Translated women’s fiction offers readers from all over the world the opportunity to expand their literary horizons and gain an abundance of diverse perspectives. Reading women’s writing in translation also promotes the sentiment of a global conversation, encouraging the exchange of ideas, cultural nuances, and voices that may often have been excluded from the English literary canon.
The novels spotlighted here not only offer opportunities to diversify your traditional reading habits, but also seek to challenge gender imbalances within both literature and our real-world contexts, too. These recommendations will enhance your empathy and help you to cultivate deeper understandings about our shared, shamelessly female, humanity, in spite of all of the ways we may seem to be wholly unalike. The translations of these incredible, transformative novels have helped to bring their writers and stories to a wider audience, and supplied us with the invaluable chance to uncover, learn from, and share some true literary treasures.
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman
I Who Have Never Known Men by Jacqueline Harpman follows an unnamed young girl as the focal narrator, who lives imprisoned in an underground bunker alongside 39 other women with no memories of life beyond the cage. Silent, uniformed men guard them in their prison, ensuring that none of them can escape into the world outside. When an alarm suddenly begins to sound, however, the guards flee and, with the keys they hastily leave behind, the women are forced to encounter an ominously unfamiliar, barren world.
The novel is brilliantly translated from French by Ros Schwartz and explores themes of companionship, maternity, survival, human nature, and the indomitable endurance of the female spirit in the face of isolation and struggle. Jacqueline Harpman beautifully crafts a stream-of-consciousness narrative that is highly praised and strongly recommended over on BookTok, but which also transcends expectations about what literature is capable of doing and being. This is a book that will leave you puzzled and haunted in equal measure, and a must-read for anyone looking to delve into translated women’s fiction.
“Even a person raised in captivity learns to want, yearns to see beyond their cage. How much of our humanity is intrinsic? How much remains, when all else is stripped away?”
Jacqueline Harpman, I Who Have Never Known Men
The Years by Annie Ernaux
Annie Ernaux’s ‘collective autobiography’ The Years is a Nobel Prize in Literature winner and explores the period from 1941 to 2006 through a unique blend of cultural memory and personal experience. The book intricately fuses subjective impressions, anecdotes, and events with historical moments, news stories, and social shifts in an effort to capture the passage of time and its impact on the evolution of French society and the freedom of its women.
In the construction of a narrative that is at once both deeply intimate and stubbornly impersonal, Annie Ernaux explores themes of family life, political doctrine, maternity, motherhood, bodily autonomy, consent, and the women’s liberation movement. Together, this creates an image of a social world that is mutually opening up and closing in on women, as well as continually reconfiguring their opportunities for career growth, economic independence, sexual freedom of choice, and their domestic roles in the modern world. Wonderfully translated here by Alison L. Strayer, The Years offers a uniquely introspective approach to the women’s memoir genre whilst somehow still achieving a universal perspective on womanhood and the female experience more broadly speaking.
“It seems to her that her education is more than just a way to escape poverty. It is a weapon of choice against stagnation in a kind of feminine condition that arouses her pity, the tendency to lose oneself in a man, which she has experienced, and of which she is ashamed. She feels no desire to marry or have children. Mothering and the life of the mind seem incompatible.”
Annie Ernaux, The Years
The Days of Abandonment by Elena Ferrante
Strongly captivating its Italian readers upon its initial publication, Elena Ferrante’s The Days of Abandonment tells the grippingly relatable story of one woman’s descent into devastating emptiness after her husband abandons her for a younger, more attractive model. Left literally trapped inside with her two young children within the four walls of their neglected high-rise apartment, she is forced to confront the ghost of her unfaithful husband, and come to terms with confusion about her own sense of self and the potential loss of her normal life.
As an intense lover of Elena Ferrante’s entire literary oeuvre (especially My Brilliant Friend, book one in her outstanding Neapolitan Quartet), I could not recommend The Days of Abandonment highly enough. It is the perfect starting point for those looking to explore Ferrante’s writing and is faithfully translated by Ann Goldstein in a way that captures her beautiful, soul-consuming prose whilst also being highly accessible to English readers.
“I am the queen of spades, I am the wasp that stings, I am the dark serpent. I am the invulnerable animal who passes through fire and is not burned.”
Elena Ferrante, The Days of Abandonment
Sagittarius by Natalia Ginzburg
Sagittarius by Natalia Ginzburg is a wonderful novella about a domineering mother who moves to the Italian suburbs with her daughter and son-in-law in the hopes of beginning a faster-paced way of life. With big dreams of opening up her own art gallery, the charmingly trusting mother unwittingly befriends a suspicious, albeit beautiful, woman named Scilla — who’s troubled past and cleverly disguised ill intentions quickly shatter her fantasies of a fresh new start.
