Reading List · Lisanne Swart
Best International Booker Prize Winners
The International Booker Prize is awarded each year to a single work of fiction translated into English, with the £50,000 prize split equally between author and translator — itself a quiet statement about how much translation actually shapes a book. Since 2016 the prize has gone to one title rather than a body of work, and the resulting winners list reads like a tour through what serious literary fiction is doing right now outside the English-speaking world: psychological extremity, fractured memory, bodies that stop cooperating with the people living in them, and the specific damage that families, regimes, and time itself do to a self. Not every winner fits this shelf. The seven below are the ones that belong here — books concerned less with plot than with what is actually happening inside a person, and willing to sit in discomfort rather than resolve it.
By Lisanne Swart · 7 books · Translated Fiction · Updated June 2026
The Vegetarian
Yeong-hye is an unremarkable South Korean woman whose decision to stop eating meat, after a series of violent dreams, triggers an escalating crisis in her marriage and her family that none of them are equipped to handle. Her refusal is treated by everyone around her not as a personal choice but as a threat to be corrected, and the novel follows the increasingly extreme measures her husband, father, and sister take to force her back into compliance, while Yeong-hye herself moves further away from food, from her body’s expected behaviour, and eventually from conventional reality altogether. The novel is told in three parts, each from a different family member’s perspective, so that Yeong-hye herself remains almost entirely opaque — seen, judged, and acted upon, rather than heard. Han Kang won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2024.
The Vegetarian is the book that most precisely demonstrates what happens when a woman’s autonomy over her own body is treated by her family as a problem requiring intervention rather than a fact requiring respect. The structural choice to keep Yeong-hye’s interior life mostly out of reach is the novel’s most radical move: we watch her disappear from the perspectives of people who claim to love her, and the horror accumulates precisely because we are denied the access that would let us simply diagnose her. Read it as a study of what bodily refusal can mean when every other form of refusal has been made impossible.
Flights
A fragmented, genre-defying novel that moves between short fictional narratives, travel writing, and essayistic digressions, loosely unified by an unnamed narrator’s restless preoccupation with movement, the body, and the impossibility of staying still. Among the threads: a seventeenth-century anatomist who became obsessed with preserving the body’s most resistant tissues; a woman who disappears for several days on a Croatian island and reappears with no memory of where she has been; Chopin’s heart, smuggled back to Warsaw in a jar after his death in Paris. Tokarczuk does not connect these fragments through plot but through a sustained, recurring set of questions about what travel actually does to identity, and why human beings have always wanted to preserve bodies even as they insist on the soul’s separateness from them. Tokarczuk won the Nobel Prize in Literature in 2018, awarded in 2019 due to a scandal that postponed that year’s prize.
Flights earns its place here because it treats restlessness itself as a psychological subject worth taking seriously, rather than a plot device that gets resolved by arrival somewhere. Tokarczuk’s fragmented structure mirrors her actual argument: that a self assembled entirely from movement, observation, and the refusal to settle is still a coherent self, just one that conventional narrative isn’t built to hold. The recurring fascination with preserved bodies and anatomical specimens gives the book an undercurrent of real strangeness beneath its essayistic surface. This is a book for readers who want their psychology delivered through structure as much as through character.
Celestial Bodies
Three sisters in the Omani village of al-Awafi — Mayya, who marries a man she does not love after her own heart is broken; Asma, who marries out of duty; and Khawla, who waits years for a man who has emigrated to Canada — navigate love, marriage, and the rapid transformation of their country from a slave-owning society into a modern oil state across three generations. Alharthi moves the narrative between dozens of voices and timelines without warning, tracing how the abolition of slavery in Oman in the 1970s reshaped relationships between former masters and the families they had once owned, and how the personal choices of three sisters are inseparable from forces operating at the level of an entire nation’s rapid modernisation. Celestial Bodies was the first novel originally written in Arabic to win the International Booker Prize.
Celestial Bodies belongs on this shelf because it refuses to separate the intimate from the historical: the three sisters’ marriages, disappointments, and private griefs are shown to be structured by an economic and social system that is itself in the process of violent transformation. Alharthi’s fractured, multi-voiced structure asks real attention from the reader, but it is the only honest way to tell a story in which everyone’s interior life is shaped by forces most of them cannot fully see. This is psychological fiction operating at national scale, and it rewards a second reading more than almost any book on this list.
The Discomfort of Evening
Ten-year-old Jas lives with her strictly religious parents and siblings on a Dutch dairy farm, where waste and frivolity are treated as sin, until an icy morning accident takes her older brother and Jas becomes convinced, with the specific magical logic of a traumatised child, that she is responsible. As her parents withdraw into a grief they cannot articulate, Jas and her remaining siblings develop an escalating fascination with death and ritual, inventing increasingly disturbing private games to try to control a loss that has made the entire household incomprehensible to them. Rijneveld, who grew up in a Reformed farming family, drew directly on a childhood marked by similar religious rigidity and a similar family tragedy. The International Booker judges specifically cited the novel for capturing “the strangeness of a child looking at the strangeness of the world.”
