Strikingly translated by Lucy Scott, Astrid Roemer's classic queer novel is a tentpole of European and post-colonial literature. And amid tales of plantation-dwelling snakes, rare orchids, and star-crossed lovers, it is also a blistering meditation on the cruelties we inflict on those who disobey. Roemer, the first Surinamese winner of the prestigious Dutch Literature Prize, carves out postcolonial Suriname in barbed, resonant fragments. Who is Noenka? Roemer asks us. I'm Noenka, she responds resolutely, which means Never Again.

In this lush translation by Sophie Hughes and Annie McDermott, Layla Martinez's eerie debut novel is class-conscious horror that drags generations of monsters into the sun. Described by Mariana Enriquez as a house of women and shadows, built from poetry and revenge, this vision of a broken family in our unjust world places power in the hands of the eccentric, the radical, and the desperate.

Composing a fuller picture of the literary era that brought us Osamu Dazai and Kōbō Abe, Unusual Fragments foregrounds stories of alienation with surprising humor and imagination.

A young storm-chaser welcomes a jaded woman into the eye of a storm. The last man of a peculiar family, implausibly tiny in stature, attends a Mozart opera with his dedicated wife. A medical student coolly observes an adolescent boy as he contorts his body into violent positions. With tension and wit, the writers of Unusual Fragments, among them Nobuko Takagi, Yoshida Tomoko, and Inagaki Taruho, trace their taboo, feminist, bizarre themes to complicate what we think of as 20th century Japanese literature. What's hiding just beneath the fiction of our perfectly ordered, happy lives? Something unusual. Something far more interesting.

Crystal toils day and night to earn top grades at her cram school. She's also endlessly texting, shopping, drinking, vexing her boyfriends, cranking up her mp3s, and fantasizing about her next slice of cheesecake. Her non- stop frenzy never quite manages the one thing that might calm her down: opening up about the pressures that are driving her to the edge. She certainly hasn't talked with her best friend, Mina, nor Mina's brother, whom she's developing a serious crush on. And Crystal's starting to lose her grip.

In this shocking English debut, award-winning Korean author Kim Sagwa delivers an astonishingly complex portrait of modern-day adolescence. With pitch-perfect dialogue and a precise eye for detail, Kim creates a piercingly real teen protagonist-at once powerful, vulnerable, and utterly confused. As one bad decision leads to another, this promising life spirals to a devastating climax.

A thrilling metafiction about grief, the internet, and the difficulty of knowing others, The Voices of Adriana combines the psychological acuity of Marguerite Duras with the creative possibility of One Thousand and One Nights.

Adriana has become obsessed with her father's online dating. Recently widowed, he's on a self-destructive, manic search for a partner to accompany him through his twilight years. At the same time, her life as an isolated grad student feels unreal, and to fill the void of her mother's death, Adriana begins writing, trying on different voices. She builds worlds from the online profiles of her father's latest flings, that is until more fundamental voices--those of her grandmother and mother--begin calling out to her in the night.The Voices of Adriana, the latest from Spanish writer Elvira Navarro, is an innovative novel about grief and how we might reanimate the voices of those we've lost, not as ghosts, but as living parts of ourselves.

When five-year-old Kampol is told by his father to wait for him in front of some run-down apartment buildings, the confused boy does as told--he waits, and waits, and waits, until he realizes his father isn't coming back anytime soon. Adopted by the community, Kampol is soon being raised by figures like Chong the shopkeeper, who rents out calls on his telephone and goes into debt while extending his customers endless credit. Kampol also plays with local kids like Noi, whose shirt is so worn that it rips right in half, and the sweet, deceptively cute toddler Penporn.

Dueling flea markets, a search for a ten-baht coin lost in the sands of a beach, pet crickets that get eaten for dinner, bouncy ball fads in school, and loneliness so merciless that it kills a boy's appetite all combine into Bright, the first-ever novel by a Thai woman to appear in English translation. Duanwad Pimwana's urban, and at times gritty, vignettes are balanced with a folk-tale-like feel and a charmingly wry sense of humor. Together, these intensely concentrated, minimalist gems combine into an off-beat, highly satisfying coming-of-age story of a very memorable young boy and the age-old legends, practices, and personalities that raise him.

In the midst of a terrorist attack on a bookstore reading by G ran Loberg, a comic book artist famous for demeaning drawings of the prophet Mohammed, one of the attackers, a young woman, has a sudden premonition that something is wrong, changing the course of history. Two years later, this unnamed woman invites a famous writer to visit her in the criminal psychiatric clinic where she's living. She then shares with him an incredible story--she is a visitor from an alternate future.

