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Winner of the prestigious Cervantes Prize (the Spanish-speaking world’s top literary award, bestowed in honor of lifetime achievement), Mexican author, translator, and diplomat Sergio Pitol was widely acclaimed before his passing in 2018. The Love Parade is a Premio Herralde-winning work of historical political fiction set in 1970s Mexico City, a multifaceted tale (and part detective story) surrounding a 1940s murder. Valeria Luiselli, author of Tell Me How It Ends, called Pitol “one of Mexico’s most culturally complex and composite writers. He is certainly the strangest, most unfathomable and eccentric….a voice that reverberates beyond the margins of his books.”

Dissident German author Franz Fühmann (1922-1984) wrote poems, novels, short stories, essays, children’s books, and even ballets. The Beloved of the Dawn, illustrated by Sunandini Banerjee, is a “subversive” retelling of four classical Greek myths, including one about Hera and Zeus.

French novelist, playwright, and independent bookstore owner(!) Grégoire Courtois’s dystopian new work, The Agents, is billed as Nineteen Eighty-Four meets Tron, via The Office. The author of the acclaimed literary horror novel, The Laws of the Skies, returns with a Kafkaesque ordeal about bureaucracy, data feeds, cubicles, and a live-in work tower.

Prix Goncourt-winning French author Jérôme Ferrari’s new novel, In His Own Image, is “a bewitching story of passion, death, and love, and a powerful reflection on the ambiguous relationship between art and reality.” When a Corsican photojournalist is killed in an auto accident, her uncle must reckon with the legacy of her life and art. French magazine Madame Figaro calls In His Own Image “[m]etaphorical, musical, and absolutely enrapturing.”

From French writer (and screenwriter, director, journalist, and antique key collector) Antoine Laurain — author of The Red Notebook and The President’s Hat — comes Red Is My Heart, a new work about heartbreak, rejection, and love unrequited, richly illustrated by Parisian street artist Le Sonneur.

Icelandic novelist, poet, and Academy Award-nominated lyricist Sjón has five previous books in English (including his masterful epic, CoDex 1962, and his profoundly moving Moonstone). His timely latest, Red Milk, is the fictionalized story of a midcentury Reykjavík-based neo-Nazi and “and the enduring global allure of fascism.” The Lives of Others author Neel Mukherjee calls Red Milk “A book like a blade of light, searching out and illuminating the darkest corners of history….It’s vivid, unputdownable, alive, and written with unerring artfulness and subtlety.”

Swedish writer, playwright, artist, feminist, and International Booker long-lister Sara Stridsberg has been translated into over 25 languages. Her new novel, The Antarctica of Love, is a heart-wrenching story narrated by a murdered wife and mother. Kate Reed Petty, author of True Story, says “The Antarctica of Love is a shocking and beautiful subversion of the 'dead girl' trope. With fierce dignity, the narrator in this elegiac novel refuses to be reduced to murder victim/sex worker/addict; she is a poet, philosopher, and author of her own life story in this haunting portrait of the starkest meanings of love and family. Stridsberg's literary talent left me awe-struck.”

German crime writer Friedrich Ani is the prolific author of dozens of books, scripts, and screenplays — and has won the German Crime Fiction Award (Deutscher Krimi Preis) thrice (finishing in second place four other times). His latest, Killing Happiness — featuring a foreword by British crime writer Ann Cleeves — follows Inspector Jakob Franck as he investigates the murder of an 11-year-old. German newspaper Sächsische Zeitung says, “Ani's elegantly written crime novel is characterized by psychological intensity and dark melancholy.”

Claudia Durastanti’s Strangers I Know was a finalist for Italy’s top literary prize, the Premio Strega, and has already been celebrated by authors like Jhumpa Lahiri and Lauren Groff. The Italian writer’s new novel is billed as “a funny and profound portrait of an unconventional family that makes us look anew at how language shapes our understanding of ourselves.” Ocean Vuong, author of On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous and whom Durastanti translated into Italian, says “Brave and deeply felt….Here the novel is not only a medium of illumination, but also a buoy cast into the dark waters of memory, imagination, and boldly embodied questions. In other words, it is my favorite kind of writing, the kind that not only tells of the world — but burrows through it, alive.”

Exiled Iranian author and journalist Shahriar Mandanipour has been called “one of Iran’s most important living fiction writers” (The Guardian). His new book — the third now available in English (after novels Censoring an Iranian Love Story and Moon Brow) — Seasons of Purgatory collects nine short stories. Booklist says, “Dostoyevskian in their density and black humor, Mandanipour’s stories capture the Iranian experience of constant upheaval in a brilliant translation that allows the English-speaking world to experience this gem of Iranian literature.”

A finalist for the Prix Goncourt (for first novel), French author Agnès Riva’s debut Geography of an Adultery is a tale of marital infidelity. Deborah Shapiro, author of The Sun in Your Eyes, says, “With precision and economy, Agnès Riva stirs up an uneasy and affecting novel that lives in the tension between constraint and abandon. As it depicts the quotidian, often ridiculous territory of an affair, Geography of an Adultery ingeniously maps one woman’s inner world.”

Winner of Italy’s 2020 Premio Strega, Sandro Veronesi’s The Hummingbird tells the tale of the life of middle-aged Florentine ophthalmologist Marco Carrera (nicknamed “the hummingbird” since childhood) in all its love and loss. Along with Richard Ford, Michael Cunningham, Jhumpa Lahiri, Roddy Doyle, Edward Carey, Domenico Starnone, and more, The Hummingbird was also praised by Ian McEwan, who says, “The Hummingbird is a masterly novel, a brilliantly conceived mosaic of love and tragedy. Veronesi creates a thought-rich and ultimately comic meditation on human error and lost chances. It's a cabinet of curiosities and delights, packed with small wonders, strange and sudden turns, insights of great poise and unusual cultural reference points.”

Catalan author, translator, professor, and feminist activist Bel Olid has written for both adults and children. Wilder Winds collects 16 of their short stories, drawing on “notions of individual freedom, abuses of power, ingrained social violence, life on the outskirts of society, and inevitable differences.” Writing for Catalan online newspaper, Núvol, Júlia Sentís says of Wilder Winds, “Charming and comforting on the one hand; like a vast abyss of violence and danger, it is stimulating and disturbing on the other.”