Here, Ginzburg is translated by Avril Bardoni, working to explore focal themes of social class, ambition, female friendship, betrayal, and the breakdown of familial aspirations due to financial ruin. Cautiously narrated by the main character’s daughter, readers are certain to be drawn into this remarkable story and feel emotionally invested in the events that take place there.
“There were days when my mother was almost as bored in town as she had been in [the village]. She already knew the central shopping district like the back of her hand, having walked the length and breadth of it looking for suitable premises, small but attractive, for her art gallery; but the rents were all extremely high and, besides; another problem was beginning to occur to her, that of finding painters willing to show in her gallery. She knew nobody.”
Natalia Ginzburg, Sagittarius
Three Summers by Margarita Liberaki
The Greek novel Three Summers by Margarita Liberaki tells the sensual story of three sisters — Maria, Infanta, and Katerina — who are extremely close and yet also distinctly apart by their different personalities, passions, and dreams. The novel bursts with the vibrant imagery of a sun-soaked countryside near Athens, which forms the backdrop to the sisters’ troubled coming-of-age over three unending, humid summers.
Together the girls share and keep secrets, fall in and out of love, struggle to understand the adult family members that confine them, and anxiously try to work out who they are — both in relation to themselves, and to each other. Karen Van Dyck’s translation captures all the youthful energy, warmth, and lightness of the original, making the book a shameless declaration of female romance for nature and life. This is also the perfect recommendation for anyone who loves Little Women by Louisa May Alcott or literature about sisterhood more generally.
“Now my sisters and I no longer lie around in the hay talking. We aren’t all in the same place the way we were last year and other years. And when we happen to be together it’s as if there is a new awkwardness, as if we had betrayed one another by doing our own thing.”
Margarita Liberaki, Three Summers
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk
Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead by Olga Tokarczuk is a story following a series of mysterious deaths in a remote Polish village, and an eccentric older woman named Janina, who becomes a quasi-detective. Janina is an astrologer, translator of William Blake (the source material from which the novel derives its title), and an intense animal advocate. Weaving a lusciously dark, embroiling feminist mystery, Tokarczuk examines themes of natural justice, free will versus determinism, and the complicated relationship between humanity and the natural world.
Popularly translated by Antonia Lloyd-Jones, the novel was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2019 for its timely discourse surrounding the hypocrisy of those who preach kindness and morality, yet continually allow and enable vicious acts of cruelty to take place. Readers should be prepared for some unsettling, violent descriptions, but to also be endowed with a deeper, more profound sense of empathy for nature than ever before.
“You know what, sometimes it seems to me we’re living in a world that we fabricate for ourselves. We decide what’s good and what isn’t, we draw maps of meanings for ourselves… And then we spend our whole lives struggling with what we have invented for ourselves. The problem is that each of us has our own version of it, so people find it hard to understand each other.”
Olga Tokarczuk, Drive Your Plow Over the Bones of the Dead
The Vegetarian by Han Kang
Winner of the 2016 International Booker Prize, Han Kang’s The Vegetarian follows a South Korean woman named Yeong-Hye who, after having some distressing dreams about the slaughter of animals, decides to become a vegetarian. The story is told in three separate parts, each with a different narrator who is closely linked to Yeong-Hye herself, although readers never get to hear from or know Yeong-Hye directly.
Yeong-Hye’s choice to stop eating meat reads as a brave act of defiance and non-conformity to cultural norms, and works to disrupt the mindlessly conventional familial and social life she once participated in. Translated by Deborah Smith, the novel explores themes of agency, bodily autonomy, resistance against tradition, misogyny, and the impact that cultural expectations have on the lives and bodies of individuals, especially women.
“The feeling that she had never really lived in this world caught her by surprise. It was a fact. She had never lived. Even as a child, as far back as she could remember, she had done nothing but endure.”
Han Kang, The Vegetarian
The Door by Magda Szabó
The Door by Hungarian writer Magda Szabó focuses on the unconventional and complex relationship between Magda (also a writer) and her housekeeper, Emerence. Over the span of two decades, the bond between these two women deepens, filled with resentment, affection, and a lifetime of secrets. The novel, translated here by Len Rix, aptly examines themes of friendship and the enduring impact that the past has on the present.
