Famous at home. Unknown in English.

International Booker 2026 · Shortlist

On Earth as It Is Beneath

Assim na terra como embaixo da terra

Ana Paula Maia · 40 when first published

Novel · 112 pages · Crime, Politics

Translated by Padma Viswanathan

AIAI-generated summary:In a remote penal colony about to be closed, built on ground soaked in the torture of enslaved people, the chief officer Melquíades hunts prisoners for sport on nights of the full moon.

International Booker 2026 · Shortlist

The Director

Lichtspiel

Daniel Kehlmann · 48 when first published

Novel · 352 pages · Historical, Politics

Translated by Ross Benjamin

AIAI-generated summary:The film director G. W. Pabst, who escaped to Hollywood when the Nazis took power, finds himself back in his annexed Austrian homeland, courted by the propaganda minister in Berlin.

International Booker 2026 · Shortlist

The Witch

La Sorcière

Marie NDiaye · 29 when first published

Novel · 144 pages · Family

Translated by Jordan Stump

AIAI-generated summary:Lucie is a witch of little talent, while her two daughters prove far more gifted than she ever hoped, and her own mother's powers are absolute.

International Booker 2026 · Shortlist

She Who Remains

Остайница · Ostaynitsa

Rene Karabash · 29 when first published

Novel · 150 pages · Family

Translated by Izidora Angel

AIAI-generated summary:In a mountain village in Albania where the Kanun, an ancient code of laws, still rules daily life, Bekia swears a vow of virginity and lives as a man and head of her family.

International Booker 2026 · Shortlist

The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran

Nachts ist es leise in Teheran

Shida Bazyar · 28 when first published

Novel · 272 pages · Migration, Family, Politics

Translated by Ruth Martin

AIAI-generated summary:In Tehran in 1979, the young communist Behsad fights for a new order after the Shah's fall and falls in love with Nahid; ten years later they and their children are refugees in a small German town.

International Booker 2025 · Shortlist

A Leopard-Skin Hat

Un chapeau léopard

Anne Serre · 48 when first published

Novel · 122 pages

Translated by Mark Hutchinson

AIAI-generated summary:Over two decades the Narrator keeps his gaze on his friend Fanny, an unreadable young woman whose stiff, half-frozen body seems to hold some pain, and tries to bring her back to life with words.

International Booker 2025 · Shortlist

Under the Eye of the Big Bird

大きな鳥にさらわれないよう · Ōkina tori ni sarawarenai yō

Hiromi Kawakami · 58 when first published

Novel · 288 pages · Speculative

Translated by Asa Yoneda

AIAI-generated summary:Far in the future, with humankind close to dying out, people live in small separate groups, hoping that unions between groups will produce children with new genes, humans able to evolve.

International Booker 2025 · Shortlist

On the Calculation of Volume I

Om udregning af rumfang I

Solvej Balle · 58 when first published

Novel · 160 pages · Love, Speculative · Om udregning af rumfang, book 1

Translated by Barbara J. Haveland

AIAI-generated summary:Back from a short trip, Tara Selter finds herself caught in a single day, the eighteenth of November, while her husband Thomas wakes every morning believing it is happening for the first time.

International Booker 2025 · Shortlist

Small Boat

Naufrage

Vincent Delecroix · 54 when first published

Novel · 122 pages · Migration, Politics

Translated by Helen Stevenson

AIAI-generated summary:In November 2021 a migrant boat sinks in the Channel after repeated calls for help go unanswered; the novel imagines the woman at the coastguard centre who took those calls.

International Booker 2025 · Shortlist

Perfection

Le perfezioni

Vincenzo Latronico · 38 when first published

Novel · 115 pages · Satire

Translated by Sophie Hughes

AIAI-generated summary:Anna and Tom, a creative couple in a bright Berlin flat full of plants, seem to have a life everyone would want, until a deep dissatisfaction they cannot pin down begins to grow.

International Booker 2024 · Shortlist

Mater 2-10

철도원 삼대 · Cheoldowon samdae

Hwang Sok-yong · 77 when first published

Novel · 486 pages · Historical, Family, Politics

Translated by Sora Kim-Russell, Youngjae Josephine Bae

AIAI-generated summary:A laid-off worker staging a protest atop a factory chimney talks through the cold nights to the dead of his family, three generations of railwaymen whose lives run through a century of Korean history.

International Booker 2024 · Shortlist

The Details

Detaljerna

Ia Genberg · 55 when first published

Novel · 144 pages

Translated by Kira Josefsson

AIAI-generated summary:Laid low by fever, a woman finds herself visited by figures from her past: a future celebrity who once wrote to her, a companion who vanished without trace, a lover she could never keep.

