5 new translations to add to your reading list

Beauty Is A Wound by Eka Kurniawan
Translated by Annie Tucker 

Dewi Ayu, a prostitute and mother of four, leaves her grave after 21 years to visit her youngest daughter, a woman with the misleading name of Beauty. Kurniawan, who’s earned comparisons to Rushdie and Marquez, accommodates horrors from Indonesia’s history (like the 1965 massacre) in this magical satire.  

The Story Of The Lost Child by Elena Ferrante
Translated by Ann Goldstein

Theories on the identity of this anonymous Italian author are as intriguing as her Neapolitan novels, a serialised account of a female friendship that begins in 1950s Naples, when the girls are eight. In the concluding part of the saga, Lila and Elena, now grown women with individual regrets, face the most complex leg of their journey.

One Out Of Two by Daniel Sada 
Translated by Katherine Silver

The Gamal twins, middle-aged spinsters, live lives of synchronised banality until one of them spots a potential suitor. As the sisters take turns dating the same man, Sada’s comic love triangle extends into a clever study of identity.    

One Thousand Days In A Refrigerator by Manoj Kumar Panda 
Translated by Snehaprava Das

The award-winning Odia author’s short stories range from morbid to whimsical: a widower has a heart-to-heart with his wife’s corpse, a woman plans a visit to her rapist’s house and god makes a court appearance to give justice a hand.  

Pyre by Perumal Murugan
Translated by Aniruddhan Vasudevan

Newly-weds Saroja and Kumaresan, fearing the wrath of their village, keep their caste difference a secret. But as suspicions flare, the couple confronts grave consequences. In Murugan’s vivid prose, both the tenderness of young love and the horror of violence find new vigour.