historical, Migration
AI-generated summary:A novelist sets out in 2010 to find traces in America of Felice Bauer, Kafka's former fiancée, who married, had two children, emigrated and kept the letters of the man who left her for forty years.
Magnesia Litera 2022 · Shortlist
Cestou špendlíků nebo jehel
Zuzana Říhová · 40 when first published
Novel · 243 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Bohumil and Bohumila move from Prague with their mentally disabled son to a small village in the borderlands to save their marriage, and during a hot summer they try to fit in with the locals.
Magnesia Litera 2017 · Shortlist
Jezero
Bianca Bellová · 46 when first published
Novella · 186 pages · Coming of age, Nature
AI-generated summary:In a fishing village at the end of the world, by a lake that is drying up, a boy named Nami who has nothing but a grandmother sets out to find the mother who vanished from his life.
Magnesia Litera 2017 · Shortlist
Voliéry
Zuzana Brabcová · 57 when first published
Novel · 132 pages · Autofiction
AI-generated summary:In diary-like notes from December 2012 to February 2015, a woman longs to escape her loneliness and feel close to someone, yet cannot overcome her fear of being hurt again by indifference.
Magnesia Litera 2014 · Shortlist
Dějiny světla
Jan Němec · 32 when first published
Novel · 412 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Told to its hero in the second person, the life of the photographer František Drtikol unfolds from a silver-mining town in Bohemia through art-nouveau Munich to the bohemian Prague of the interwar republic.
Magnesia Litera 2013 · Winner
Stropy
Zuzana Brabcová · 53 when first published
Novel · 228 pages
AI-generated summary:In the detox ward of a psychiatric hospital, several women from different walks of life live side by side, and their pasts, traumas and visions break through the walls and ceilings.
Magnesia Litera 2011 · Shortlist
Nebe nemá dno
Hana Andronikova · 43 when first published
Novel · 302 pages · Autofiction, Nature
AI-generated summary:After her father's death and a diagnosis of cancer, a woman travels to the Peruvian jungle and the Nevada desert, trying to come to terms with her own possible end.
Magnesia Litera 2010 · Shortlist
Na krásné modré Dřevnici
Antonín Bajaja · 67 when first published
Novel · 426 pages · Coming of age, Family, Politics
AI-generated summary:Written as letters to his sister, a man remembers their childhood in Zlín just after the war, as the communists take power and the town becomes Gottwaldov.
Magnesia Litera 2010 · Shortlist
Vyhnání Gerty Schnirch
Kateřina Tučková · 29 when first published
Novel · 460 pages · Historical, War, Family
AI-generated summary:On the night of 30 May 1945, Gerta Schnirch, mother of a baby girl, is driven out of Brno towards Vienna with the city's other Germans.
Magnesia Litera 2009 · Shortlist
Cesta na jih
Michal Ajvaz · 59 when first published
Novel · 596 pages · Crime, Speculative
AI-generated summary:In a village on the south coast of Crete, the narrator meets a young man who tells him how a search for the killer of two brothers led him there from Prague.
Magnesia Litera 2009 · Shortlist
Milostný dopis klínovým písmem
Tomáš Zmeškal · 42 when first published
Novel · 315 pages · Love, Politics, Historical
AI-generated summary:A love story struck by the political persecution of the 1950s: a prisoner of the regime grows estranged from those closest to him, in a state that reaches into private bedrooms.
Magnesia Litera 2007 · Winner
Peníze od Hitlera
Radka Denemarková · 38 when first published
Novel · 252 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:In 1945 Gita, a sixteen-year-old who has survived a concentration camp, hurries home to her Czech village, only to find there is nowhere to return to.
Magnesia Litera 2006 · Winner
Selský baroko
Jiří Hájíček · 38 when first published
Novella · 200 pages · Historical, Crime
AI-generated summary:A genealogist who builds family trees for emigrants is hired to find the woman who in the 1950s wrote a letter denouncing farmers in a South Bohemian village.
Magnesia Litera 2005 · Winner
Možná že odcházíme
Jan Balabán · 43 when first published
Short stories · 155 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Stories of tired, lonely people at the moment when something suddenly unsettles everything they have lived so far: a man afraid of birds, a woman leaving her husband, patients in an alcohol clinic.
Magnesia Litera 2005 · Shortlist
Zatím dobrý
Jan Novák · 51 when first published
Novel · 451 pages · Historical, Family, Politics
AI-generated summary:A family saga through two world wars and two totalitarian regimes, ending in a western-like chase in which five young men with pistols try to fight their way past twenty thousand East German police to the West.
Magnesia Litera 2003 · Winner
O rodičích a dětech
Emil Hakl · 44 when first published
Novel · 153 pages · Family, Autofiction
AI-generated summary:A man of forty spends a whole day walking through Prague with his father, thirty years older, the two of them trading stories instead of arguments.
Magnesia Litera 2002 · Shortlist
Noční práce
Jáchym Topol · 39 when first published
Novel · 320 pages · Coming of age, Politics
AI-generated summary:When Warsaw Pact troops invade Czechoslovakia, a father takes his two young sons from Prague to the village he comes from, to hide them until things calm down.
Magnesia Litera 2002 · Shortlist
Europeana
Patrik Ouředník · 44 when first published
Novel · 151 pages · Historical, Satire
AI-generated summary:A mosaic of invented episodes, documents, dates and paraphrases surveys the twentieth century, its turning points and its haste, in a deliberately naive voice.