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
APE 2026 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Manual for Going About Amazed at Being Alive”
Patrícia Portela · 51 when first published
Novel · 132 pages
AI-generated summary:Taking José Gomes Ferreira's fable The Adventures of João Sem Medo as its starting point, this book leads readers past the barrier of the real and through a parade of characters from his world to rediscover what imagination can do.
APE 2025 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Unwritten Autobiography of Martha Freud”
Teolinda Gersão · 84 when first published
Novel · 413 pages · Historical, Love
AI-generated summary:Drawing on the letters Martha Bernays and Sigmund Freud exchanged during their engagement, from 1882 to 1886, the novel gives a voice to the woman long remembered only as Freud's wife.
APE 2024 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Every Wound Is a Beauty”
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida · 41 when first published
Novella · 55 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Maria, a little girl possessed by the need to put words on paper and burst out laughing, clashes with her godmother, who wants a quiet, ordinary child and punishes her, often cruelly, for writing at all.
APE 2023 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Mercy”
Lídia Jorge · 76 when first published
Novel · 457 pages
AI-generated summary:In the Hotel Paraíso, a care home in the invented town of Valmares, Dona Alberti, confined to a wheelchair but sharp of mind, records on tape the last year of her life among the residents and their carers.
APE 2022 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Around the World in Twenty and a Half Days”
Julieta Monginho · 63 when first published
Novel · 177 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Leo, a child weighed down by an unloving family, decides to run away for good, no longer content with visiting the painted dog Puck at Amsterdam's Rijksmuseum or slipping off to the nearby windmill.
APE 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Synopsis of Love and War”
Afonso Cruz · 50 when first published
Novel · 175 pages · Love, Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:Theobald Thomas and Bluma Janek seem meant for each other from birth and find each other through books, until one August night in post-war Berlin a wall goes up between them.
APE 2022 · Shortlist
Maremoto
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida · 39 when first published
Novel · 304 pages · War, Family
AI-generated summary:In Lisbon, Boa Morte da Silva, an old soldier who now parks cars, and a girl from Rua do Loreto become friends like a chance grandfather and granddaughter, while he writes letters to a daughter who is almost a stranger.
APE 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Though I Am an Old Wanderer”
Mário Cláudio · 80 when first published
Novel · 172 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Newly found papers about the poet Tiago Veiga, above all the diary his Irish wife Ellen Rassmunsen kept at the Caramulo sanatorium, lead his biographer to write a final account of the man.
APE 2022 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Júlia Mann's Return to Paraty”
Teolinda Gersão · 81 when first published
Novella · 139 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Three linked novellas about real lives: the bond between Freud and Thomas Mann, and Júlia Mann, the Brazilian-born mother of Thomas and Heinrich Mann, looked down on in Germany for being of mixed race and South American.
APE 2021 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Against Me”
Valter Hugo Mãe · 49 when first published
Novel · 281 pages · Autofiction, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:The author goes back to his own childhood to tell how a boy who would become a writer learned to make words his food, his company, his refuge and even small pieces of God.
APE 2021 · Shortlist
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida · 38 when first published
Novel · 89 pages · Family, Migration
AI-generated summary:Filomena, who sent her small daughter Solange from war-torn Angola to be raised by an aunt in Portugal, keeps their bond alive almost entirely by telephone, the two meeting only rarely in Luanda or Lisbon.
APE 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Night of the Barricades”
H. G. Cancela · 53 when first published
Novel · 225 pages · Politics, Family
AI-generated summary:Seen through his son's eyes, the life and defeat of a revolutionary shaped by the street fighting of May 1968 in Paris and by Portugal's revolution of April 1974.
APE 2021 · Shortlist
João Tordo · 45 when first published
Novel · 390 pages · Love, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Lisbon, 1973: with the revolution only months away, a boy of seventeen falls for Felicidade, a classmate and one of the three identical Kopejka sisters, the most admired girls at their school.
APE 2021 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Infected City”
Teresa Veiga · 75 when first published
Novel · 172 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:In a small, tradition-bound town in the interior, a woman's murder shatters the calm, while two very different women, Raquel and Anabela, become friends on a computing course.