Also: Augustpriset 2022 ★ winner

International Booker 2024 · Shortlist

Crooked Plow

Torto Arado

Itamar Vieira Junior · 40 when first published

Novel · 288 pages · Family, Politics · Trilogia da terra, book 1

Translated by Johnny Lorenz

AIAI-generated summary:Two little sisters in the backlands of Bahia open their grandmother's case and find a strange old blade; what happens next ties their lives together for good.

Also: Jabuti 2020 ★ winner

International Booker 2024 · Shortlist

What I'd Rather Not Think About

Waar ik liever niet aan denk

Jente Posthuma · 46 when first published

Novel · 224 pages · Family

Translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey

AIAI-generated summary:One and Two are twins, named by One because he was born fifteen minutes first. When he kills himself, his sister holes up in his flat and tries to work out how it came to this.

International Booker 2024 · Shortlist

Not a River

No es un río

Selva Almada · 47 when first published

Novel · 99 pages

Translated by Annie McDermott

AIAI-generated summary:Two men, Enero and El Negro, take Tilo, the teenage son of their dead friend Eusebio, fishing, and through a long night of drinking, cooking and talk, ghosts of the past and present close in.

International Booker 2023 · Shortlist

Whale

고래 · Gorae

Cheon Myeong-kwan · 40 when first published

Novel · 367 pages

Translated by Chi-Young Kim

AIAI-generated summary:A girl from a mountain village becomes a businesswoman in a small town amid a crowd of schemers and misfits, and years later her mentally disabled daughter Chunhui comes back from prison to a ruined brick factory.

International Booker 2023 · Shortlist

Boulder

Boulder

Eva Baltasar · 42 when first published

Novel · 112 pages · Love

Translated by Julia Sanches

AIAI-generated summary:A woman drawn to solitude cooks aboard a cargo ship, with the ocean, long empty hours and women met in ports, until one lover keeps her ashore in a house and brings her into an assisted pregnancy.

International Booker 2023 · Shortlist

Standing Heavy

Debout-payé

GauZ' · 43 when first published

Novel · 167 pages · Migration, Satire

Translated by Frank Wynne

AIAI-generated summary:Ossiri, an Ivorian student who arrives in Paris without papers in 1990, finds work as a security guard and watches the city and its shoppers from his post.

International Booker 2023 · Shortlist

Still Born

La hija única

Guadalupe Nettel · 47 when first published

Novel · 200 pages · Family

Translated by Rosalind Harvey

AIAI-generated summary:Eight months into her pregnancy, Alina is told that her daughter cannot survive birth; her close friend Laura tells how Alina and her partner face the news, alongside the story of her neighbour Doris and Doris's troubled son.

International Booker 2023 · Shortlist

The Gospel According to the New World

L'Évangile du nouveau monde

Maryse Condé · 87 when first published

Novel · 256 pages

Translated by Richard Philcox

AIAI-generated summary:Found one Easter evening lying on straw beside a donkey, a foundling named Pascal is raised by an elderly couple of gardeners and grows up looking for God, his father, and for a way to change the world.

International Booker 2022 · Shortlist

Cursed Bunny

저주토끼 · Jeoju tokki

Bora Chung · 41 when first published

Short stories · 256 pages · Speculative

Translated by Anton Hur

AIAI-generated summary:Ten tales of horror, science fiction and fantasy shaped like folktales and legends, in which revenge returns again and again: a cursed rabbit aimed at a rival liquor maker, a head that rises from a toilet calling a woman mother.

Also: National Book Award 2023 finalist

International Booker 2022 · Shortlist

Elena Knows

Elena sabe

Claudia Piñeiro · 47 when first published

Novel · 176 pages · Crime, Family

Translated by Frances Riddle

AIAI-generated summary:Rita's body turns up at the church she attended, and the inquiry is soon shut; only her mother, herself ravaged by illness, refuses to stop hunting for whoever killed her.

International Booker 2022 · Shortlist

A New Name: Septology VI–VII

Eit nytt namn

Jon Fosse · 62 when first published

Novel · 232 pages · Septologien, book 3

Translated by Damion Searls

AIAI-generated summary:As Christmas nears on a fjord north of Bergen, an ageing painter feels he has finished with painting, while his namesake and double prepares to spend Christmas with his neighbour and the neighbour's sister.

