Coming out in the second half of 2026 we have the 5th part of Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume series and the International Booker nominated Bury Your Dead by Ana Paula Maia. Enjoy Most Anticipated Translated Fiction 2026 Part 2 (July – Dec).
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Most Anticipated Translated Fiction 2026 Part 2 (July – Dec)
One Hundred Guinea Pigs by Gustavo Rodríguez
Release Date: July 14th
Translator – Translated from Spanish by Daniel Hahn
Friendship makes life worth living, and worth ending too.
Eufrasia Vela is a caregiver—it’s not just her job. But when she begins working with Doña Carmen, a bedridden elderly woman who spends her days staring out the window at her now-obstructed view of the sea, she confronts the limits to her ability to help. That is, until Doña Carmen makes a big, last request: to transform her caretaking from helping her stay alive to helping her die. A good death has much in common with a good life, after all, and incapacity, loneliness, and isolation are devastations that a compassionate friend can help ease.
Dignity, community, respect, and generosity—they’re what Eufrasia offers her clients, and what their friendship offers her. One Hundred Guinea Pigs is the lifegiving, warmhearted novel about euthanasia you didn’t know you needed.
The Winds of Maracaibo by María Elena Morán
Release Date: July 28th
Translator – Translated from Spanish by Madeline Jones
“Elisa left with Camilo.” “Camilo took her out of the country.”
These are the text messages Nina receives while living in the storage room of a university in Porto Alegre, Brazil, where she’s cleaning houses to make money to send back home.
Home is 4,500 miles away, in Maracaibo, Venezuela, where the water never runs on Mondays and there’s yet another blackout. Where a trip to the grocery store costs 220 times the minimum wage.
Home is Elisa, her thirteen-year-old daughter, who loves to run around the house and belt out Queen’s “Don’t Stop Me Now.” Who should be growing, when instead her waist is shrinking. Home is Graciela, Nina’s mother, who lately stays shut up in her room all day talking with her dead, most urgently her beloved husband, Raúl (who’s just as eager to talk back from the grave).
And what the hell does Camilo think he’s doing now, stealing off with their daughter to the United States of America—the one place Nina most assuredly never wants to call home?
Narrated through the voices of Nina and her family, and through the voice of her treacherous ex, Camilo, The Winds of Maracaibo is the heart-racing tale of a mother fighting to get her daughter back across the border, at any cost—a brave and furious reversal of the American Dream and an ode to the Venezuelan women who gave their blood, sweat, and tears to a nation dismantled by the egos of men.
A Plagued Sea by Kim Bo-Young
Release Date: Aug 11th
Translator – Translated from Korean by Sophie Bowman
While waiting for a train to Haewon, an isolated Korean seaside village, bodyguard Mu-young gets a disaster alert on her phone. TVs throughout the station report breaking news of a massive earthquake on the eastern coast. Despite the danger, Mu-young boards the train with her niece: she’d rather face the earthquake than leave the girl in her mother’s care. That choice haunts her for the rest of her life.
Three years later, Haewon Village is home to horrors. The earthquake unleashed an ancient plague that transforms its victims into fishy monsters, and the government’s lockdown has cut off any hope for help. Mu-young’s niece is dead, and all that’s left for her is to hunt villagers who break isolation. When an officious bureaucrat from Seoul arrives in the village, he stirs up even deeper trouble. Will Mu-young survive? Does she even deserve to?
Bury Your Dead by Ana Paula Maia
Release Date: Aug 11th
Translator – Translated from Portuguese by Padma Viswanathan
Edgar Wilson has a gruesome job, one he is entirely unsentimental about—he cleans up roadkill in rural Brazil. But one day vultures are circling in the woods, and he can’t not go see what they’re gathering for.What transpires is a quest—a miserable day-long journey—for a couple of poor working men who only want to acknowledge that everybody (and in this case, every literal body) has the right to be treated as more than just scrap or trash.
Dead animals, defrocked priests, corpses abandoned in the woods, and a criminal outfit trafficking in body parts—Bury Your Dead is an exhortation, a road trip, a story of friendship, and a hymn to the small ways we can shape the world. Ana Paula Maia’s alchemy with the grimmest of ingredients makes this her more hopeful, generous novel yet.
The Song of Stork and Dromedary by Anjet Daanje
Release Date: Aug 18th
Translator – Translated from Dutch by David McKay
Inspired by the life and work of Emily Brontë, this masterful, multi-award-winning book — acclaimed as the best Dutch novel published this century — pulls readers into a narrative that redefines time itself.
In the early 1800s, in Yorkshire, Eliza May Drayden and her sisters live far from the public eye, devoted to their shared love of reading and writing books. When, after dozens of rejections, Eliza May’s only novel, Haeger Mass, is finally published, it’s labelled as ‘ghastly’ and ‘immoral’. Over time, however, it is embraced by generations of readers as a masterpiece, and tales about its mysterious, reclusive author take on a life of their own.
In eleven extraordinary chapters, the story of Eliza May — both before and after her death — unfolds: through the tales of people who met her; her sister’s letters; her biographers’ words; the pages of a mysterious notebook; and the lives that become intertwined with hers, even centuries later.