APE 2020 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Triptych of Salvation”
Mário Cláudio · 78 when first published
Novel · 197 pages · Historical, Crime
AI-generated summary:Hans Kunsperger, scribe to an elderly, esteemed lawyer, slowly murders his master to take over his dream of giving a church an altarpiece of Christ's death and resurrection, which leads him to Lucas Cranach's studio.
APE 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Gesture We Make to Protect Our Heads”
Ana Margarida de Carvalho · 50 when first published
Novel · 255 pages · Historical, War
AI-generated summary:Near the Spanish border in the Alentejo, while fugitives and news of executions cross over from the Civil War, two men meet on a road: one returning bent on revenge, the other hauling olives just to get by.
APE 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Men of Dust”
António Tavares · 59 when first published
Novel · 220 pages · Historical, Migration, Politics
AI-generated summary:In Portugal's Hot Summer of 1975, with civil war looming and the empire collapsing, a handful of Africans driven into exile, most of them from Angola, labour on road gangs in a country they do not know.
APE 2020 · Shortlist
A Visão das Plantas
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida · 37 when first published
Novel · 304 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Captain Celestino, a former pirate who once smothered a revolt of the Africans he was shipping to Brazil, ends his days almost a saint, quietly tending a garden, in a story drawn from a passage in Raul Brandão.
APE 2020 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Light of Beijing”
Francisco José Viegas · 57 when first published
Novel · 395 pages · Crime · Jaime Ramos, book 9
AI-generated summary:A body hangs from the Dom Luís bridge in Porto and a woman's corpse lies in the Douro hills, and Inspector Jaime Ramos, facing an internal inquiry, finds the two cases are connected.
APE 2019 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“A Dancer in the Battle”
Hélia Correia · 69 when first published
Novel · 115 pages · Migration, War
AI-generated summary:Fleeing war, a band of people walks across the desert towards Europe and the hope of peace, in a novel written like an epic poem in prose.
APE 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Luanda, Lisbon, Paradise”
Djaimilia Pereira de Almeida · 36 when first published
Novel · 229 pages · Migration, Family
AI-generated summary:Sent from Luanda to Lisbon for medical treatment, Cartola and his son Aquiles struggle with illness, debts and calls home, until they find shelter and a friend in a valley on the edge of the city.
APE 2019 · Shortlist
Joana Bértholo · 36 when first published
Novel · 499 pages · Speculative, Satire
AI-generated summary:In a society that has become one with the market, where everything has a price, people start to be charged for the words they speak, and the novelty soon turns into enthusiasm.
APE 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“A Wall in the Middle of the Road”
Julieta Monginho · 60 when first published
Novel · 245 pages · Migration
AI-generated summary:Refugees who have survived the sea crossing find a wall barring their way into Europe, and in the camps that grow beside it, volunteers from many countries arrive to help.
APE 2019 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Invisible One”
Rui Lage · 43 when first published
Novel · 281 pages · Crime, Speculative, Historical
AI-generated summary:In 1931 a remote mountain village is tormented at night by unseen forces and opened graves, and the poet Fernando Pessoa, medium and astrologer, turns detective to solve the mystery.
APE 2018 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Persons of the Drama”
H. G. Cancela · 50 when first published
Novel · 283 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:With a wall in front of him and a blade at his back, a narrator tells a story of guilt, incest and violence within a family that becomes a critical look at Europe's past and its dealings with the Arab world.
APE 2018 · Shortlist
Carla Pais · 38 when first published
Novel · 204 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:In a village split down the middle by a stream from a spring, a young man freed after ten years of torment and a girl whose little brother cannot speak fall in love, and dream of escaping over the mountains to be free.
APE 2018 · Shortlist
A Sociedade dos Sonhadores Involuntários
José Eduardo Agualusa · 57 when first published
Novel · 288 pages · Politics, Satire
AI-generated summary:Daniel Benchimol, an Angolan journalist, keeps dreaming of strangers, and dreams draw him together with a Mozambican artist, a Brazilian scientist and a hotelier with a violent past, in a country whose dictatorship is crumbling.
APE 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Where Do Cats Go When They Die?”
Luís Cardoso · 59 when first published
Novel · 267 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:A man goes back to Ataúro, the island off East Timor where he grew up, in search of someone, and the trip carries him back through his youth, exile, struggles and losses that run beside his country's history.