Also: National Book Award 2022 finalist · Brage 2021 ★ winner

International Booker 2022 · Shortlist

Heaven

ヘヴン · Hebun

Mieko Kawakami · 33 when first published

Novel · 192 pages · Coming of age

Translated by Sam Bett, David Boyd

AIAI-generated summary:A fourteen-year-old boy who is tormented and beaten by his classmates, and cannot understand why he only ever submits, receives an unsigned letter telling him: we are friends.

International Booker 2022 · Shortlist

The Books of Jacob

Księgi Jakubowe

Olga Tokarczuk · 52 when first published

Novel · 903 pages · Historical

Translated by Jennifer Croft

AIAI-generated summary:In the eighteenth-century Polish-Lithuanian Commonwealth, Jacob Frank proclaims himself the Messiah, and several thousand Jews from Podolia follow him into baptism and a long journey in search of a place of their own.

Also: Nike 2015 ★ winner

International Booker 2021 · Shortlist

When We Cease to Understand the World

Un verdor terrible

Benjamín Labatut · 40 when first published

Short stories · 192 pages · Historical

Translated by Adrian Nathan West

AIAI-generated summary:Linked narratives follow real scientists and mathematicians, among them Fritz Haber, Alexander Grothendieck, Schrödinger and Heisenberg, through discoveries that transform the world and sometimes drive their makers to the edge of madness.

Also: National Book Award 2021 finalist

International Booker 2021 · Shortlist

The War of the Poor

La guerre des pauvres

Éric Vuillard · 51 when first published

Novel · 80 pages · Historical, Politics

Translated by Mark Polizzotti

AIAI-generated summary:Between 1524 and 1526 the common people of the Holy Roman Empire rise in revolt; a short, burning narrative follows Thomas Müntzer, a religious leader of the rebels, and sets the uprising among the rebellions of the early Reformation.

International Booker 2021 · Shortlist

In Memory of Memory

Памяти памяти · Pamyati pamyati

Maria Stepanova · 45 when first published

Novel · 400 pages · Family, Autofiction

Translated by Sasha Dugdale

AIAI-generated summary:Setting out to write the story of her own family, a writer works through its archive of papers and objects and is soon asking whether the past can be kept in memory at all.

Also: Warwick Prize 2021 shortlist

International Booker 2021 · Shortlist

The Dangers of Smoking in Bed

Los peligros de fumar en la cama

Mariana Enríquez · 36 when first published

Short stories · 208 pages

Translated by Megan McDowell

AIAI-generated summary:Twelve horror stories in which something sinister seeps into everyday life: a girl digs up bones in a garden, a despised beggar brings misfortune on a wealthy street, a dead rocker's fans honour him in an unthinkable way.

International Booker 2021 · Shortlist

The Employees

De ansatte

Olga Ravn · 32 when first published

Novel · 133 pages · Speculative

Translated by Martin Aitken

AIAI-generated summary:On a ship in the twenty-second century, a crew of humans and human-like beings give statements after objects brought aboard from a newly found planet stir in them a deep attachment they cannot explain.

International Booker 2020 · Shortlist

Tyll

Tyll

Daniel Kehlmann · 42 when first published

Novel · 334 pages · Historical, War

Translated by Ross Benjamin

AIAI-generated summary:Early in the seventeenth century, Tyll Ulenspiegel, a miller's boy, has to run from his village after his father, who dabbles in magic and studies nature, clashes with the Church; with Nele, a baker's girl, he wanders a land torn by war.

International Booker 2020 · Shortlist

Hurricane Season

Temporada de huracanes

Fernanda Melchor · 35 when first published

Novel · Crime

Translated by Sophie Hughes

AIAI-generated summary:Children playing by a muddy ditch outside the Mexican village of La Matosa find the body of the Witch, a woman feared and respected by the locals. Suspicion turns to some young men seen running from her house.

International Booker 2020 · Shortlist

The Adventures of China Iron

Las aventuras de la China Iron

Gabriela Cabezón Cámara · 49 when first published

Novel · Love

Translated by Fiona Mackintosh, Iona Macintyre

AIAI-generated summary:Freed from the gaucho who won her at cards, a young woman of the pampas, the China Iron, sets out across the Argentine desert with Liz, an Englishwoman searching for her husband.

International Booker 2020 · Shortlist

The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree

اشراق درخت گوجه سبز · Eshragh-e derakht-e gojeh sabz

Shokoofeh Azar · 47 when first published

Novel · 256 pages · Politics, Family

Translated by Anonymous

AIAI-generated summary:In Iran just after the Islamic Revolution of 1979, a family is caught up in the chaos and violence that sweep across the ancient land, in a story told in the magic realist manner of classical Persian tales.

