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Shame

Mieko Kawakami

‘During sex, Narumi would picture herself as steamed rice being turned into mochi rice cakes.’

Swimming Underwater

Merethe Lindstrøm

‘When I picture my childhood, it’s like I’m swimming underwater.’ Merethe Lindstrøm’s story is translated from the Norwegian by Marta Eidsvåg, and is the winner of Harvill Secker’s Young Translators’ Prize 2016.

Terminus

Pedro Rosa Mendes

‘We hope that the copilot knows the terrain well. That his mask of youth conceals the face of a seasoned veteran of war. That he knows the minefields because he helped plant them.’

The Animal Gesture

Alejandro Morellón

‘I have drunk from the same waters as the son of Hermes and Aphrodite.’

Fiction by Alejandro Morellón, translated by Esther Allen.

The Flowers Look More Beautiful Now Than Ever

Mieko Kawakami

‘It’s hard to imagine a country where a lockdown would function perfectly, but in the case of Japan, which lacks basic individualism, the current situation has bred insidious hatred and division.’

The Fruit of My Woman

Han Kang

‘It was late May when I first saw the bruises on my wife’s body.’

The Great Homecoming

Anna Kim

Read an excerpt from The Great Homecoming by Anna Kim, a novel of love and loss in the wake of the Korean war.

The Hole

Hiroko Oyamada

‘The hole felt as though it was exactly my size – a trap made just for me.’

The Poetics of Trauma

Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson

Swedish poet and psychoanalyst Ulf Karl Olov Nilsson on trauma, silence and linguistic analysis of asylum seekers. Translated from the Swedish by Peter Graves.

The Story of Anya

Mazen Maarouf

‘The dreams were packed together like coloured soap bubbles.’

Short fiction by Mazen Maarouf, translated from the Arabic by Jonathan Wright.

The Way of the Apple Worm

Herta Müller

‘The mother of the needle is the place that bleeds.’

The White Dress

Nathalie Léger

Nathalie Léger, translated from the French by Natasha Lehrer.

To Zinder

Sven Lindqvist

Obsessed with a single line from Conrad’s The Heart of Darkness – Kurtz’s injunction to ‘Exterminate All the Brutes’ – Sven Lindqvist set out across Central Africa, and wrote a book that revealed precisely what Europe’s imperial powers had exacted on Africa’s people over the course of the preceding two centuries.

Vintage 1954

Antoine Laurain

An extract from Vintage 1954 by Antoine Laurain, translated from the French by Emily Boyce and Jane Aitken.