APE 2018 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The False Memories of Manoel Luz”
Marlene Ferraz · 38 when first published
Novel · 351 pages
AI-generated summary:When a great publisher dies, Manoel Luz, a bookseller, uncovers secrets that make him doubt the account he has always given of his own life, in the years after Portugal's April revolution.
APE 2017 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“You Cannot Live in a Cat's Eyes”
Ana Margarida de Carvalho · 47 when first published
Novel · 350 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:Late in the nineteenth century, after slavery has been abolished, an illegal slave ship goes down off Brazil, and its survivors, from overseer and slave to priest and noblewoman, wash up on a beach that vanishes at high tide.
APE 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“God Will Provide”
Alexandra Lucas Coelho · 49 when first published
Novel · 563 pages
AI-generated summary:Over seven days in present-day Rio de Janeiro, seven characters live through a story that reaches back across five centuries of the past that Portugal and Brazil share.
APE 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Fat Woman”
Isabela Figueiredo · 53 when first published
Novel · 285 pages · Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Maria Luísa is bright, good-looking, hard-working and determined, yet she is overweight, and that one fact colours everything as she bears her classmates' cruelty and goes after a life that is worth the effort.
APE 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Little Europe”
Mafalda Ivo Cruz · 57 when first published
Novel · 331 pages
AI-generated summary:A novel that treats Europe, with its wars of faith and nation, its empires, revolutions and ideologies, as the unconscious of the present, and means to be a place of abundance rather than a picture of society.
APE 2017 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Lost Steps”
Paulo Varela Gomes · 64 when first published
Novel · 387 pages
AI-generated summary:Anna W., a woman no one can read, is seen at sixteen, twenty, thirty-three and forty-five, from Saint Helena and a Moroccan village to European cities in the 1970s and India in the late 1980s.
APE 2016 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Once Upon a Time in Goa”
Paulo Varela Gomes · 63 when first published
Novel · 363 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:In 1963, two years after Portugal lost its Indian territories, Graham, a hard-up Englishman, reaches Goa by dubious means and is taken time and again for a Portuguese agent.
APE 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Flowers”
Afonso Cruz · 44 when first published
Novel · 275 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:A man so wounded by the tragedies he reads in the papers that he can no longer recall his first kiss is helped by his neighbour, who shrugs off the world's woes, to win back the memories he has lost.
APE 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Bright Dawns”
Amadeu Lopes Sabino · 72 when first published
Novel · 524 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:Michel Lidzki, a Jew in flight from everything, Judaism included, shares his last years in the 1960s and 1970s with Baudouin Dunesme, his Belgian partner's son, a Maoist militant who joins the guerrilla war against Israel.
APE 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Timorese (1973–1980)”
Joana Ruas · 70 when first published
Novel · 613 pages · War, Historical, Politics · A Pedra e a Folha, book 3
AI-generated summary:Between 1973 and 1980, FRETILIN guerrillas led by Nicolau Lobato wage a lonely war of independence against the Indonesian invasion of East Timor, cut off from the world with nowhere to fall back.
APE 2016 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Portuguese Dream”
Paulo Castilho · 71 when first published
Novel · 468 pages · Family, Satire
AI-generated summary:All that remains of the Mendes family's former wealth is the Vivenda Pérola, and they wait impatiently to inherit childless Uncle Leonardo's Alentejo estate by the Alqueva reservoir, hoping to make it a luxury resort.
APE 2015 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Portrait of a Boy”
Mário Cláudio · 73 when first published
Novella · 139 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:A father fed up with his wayward son Giacomo leaves the boy at Leonardo da Vinci's workshop, where the painter, struck by his looks, renames him Salai and takes him on as a servant.
APE 2015 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Impunity”
H. G. Cancela · 47 when first published
Novel · 222 pages
AI-generated summary:A man gropes his way through the dark, then drives all night from Portugal into Spain; in Seville he lets himself into a top-floor flat and finds two children asleep among signs of neglect.
APE 2015 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Memorable Ones”
Lídia Jorge · 68 when first published
Novel · 341 pages · Politics, Historical
AI-generated summary:In 2004 Ana Maria Machado, a Portuguese reporter based in Washington, returns home to film the story of the 1974 revolution, tracking down its heroes and witnesses with two former colleagues.
APE 2015 · Shortlist
Luísa Costa Gomes · 60 when first published
Novella · 222 pages
AI-generated summary:In a light, affectionate, utopian world, two brothers keep stumbling on the big and small questions that knowing the world raises, in a comic tale that plays with famous paradoxes of philosophy.