The novel has received excellent critical acclaim, often praised for its compelling exploration of female relationships, haunted atmosphere, and its poignantly insightful portrayal of Hungarian social history and cultural dynamics. This book makes for a highly engaging, suspenseful read that will leave you feeling as deeply intertwined and enamoured with the characters as they are with one another.
“She was lonely. Who isn’t lonely, I’d like to know? And that includes people who do have someone but just haven’t noticed.”
Magda Szabó, The Door
Heart Lamp: Selected Stories by Banu Mushtaq
Winner of the 2025 International Booker Prize, Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp: Selected Stories is a collection of twelve incredible tales centering women in predominantly Muslim communities in Southern India. The collection spans more than three decades of Mushtaq’s writing career, with each short story aiming to draw attention to how generations of powerful South Indian women have been historically denied rights, subjected to emotional and physical abuse, and treated as though their lives possessed no value outside of traditional maternal, marital, and mothering roles.
This collection has been wonderfully translated by Deepa Bhasthi and deals closely with themes of women’s rights, religious oppression, the gendered roles of family life, and the toll of community conflicts. Mushtaq has been heavily praised for the dry and gentle humour she utilises throughout her work, as well as the compelling portraits she paints of her female character’s — whom she weaves as vessels that tirelessly champion for women’s liberation and safety.
“The coping mechanisms we devise, the solutions we find and the adjustments we make around men are survival strategies nurtured across generations.”
Banu Mushtaq, Heart Lamp: Selected Stories
Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami
Winner of the 2007 Akutagawa Prize (the most prestigious literary award in Japan), Mieko Kawakami’s Breasts and Eggs is a novel exploring the journeys of three women — Natsuko, her sister Makiko, and Makiko’s daughter, Midoriko. Together, the three women work to navigate the complexities of womanhood, motherhood, and female identity in Japan, whilst also trying to remain present in their own hopes and aspirations as they do so. Split across two parts, the first follows Makiko’s dream of having breast augmentation surgery and Midoriko’s struggles with puberty, whilst the second, set ten years later, focuses on Natsuko’s desire to become a mother in spite of her asexuality and lack of male partner.
Translated by David Boyd and Sam Bett, Breasts and Eggs offers up an intimate exploration of Japanese contemporary womanhood, highlighting themes of societal expectations, unattainable beauty standards, bodily autonomy, and a woman’s choice to have a baby. Kawakami’s unflinching portrayal of her nuanced female characters seeking out a space for themselves within a relentlessly patriarchal society greatly recommends this novel for the next must-read on your TBR.
“At the end of the day, where is this pain that men feel coming from? In their opinion: us. It’s all our fault—whether they’re unpopular, broke, jobless. Whatever it is, they blame women for all of their failures, all their problems. Now think about women. No matter how you see it, who’s actually responsible for the majority of the pain women feel? If you think about it that way, how could a man and a woman ever see eye to eye? It’s structurally impossible.”
Mieko Kawakami, Breasts and Eggs
The Third Love by Hiromi Kawakami
The Third Love by Hiromi Kawakami (no relation to Mieko Kawakami) is a novel that ponders upon the themes of love, destiny, self-discovery, and desire through the lens of a 21st-century woman’s journey from childhood to adulthood. Against a colourful backdrop of both modern and historical Japan, the central female protagonist, Riko, is made to experience different forms of her identity and relationships in dreamlike worlds that each connect with her waking life.
Readers are drawn to this Hiromi Kawakami novel for its unique blend of narrative styles and for her thought-provoking explorations of womanhood and love in all its possible iterations. Her most recent publication, Under the Eye of the Big Bird, was shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize and is also very highly recommended, all of her works having been translated by Ted Goossen.
“‘Poor you. That you love me, and poor me that I love you. It’s terrible for both of us.’
Hiromi Kawakami, The Third Love
It felt strange, Riko thought, for a couple so much in love to speak of that love in such doleful terms.”
Oldladyvoice by Elisa Victoria
Translated by Charlotte Whittle comes the debut novel from Spanish writer Elisa Victoria, Oldladyvoice. This coming-of-age story is told from the perspective of nine-year-old Marina, a young girl who is spending the summer with her grandma whilst her mother undergoes treatment for an unspecified illness in the hospital. The novel explores Marina’s irreverent, sharp mind as she seeks to make sense of the strikingly adult world of illness, sexuality, and societal expectations in which she has suddenly found herself.
Presenting a vividly original take on the coming-of-age genre, Oldladyvoice reimagines girlhood through the eyes of a unique, hilarious, endearing, and impressively perceptive narrator. The novel additionally explores generational female relationships, with the oldest and youngest of Marina’s matriarchal family coming together in love, support, and hope for the sick mother who exists as the centre of it all.