The Discomfort of Evening is one of the most psychologically exact accounts ever written of what a child’s mind does when adults around her stop being able to explain anything. Jas’s magical thinking is not portrayed as charming or whimsical; it is shown as the genuinely desperate improvisation of a nervous system trying to find some explanation, any explanation, for a catastrophe that the adults in the house have gone silent about. Rijneveld’s prose moves between the visceral textures of farm life and the increasingly disturbing logic of a child’s grief without ever softening either. This is one of the most unflinching novels about childhood trauma published this century.
At Night All Blood Is Black
Alfa Ndiaye is a Senegalese soldier fighting for France in the trenches of the First World War, and the novel opens with the death of his closest friend Mademba, whom Alfa was unable to give a quick, mercy-killing death when Mademba begged for one, gutted and dying slowly on the battlefield. Tormented by his failure to act, Alfa begins a campaign of increasingly ritualised retaliation against German soldiers, severing their hands and bringing them back as trophies — behaviour his fellow soldiers initially celebrate as heroic, then come to fear, as Alfa’s psychological state deteriorates further into a place none of them can follow him. The novel is narrated entirely in Alfa’s voice, in short, incantatory, repetitive sentences that mimic the increasingly fractured logic of his mind.
At Night All Blood Is Black is the most formally relentless book on this list: Diop’s prose style, with its hypnotic repetitions and refusal of conventional pacing, forces the reader into something close to Alfa’s own deteriorating mental state rather than simply describing it from outside. The novel sits at the intersection of two atrocities — the industrial slaughter of the First World War and the colonial relationship that put Senegalese soldiers in French trenches in the first place — and refuses to let either one explain away the other. This is psychological horror in the most literal sense: the horror of watching a mind come apart from the inside, narrated by the mind itself.
Tomb of Sand
An eighty-year-old woman named Ma, recently widowed, turns her back on her family and refuses to get out of bed, then later refuses to die in any way her family expects, eventually deciding to travel to the Pakistan border to confront a trauma from the 1947 Partition of India that she has carried, unspoken, for seventy-five years. Her estranged daughter and conventional son struggle to understand a mother who appears to be unravelling, while Ma herself is engaged in something closer to a final, deliberate refusal of every role — widow, mother, grieving relic — that her family and her culture have assigned her. Shree’s original Hindi text plays constantly with language, wordplay, and porous boundaries between voices; Daisy Rockwell’s translation was widely praised for finding an English equivalent to that playfulness. Tomb of Sand was the first novel originally written in any Indian language to win the International Booker Prize.
Tomb of Sand belongs here because it takes the psychology of old age and inherited historical trauma more seriously, and more strangely, than almost any other novel of recent years. Ma’s refusal to perform grief, age, or domestic compliance in the ways her family expects is presented neither as senility nor as wisdom but as something genuinely unclassifiable, a final act of self-authorship after a lifetime of being defined by other people’s expectations. The novel’s playful, digressive style is not decoration; it mirrors Ma’s own refusal to be contained by a single, legible narrative. This is one of the most original psychological portraits of old age in contemporary fiction.
Time Shelter
A mysterious figure named Gaustine opens a clinic for Alzheimer’s patients in which each floor is meticulously recreated to resemble a specific decade of the twentieth century, on the theory that patients losing their grip on the present can be made calmer and more functional if surrounded by the physical details of whatever decade their memory has settled into. The narrator, serving as Gaustine’s assistant, gathers the furniture, the shirt buttons, the scents and sounds of vanished decades to stock the clinic’s rooms — until increasing numbers of healthy people, exhausted by the present, start requesting admission too, and entire countries eventually hold referendums on which decade of the past they would like to permanently return to. Gospodinov, one of Bulgaria’s most acclaimed living writers, was finishing the novel in Berlin as COVID began sweeping through Europe, lending the book’s warnings about nostalgia, isolation, and the dangerous appeal of retreating into the past an unsettling prescience. Time Shelter was the first Bulgarian-language novel to win the International Booker Prize.
Time Shelter is the book on this shelf most directly about memory, which makes it the most natural fit here of all seven winners: it takes the literal psychological mechanics of dementia and uses them as the device for a much larger argument about what nostalgia does to nations as well as individuals. Gospodinov’s premise sounds almost like satire, and the early chapters do play that way, but the novel’s escalation, from a small clinic into entire countries voting to relocate themselves in time, is a genuinely unsettling extrapolation of something real about how people and politics relate to an idealised past. Read it for the same reasons you would read about memory loss in an individual mind, just scaled up to the size of a continent.
Where to start
If you want the most psychologically extreme novel on the list
→ Read The Vegetarian. Han Kang’s three-part structure denies the reader access to the one mind the book is actually about, and the resulting horror is more unsettling than anything explained outright could be.
If you want memory and nostalgia taken to their logical, unsettling conclusion
→ Read Time Shelter. Gospodinov starts with a clinic for dementia patients and ends with entire nations voting on which decade to live in. It is funnier than it sounds and more frightening than it admits to being.
If you want the most devastating account of childhood grief
→ Read The Discomfort of Evening. Rijneveld’s portrait of a child’s magical thinking after a family tragedy is one of the most psychologically exact novels about trauma published this century.
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From the bookshelf
“The strangeness of a child looking at the strangeness of the world.” — International Booker judges, on The Discomfort of Evening
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