APE 2015 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“There Are No Lemons in Heaven”
Sandro William Junqueira · 40 when first published
Novel · 423 pages · Speculative, Politics, Migration
AI-generated summary:In a world split by war between a wealthy North and a poor South, the southerners will try anything to share in the North's comfort, and the northerners anything to keep it to themselves.
APE 2014 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“What Does the Fury of the Sea Matter”
Ana Margarida de Carvalho · 44 when first published
Novel · 239 pages · Historical, Politics, Love
AI-generated summary:One night in 1934, a prisoner being taken to the new Tarrafal camp in Cape Verde throws a bundle of letters from the train; decades later Eugénia, a journalist, interviews him as one of its last survivors.
APE 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Where Umbrellas Go”
Afonso Cruz · 42 when first published
Novel · 620 pages
AI-generated summary:In a storybook East, half remembered past and half imagined present, the lives of a man who longs to be invisible, a boy who dreams of becoming a plane and a woman set on a blue-eyed husband become entwined.
APE 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Casanova's Letters: Lisbon 1757”
António Mega Ferreira · 64 when first published
Novel · 206 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:In mid-1757, not long after escaping from prison in Venice, Giacomo Casanova lands in a Lisbon still in ruins from the earthquake and spends six weeks trying to make sense of the Portuguese.
APE 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Implosion”
Nuno Júdice · 64 when first published
Novella · 118 pages · Politics
AI-generated summary:In an invented country of a Europe falling apart, two men who once plotted against a dictatorship run into each other at a protest, and one takes the other to see a coffin in a church.
APE 2014 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Dehumanization”
Valter Hugo Mãe · 42 when first published
Novel · 238 pages · Family, Coming of age
AI-generated summary:Among the remote fjords of Iceland, a girl who is not like the others describes what is left of her life after her twin sister dies.
APE 2013 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“And the Night Turns”
Alexandra Lucas Coelho · 45 when first published
Novel · 246 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Ana, a Catalan journalist, and Léon, a Belgian, meet in Jerusalem and share an on-and-off passion for two years across the Middle East, Europe and America, which she later sets out to write down.
APE 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Jesus Christ Drank Beer”
Afonso Cruz · 41 when first published
Novel · 248 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:In a tiny Alentejo village, a girl sets about turning the place into Jerusalem so that her grandmother, whose dearest wish is to see the Holy Land, can believe she has made the journey.
APE 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Girl Without Flesh”
Jaime Rocha · 63 when first published
Novel · 77 pages
AI-generated summary:Mateus watches Salomé wake in his bed and finds her body changed overnight: her skin darker, almost green, and her scars now looking like marks she was born with, as if she were no longer quite human.
APE 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Balcony, Followed by Sunset in Carvangel”
Mário de Carvalho · 68 when first published
Novella · 220 pages
AI-generated summary:Two tales in one volume, peopled by a cannon that looms over a city yet never fires, a gallows put up by night, anarchists nobler than any commoner, a cellist cleric and a ship that is always awaited.
APE 2013 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Banquet”
Patrícia Portela · 38 when first published
Novel · 325 pages
AI-generated summary:A playful return to humanity's founding myths, from Plato's cave and the trees of Eden to a Faust who will not honour his pact, mixing philosophy with everyday matters to chew over our immortality.
APE 2012 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Lake”
Ana Teresa Pereira · 53 when first published
Novel · 129 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Jane, an actress, is drawn into an all-consuming bond with Tom, the man who directs her, until she can no longer tell herself apart from the parts she plays.
APE 2012 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“Leonor's Lights”
Maria Teresa Horta · 74 when first published
Novel · 1065 pages · Historical, Love
AI-generated summary:The life of Leonor de Almeida Portugal, Marquise of Alorna and granddaughter of the Távoras, a woman torn between reason and feeling in the age of the Enlightenment.
APE 2012 · Shortlist
Mário Cláudio · 70 when first published
Novel · 798 pages · Historical
AI-generated summary:The life of the poet Tiago Veiga (1900–1988), a great-grandson of Camilo Castelo Branco who lived and died in rural Alto Minho, told by a biographer who met him.