International Booker 2020 · Shortlist

The Memory Police

密やかな結晶 · Hisoyaka na kesshō

Yoko Ogawa · 32 when first published

Novel · 411 pages · Speculative

Translated by Stephen Snyder

AIAI-generated summary:On an island where things vanish one by one, birds, perfume, soda pop, and people's hearts thin out with each loss, a novelist keeps writing while 'memory hunts' carry on the disappearances.

Also: National Book Award 2019 finalist

International Booker 2019 · Shortlist

The Remainder

La resta

Alia Trabucco Zerán · 31 when first published

Novel · 208 pages · Politics, Family

Translated by Sophie Hughes

AIAI-generated summary:When the body of a Chilean woman who lived in exile under the dictatorship is stranded in the Andes, her daughter and two childhood friends, children of former militants, set out by hearse across the mountains to bring it home.

International Booker 2019 · Shortlist

The Years

Les Années

Annie Ernaux · 68 when first published

Nonfiction · 241 pages · Autofiction, Historical

Translated by Alison L. Strayer

AIAI-generated summary:Starting from photographs and memories, a woman born in the 1940s traces the passing decades from the end of the Second World War to the present, writing her life as an impersonal, collective autobiography.

Also: Warwick Prize 2019 ★ winner

International Booker 2019 · Shortlist

The Shape of the Ruins

La forma de las ruinas

Juan Gabriel Vásquez · 42 when first published

Novel · Politics, Historical

Translated by Anne McLean

AIAI-generated summary:In 2014 a man is arrested in Bogotá for trying to steal the suit of the murdered politician Jorge Eliécer Gaitán from a museum, and a chance meeting draws the narrator, a writer, into his web of conspiracies.

International Booker 2019 · Shortlist

The Pine Islands

Die Kieferninseln

Marion Poschmann · 48 when first published

Novel · 192 pages

Translated by Jen Calleja

AIAI-generated summary:After dreaming that his wife is cheating on him, a lecturer who studies beards leaves her and takes the first plane to Japan. Inspired by the poet Bashō, he sets out to see the moon over the Pine Islands, and meets a student carrying a manual of suicide.

Also: Deutscher Buchpreis 2017 shortlist

International Booker 2019 · Shortlist

Drive Your Plough Over the Bones of the Dead

Prowadź swój pług przez kości umarłych

Olga Tokarczuk · 47 when first published

Novel · 314 pages · Crime, Nature

Translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones

AIAI-generated summary:In a remote mountain hamlet in the Kłodzko Valley, Janina Duszejko, an eccentric older woman who loves astrology and translates Blake, looks after her absent neighbours' houses until local hunters start dying.

Also: Warwick Prize 2019 shortlist

International Booker 2018 · Shortlist

Frankenstein in Baghdad

فرانكشتاين في بغداد · Frankenstein fi Baghdad

Ahmed Saadawi · 40 when first published

Novel · 288 pages · Speculative, War

Translated by Jonathan Wright

AIAI-generated summary:In Baghdad in 2005, junk dealer Hadi al-Attag stitches the body parts of bombing victims into one corpse. When a wandering soul enters it, the creature rises to take revenge on those who killed each of its parts.

Also: IPAF 2014 ★ winner

International Booker 2018 · Shortlist

Like a Fading Shadow

Como la sombra que se va

Antonio Muñoz Molina · 58 when first published

Novel · 531 pages · Crime, Autofiction

Translated by Camilo A. Ramirez

AIAI-generated summary:A writer follows James Earl Ray, the killer of Martin Luther King, through the ten days he spent in Lisbon in 1968 seeking a visa for Angola, and retraces his own first visit to the city as a young man.

International Booker 2018 · Shortlist

The White Book

흰 · Huin

Han Kang · 46 when first published

Novel · 132 pages

Translated by Deborah Smith

AIAI-generated summary:One spring a writer resolves to set down everything white and begins with a list: swaddling bands, a newborn's gown, salt, snow, a shroud. Each item opens a short piece about something that can never be sullied.

Also: Warwick Prize 2018 shortlist

International Booker 2018 · Shortlist

The World Goes On

Megy a világ

László Krasznahorkai · 59 when first published

Short stories · 288 pages

Translated by George Szirtes, Ottilie Mulzet, John Batki

AIAI-generated summary:Stories and speeches in three parts, in which a narrator speaks, then tells, then takes his leave, encountering Gagarin, a flightless Okinawan rail, a homeless man in the Berlin metro and Nietzsche in Turin.