In The Song of Stork and Dromedary, Anjet Daanje has crafted an absorbing literary mystery and an unforgettable meditation on love, life, loss, and the inexplicable nature of time. As the Brontës themselves did, Daanje shows us that storytelling is our only way to transcend death.
Last Day of a Prior Life by Andrés Barba
Release Date: Aug 25th
Translator – Translated from Spanish by Lisa Dillman
While preparing an empty house for sale, a woman encounters an unblinking seven-year-old boy, trapped there from another era, like an insect preserved in amber. Unable to articulate what he needs, the child draws her into an unsettling bond that neither can escape … until they understand what has caused it.
With incredible precision, this deeply disquieting novel weaves together doppelgängers and time loops in the tradition of a classic ghost story. Yet its contemporary sensibility — where lyricism meets cruelty — evokes the dark horror of Shirley Jackson.
From one of the most renowned Spanish-language authors working today, Last Day of a Prior Life is a masterful dissection of human longing and the ties that bind us, even across time itself.
The Eye of Goliath by Diego Muzzio
Release Date: Sep 1st
Translator – Translated from Spanish by Rahul Bery
In this deliriously inventive twist on The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde, Argentine Diego Muzzio infuses classic gothic atmosphere with disturbingly modern psychological horror.
In an old sanatorium on the outskirts of Edinburgh, Dr Edward Pierce develops experimental therapies to treat patients traumatised by the First World War. Late one night, he receives a visitor who asks him to take on a bizarre case: David Bradley, an engineer who was sent to inspect the conditions of a lighthouse on a desolate island in southern Argentina. This once rational, disciplined man returned completely mute, his body overwhelmed by a single compulsion: to swim and swim, in any environment, to the point of total exhaustion.
As Pierce becomes fixated on Bradley’s diary, a macabre record of his increasing derangement, he explores strange new treatments in which the lines between doctor and patient begin dangerously to blur.
Garden by Hiroko Oyamada
Release Date: Sep 8th
Translator – Translated from Japanese by David Boyd and Lucy North
Baboons chatter in the zoo. Tadpoles writhe in a pond. A gecko is stuck to the window. And ants are crawling everywhere. Nature runs wild and mysterious in this stunning collection of stories by Hiroko Oyamada in which the everyday reality of the human world, with its social norms and familial ties, slides into something altogether more strange. As children begin to explore the landscape around them and adults are forced to navigate the bumpy terrain of marriage, parenthood and grief, the non-human world pulsates with a life of its own, and humans are revealed to be the most incomprehensible species of all.
Love at Least by Yukiko Motoya
Release Date: Sep 8th
Translator -Translated from Japanese by Kamil Spychalski
Twenty-five-year-old Yasuko has been living with her kind but apathetic boyfriend Tsunaki for three years. During this time, she has battled waves of depression and hypersomnia, staying in bed for days on end, mired in ennui.
When Tsunaki begins working longer hours, Yasuko tries to take over some of the house chores in the hope of breaking out of her rut, but cannot even manage to cook dinner without ending up sobbing in a pitch-black hallway. Any attempt to get her life together seems only to highlight Yasuko’s brokenness. As everything threatens to fall apart, she makes a spectacular last-ditch effort to wrench Tsunaki out of his indifference and find something to ground her in the world.
Radical, comical, and energetic, Love at Least is a sincere and compelling story of a young woman searching for connection.
Laplace’s Witch by Keigo Higashino
Release Date: Oct 13th
Translator – Translated from Japanese by Stephen Paul
Two people die in hot spring towns in different parts of Japan from hydrogen sulfide poisoning. Investigating the case is geochemist Shusuke Aoe, who witnessed the same mysterious girl, Madoka, at both crime scenes…
A science fiction mystery that challenges established norms of the genre, written by acclaimed author Keigo Higashino!
Paradise Burns by Pol Guasch
Release Date: Oct 20th
Translator – Translated from Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem
When Rita and Líton meet at a party, they quickly form a bond that will indelibly shape their lives. Theirs is not an easy world: most wildlife is extinct and the earth is tormented by drought and floods; the last vestiges of natural life are kept under lock and key in a mysterious greenhouse a day’s travel away. Like the other young men of the Service, Líton is frequently enlisted to put out the seemingly never-ending fires that tear through the valley; Rita lives perched on a hill in the Colony, where other men, including her father, empty an almost barren mine. Yet their bond grounds them. They navigate the love affairs, setbacks, and thwarted idealism of their twenties together, finding in each other a vital reprieve for their disillusionment―that is, until Líton, like other gay men, falls deathly sick.
On the Calculation of Volume (Book V) by Solvej Balle
Tara has returned to Thomas, but she is no longer the person he remembers. She has now spent twelve years in the eighteenth of November, while Thomas has endlessly repeated his identical day. He struggles to reconcile Tara as she is now with the Tara he loves. And so she rejoins her friends, with whom she finds companionship and understanding. They set off for Val Benoît, where other time-stranded people have created a community built on curiosity, conversation and even optimism. As the eighteenth of November continues to expand, Tara’s connection with those around her deepens, and a life beyond Thomas comes unexpectedly into view.
Release Date: Nov 17th
Translator – Translated from Danish by Sophia Hersi Smith
If you enjoyed Most Anticipated Translated Fiction 2026 Part 2 (July – Dec), check out Most Anticipated Translated Fiction 2026 Part 1 (Jan – June)