APE 2012 · Shortlist
Title translated by AI:“The Sagittarius Complex”
Nuno Júdice · 62 when first published
Novella · 129 pages
AI-generated summary:Modelled on Sade's Philosophy in the Bedroom, this short work borrows its games with language for a dialogue that moves back and forth between essay and poetry.
APE 2012 · Shortlist
A Cidade de Ulisses
Teolinda Gersão · 71 when first published
Novel · 197 pages · Love
AI-generated summary:Two people meet and fall in love in Lisbon, and their affair turns into a love story with the city itself, ranging over myth and history, literature and painting, past and present.
APE 2011 · Winner
Uma Viagem à Índia
Gonçalo M. Tavares · 40 when first published
Novel · 410 pages
AI-generated summary:A man sets off for India hoping both to understand and to put things behind him, in a journey of present-day melancholy that rewrites Camões's sixteenth-century epic The Lusiads for our time.
APE 2010 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Let the Invisible Man Through”
Rui Cardoso Martins · 42 when first published
Novel · 235 pages
AI-generated summary:As a flash flood hits Lisbon, a blind lawyer drops through an uncovered manhole and a boy scout is carried into the same drain, and the two must make their way together through the city's underworld.
APE 2009 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Third Mother”
Julieta Monginho · 50 when first published
Novel · 276 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:The people around Rosalina, among them a poet brother, a rebellious daughter and a granddaughter who loves her dearly, piece together her life of loneliness, love and loss from girlhood to her final years.
APE 2008 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“The Lizard's Den”
Filomena Marona Beja · 63 when first published
Novel · 269 pages · Historical, Politics
AI-generated summary:A biographical novel about Duarte Pacheco, the minister of public works who brought Salazar from Coimbra and served beside him for twenty years as the Estado Novo remade Lisbon and the country.
APE 2007 · Winner
Maria Gabriela Llansol · 75 when first published
Novel · 253 pages
AI-generated summary:Written after a death, a work of mourning carried out through writing itself, which moves in linked fragments from darkness towards light as grief becomes a lesson in silence.
APE 2006 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Far from Manaus”
Francisco José Viegas · 43 when first published
Novel · 443 pages · Crime
AI-generated summary:When a stranger is found dead in an apartment near Porto, Inspector Jaime Ramos follows a trail of lonely lives that runs between Portugal, Brazil and memories of Angola.
APE 2005 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Behind the Magnolia”
Vasco Graça Moura · 62 when first published
Novel · Historical, Family
AI-generated summary:The fortunes of the Lemos family and their house in Gouvães, a village in the Alto Douro, tell the story of Portugal and its changing outlook, in a chronicle of secrets, forbidden love and drama.
APE 2004 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Red”
Mafalda Ivo Cruz · 44 when first published
Novel · 214 pages · Family
AI-generated summary:Tito, a narrator with a troubled mind, tries to piece together his family's history from its gaps and silences, from keepsakes that may be false, and above all from the stories his stepfather Mário tells him.
APE 2003 · Winner
O Vento Assobiando nas Gruas
Lídia Jorge · 56 when first published
Novel · 528 pages · Migration, Love
AI-generated summary:In an invented Algarve village, Milene, thirty-four and seeing everything with a child's eyes, stays behind when her relatives go on holiday and lets a group of Cape Verdean immigrants settle in the disused cannery her family owns.
APE 2002 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Family Jewel”
Agustina Bessa-Luís · 79 when first published
Novel · 345 pages · Family, Crime · O Princípio da Incerteza, book 1
AI-generated summary:On a family estate in the Douro, a maid secretly replaces her mistress's newborn, who has not survived, with her own baby, and the boy grows up as António Clara, known as Cravo Roxo.
APE 2001 · Winner
Title translated by AI:“Irene, or the Social Contract”
Maria Velho da Costa · 62 when first published
Novel · 218 pages
AI-generated summary:In Lisbon in the last years of the twentieth century, an old woman called Irene, whose figure recalls the writer Irene Lisboa, lives among people such as Orlando, a young mixed-race graffiti artist.
APE 2000 · Winner
Exortação aos Crocodilos
António Lobo Antunes · 57 when first published
Novel · 378 pages · Politics, Crime
AI-generated summary:In Portugal after the 1974 revolution, four women whose men belong to a clandestine far-right group planting bombs tell, each in her own voice, what is going on around them.