Also: Aegon 2014 shortlist

International Booker 2018 · Shortlist

Vernon Subutex 1

Vernon Subutex 1

Virginie Despentes · 46 when first published

Novel · 396 pages · Satire · Vernon Subutex, book 1

Translated by Frank Wynne

AIAI-generated summary:Vernon Subutex, a former record-shop owner adrift in Paris, loses his flat after his last benefactor, a rock star, dies of an overdose, and drifts from couch to couch, unaware that people are looking for him.

International Booker 2017 · Shortlist

Judas

הבשורה על פי יהודה · Ha-besora al pi Yehuda

Amos Oz · 75 when first published

Novel · 308 pages · Love, Politics

Translated by Nicholas de Lange

AIAI-generated summary:In the winter of 1959, a young student whose life has fallen apart takes a job as companion to a sharp-tongued disabled old man in an ancient stone house in Jerusalem, where he meets an alluring older woman.

International Booker 2017 · Shortlist

Mirror, Shoulder, Signal

Spejl, skulder, blink

Dorthe Nors · 46 when first published

Novel · 188 pages

Translated by Misha Hoekstra

AIAI-generated summary:Sonja, a single, anxious woman in her forties living in Copenhagen, is trying and failing to learn to drive under a domineering instructor, while bouts of vertigo and memories of her rural childhood pull her off course.

International Booker 2017 · Shortlist

Compass

Boussole

Mathias Énard · 43 when first published

Novel · 464 pages · Love

Translated by Charlotte Mandell

AIAI-generated summary:Night falls on Vienna, where Franz Ritter, a musicologist in love with the Orient, cannot sleep and drifts through memories of his travels and of Sarah, the elusive woman he has always loved.

Also: Goncourt 2015 ★ winner

International Booker 2017 · Shortlist

The Unseen

De usynlige

Roy Jacobsen · 59 when first published

Novel · 244 pages · Family, Historical

Translated by Don Bartlett, Don Shaw

AIAI-generated summary:On a tiny island far out off Norway's Helgeland coast, Ingrid grows up in the Barrøy family between 1913 and 1928, in a world of fish, storms and poverty that she knows as her own.

International Booker 2017 · Shortlist

Fever Dream

Distancia de rescate

Samanta Schweblin · 36 when first published

Novel · 160 pages

Translated by Megan McDowell

AIAI-generated summary:Amanda lies dying in a rural clinic, unsure why or where her small daughter is, while David, a neighbour's boy, questions her about the days since the two of them came to stay in the country.

International Booker 2016 · Shortlist

The Story of the Lost Child

Storia della bambina perduta

Elena Ferrante

Novel · 480 pages · Family, Coming of age · L'amica geniale, book 4

Translated by Ann Goldstein

AIAI-generated summary:Elena, now an established writer, separated and with two daughters, returns to Naples for a youthful love, while her friend Lila, who never left the neighbourhood, has become its charismatic leader and a computer entrepreneur.

Also: Strega 2015 shortlist

International Booker 2016 · Shortlist

A General Theory of Oblivion

Teoria Geral do Esquecimento

José Eduardo Agualusa · 52 when first published

Novel · Historical

Translated by Daniel Hahn

AIAI-generated summary:As Angola nears independence amid riots, a frightened Portuguese woman in Luanda bricks herself into her flat, sealed off from her neighbours and the world, and lives there alone for nearly thirty years.

International Booker 2016 · Shortlist

A Strangeness in My Mind

Kafamda Bir Tuhaflık

Orhan Pamuk · 62 when first published

Novel · Migration, Love

Translated by Ekin Oklap

AIAI-generated summary:Mevlut leaves his village near Beyşehir for Istanbul as a boy and spends more than forty years in its streets, working many jobs but always thinking of himself as a seller of boza, the old fermented drink.

International Booker 2016 · Shortlist

A Whole Life

Ein ganzes Leben

Robert Seethaler · 48 when first published

Novel · 154 pages · Love

Translated by Charlotte Collins

AIAI-generated summary:Brought to a mountain valley as a small child, Andreas Egger grows up a hired hand and later works with the crew laying an early cable car, which brings electric power, light and noise to his remote home.

International Booker 2016 · Shortlist

The Four Books

四書 · Si shu

Yan Lianke · 53 when first published

Novel · Historical, Politics

Translated by Carlos Rojas

AIAI-generated summary:In a re-education zone for intellectuals during the Great Leap Forward, inmates known only as the Author, the Scholar, the Musician and Theology live through the steel campaign and the famine that follows.