Despite discrepancies that make the writer highly skeptical, he becomes increasingly fascinated by her amazing tale: in her dystopian future, any so-called anti-Swedish citizens are forced into a horrific ghetto called The Rabbit Yard. As events begin to spiral and the author becomes more and more implicated in this woman's tale, he comes to believe the unbelievable: she's telling the truth.

A remarkably intense, beautifully wrought tale that combines the ingenuity of speculative fiction with the difficulties of today's harsh political realities, They Will Drown in Their Mothers' Tears is the groundbreaking, award-winning work from the bestselling Swedish-Ugandan author Johannes Anyuru. With echoes of Guantanamo Bay, Abu Ghraib, the Charlie Hebdo tragedy, and anti-immigrant hysteria, this largest and most complex novel from an already celebrated poet, author, and spoken word artist catapults him to the front ranks of world writers.

That feels like forever ago. Mila, now a writer and a new mother, has just published a book on needlecraft--an art form so long dismissed as women's work. But after learning Citlali has drowned, Mila begins to sift through her old scrapbooks, reflecting on their shared youth for the first time as a new wife and mother. What has come of all the nights the three friends spent embroidering together in silence? Did she miss the signs that Citlali needed help?

How did Mijo become the monster we encounter in these pages? Damir Karakas, a war reporter who witnessed the horrors of the breakup of Yugoslavia firsthand, examines the recent history of an unsettled region in evocative prose, contrasting the beauty of nature against the failings of people.

Eminently worthy of acclaim. --Vogue (The Best Books of 2022 So Far)

An intimate exploration of motherhood, Linea Nigra approaches the worries and joys of childbearing from a diverse range of inspirations and traditions, from Louise Bourgeois to Ursula K. Le Guin to the indigenous Nahua model Luz Jiménez. Part memoir and part manifesto, Barrera's singular insights, delivered in candid prose, clarify motherhood while also cherishing the mysteries of the body.

Writing through her first pregnancy, birthing, breastfeeding, and young motherhood, Barrera embraces the subject fully, making lucid connections between maternity, earthquakes, lunar eclipses, and creative labor. Inspired by the author's own mother's painting practice, Linea Nigra concludes with an impassioned call: childbearing is art, and art is childbearing.

This book is a light at the end of the tunnel. --The Paris Review

Far from home, in the confines of a dim New York apartment where the oppressive skyscrapers further isolate her, Jazmina Barrera offers a tour of her lighthouses--those structures whose message is first and foremost, that human beings are here.

In trying to collect lighthouses by obsessively describing them, Barrera begins to question the nature of writing, collecting, and how, by staring so intently at one thing we are only trying to avoid others. Equal parts personal memoir and literary history, On Lighthouses takes the reader on a desperate flight from raging sea to cold stone--from a hopeless isolation to a meaningful one--concluding at last in a place of peace: the home of a selfless, guiding light.

The approaching end has her thinking about the members of her family she's lost, and especially one of her favorite granddaughters, Heli, who has been sent away to the Netherlands because of an affair with her white teacher. Ultimately, there's only one question Bee must answer: What is a family? If her descendants are spread across the world, don't look similar, don't share a heritage, and don't even know each other, what bond will they have once she has died?

A moving portrait of a woman finding peace in the legacy that is her daughters and granddaughters, Off-White, keenly translated by Lucy Scott and David McKay, is also a searing and complex portrait of male violence, the legacy of colonialism, and a dismantling of what it means to be white. Written after a nearly 20-year break from publishing, Off-White is another masterpiece from the only Surinamese author to win the prestigious Dutch Literature Award.

For fans of Claire-Louise Bennett and Eileen Myles, an enigmatic work of autofiction set in a time of leftist politics and criminalized sexuality.

Pirkko Saisio's autofictional novel, in Mia Spangenberg's tender translation, is a mesmerizing account of radical politics and sexual awakening in a series of farewells--to her mother, to the idealism of youth, to friends and lovers, and finally to her grown daughter. The novel embeds readers in a delirious Finland, where art and communist politics are hopelessly intertwined, and where queer love, still a crime, thrives in underground bars. But then one morning in 2002, on a remote island off the coast of Finland, the narrator Pirkko Saisio informs her publisher that she's accidentally deleted her latest manuscript, The Red Book of Farewells. Playful and mysterious, The Red Book of Farewells is a work that stoically embraces the small revolutions of moving on.

On a Woman's Madness tells the story of Noenka, a courageous Black woman trying to live a life of her own choosing. When her abusive husband of just nine days refuses her request for divorce, Noenka flees her hometown in Suriname, on South America's tropical northeastern coast, for the capital city of Paramaribo. Unsettled and unsupported, her life in this new place is illuminated by romance and new freedoms, but also forever haunted by her past and society's expectations.