“But what’s up with that, Mom, how come so many people seem like they don’t remember anything? When do they forget?”
Elisa Victoria, Oldladyvoice
The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector
Highly recommended and beloved amongst readers of women’s translated fiction is The Hour of the Star by Clarice Lispector, brilliantly adapted into English from Portuguese here by Benjamin Moser. Lispector’s unique blend of existential themes, psychological exploration, and beautiful prose deeply resonates with her readers and has thus contributed to her massive and devoted following. The Hour of the Star tells the story of Macabéa, a young, impoverished girl living in the slums of Rio de Janeiro, as she navigates the harsh realities of life as a woman in poverty.
The book is narrated by a cosmopolitan man named Rodrigo S.M., who empathetically recounts Macabéa’s troubled life after being initially repelled by her outward wretchedness. The narrative is one that encourages readers to acknowledge the inner strength and endurance held by women going through economic struggles entirely alone, as well as their honourable ability to find joy in the smallest of things. The novel also works to question the nature of identity, the human condition, and the role of the narrator in shaping a biased, discriminatory, or unreliable story.
“She wasn’t crying because of the life she led: because, never having led any other, she’d accepted that with her that was just the way things were. But I also think she was crying because, through the music, she might have guessed there were other ways of feeling […]”
Clarice Lispector, The Hour of the Star
So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ
So Long a Letter by Mariama Bâ is a Senegalese novel translated from French by Modupé Bodé-Thomas. The story begins when Ramatoulaye, a Senegalese living in the country’s capital, Dakar, decides to write a letter to her old friend Aissatou, who left several years prior to begin a new life in America. This decision to write is prompted by the sudden death of Ramatoulaye’s estranged husband Modou — a death that, in keeping with Muslim custom, necessitates Ramatoulaye’s observation of ‘mirasse’, a forty-day period of mourning and isolation.
Over the course of this grieving period, Ramatoulaye keeps a diary where she begins to reflect on the long funeral proceedings following Modou’s death, as well as how their marriage, though flawed, worked to shape her sense of her identity and place in the world through time. The novel delves into themes of patriarchy, loneliness, motherhood, the impact of colonial education, and the ongoing tensions between feminism and Islam. Winner of the first Noma Award for Publishing in Africa, this is a must-read book that is not simply a beautifully written piece of literature, but also a true testament to the endurance and importance, of female friendship.
“You forget that I have a heart, a mind, that I am not an object to be passed from hand to hand. You don’t know what marriage means to me: it is an act of faith and love, the total surrender of oneself to the person one has chosen and who has chosen you.”
Mariama Bâ, So Long a Letter
The Wall by Marlen Haushofer
The Wall is a work of feminist dystopian fiction that is widely viewed as the best piece of literature to have been written by Austrian novelist Marlen Haushofer. Amazingly translated from German by Shaun Whiteside, the book follows an unnamed middle-aged woman as she vacations in a hunting lodge up in the alpine mountains. Whilst she is there, however, she discovers that a transparent wall has mystically appeared, and is now impenetrably separated from the rest of the world.
Beyond the wall the woman can see that all life has seemingly been destroyed, suggesting that a globally destructive event akin to a nuclear holocaust has occurred. Having mysteriously been spared by unknown forces, the woman must now navigate survival alone, with only a dog, cat, and cow as her faithful companions. This novel explores themes of isolation, the conditions of reality, as well as the relationship between people and the natural world. Readers should prepare for an emotional journey through a void of the menial, repetitive tasks demanded by survival, with the ultimate promise of a book that will leave you speechless for several weeks afterwards.
“I could simply forget I was a woman. Sometimes I was a child in search of strawberries, or a young man sawing wood, or, when sitting on the bench holding Pearl on my scrawny lap and watching the setting sun, I was a very old, sexless creature.”
Marlen Haushofer, The Wall
The women’s fiction spotlighted here each emphasizes the importance of reading literature in translation as a means of ensuring that we are all cultivating multidimensional perspectives of the world. By seeking out and reading these stories, we expand not only our understanding of global literature but also work to actively challenge gender and ethnic inequalities that continue to be rife, both in the publishing industry and beyond. We must amplify and uphold the too-often-silenced voices of women writers in translation and acknowledge them as an essential part of promoting a truly representative, equitable, and inclusive literary landscape.
Love these recommendations? Read our article: The Evolution of Women’s Literature and Its Forgotten Trailblazers.
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