Penguin International Writers – serie

Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026The internationally acclaimed masterpiece from one of Iran's most influential writers - a powerful and essential tale of female freedom 'The best feminist novel I know. It's thrilling, beautiful and hilarious' Johanne Lykke Holm'A courageous, talented woman, and above all, a great writer' Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis Women Without Men traces the interwoven destinies of five women – including a wealthy middle-aged housewife, a sex worker and a schoolteacher – as they arrive by different paths to live together in an abundant garden on the outskirts of Tehran.Drawing on elements of Islamic mysticism and recent Iranian history, this unforgettable novel depicts women escaping the narrow confines of family and society, and imagines their future living in a world without men.Translated from Persian by Faridoun Farrokh

An electrifying novel about the Nazi who reinvented himself, Albert Speer‘Which is the most seductive, truth or fiction?’This is the story of Albert Speer: The protégé. The ‘good Nazi’. The star. The mythmaker.In 1969 Speer, Hitler’s favourite architect and Minister of Armaments and War Production, publishes his memoirs. Rewriting his own past, claiming to have known nothing about the Final Solution, he declares himself ‘collectively responsible, but not individually guilty’.It is one of the greatest lies in history.Jean-Noël Orengo’s electrifying novel is the story of a man who saved his skin through the countless fictions he created about himself. A man with a talent for survival, who dazzled those around him with his monuments to power and then, escaping death, reinvented himself as a bestselling author. A man once described as the Führer's unrequited love.It is a story of power and ambition, self-interest and self-deceit – and what happens in a war over the truth.

'A book that confronts the purity of fact, the tyranny of memory, and the totalitarianism of family like no other' Jhumpa Lahiri'Intense, sharply imagined and fascinating' Colm Toibin'On that day, ten years ago, I saw my parents for the last time. Since then I’ve changed phone numbers, houses, continents, I’ve erected an impregnable wall and put an ocean between us. They’ve been the best ten years of my life.'A son is celebrating a bittersweet anniversary. It is a decade since he saw his parents: the father who ruled through petty acts of intimidation and fear, the mother who silently accepted it, fitting herself in the spaces around others’ lives. As he looks back, he recalls the airless family home, unsettled only by the ringing of a telephone, or a visitor who was soon rejected. And he remembers how he became possessed by the irrepressible desire to be free, to live his own life. But can you ever escape the grip of your origins?At once unflinchingly honest and razor sharp, The Anniversary is above all a novel of liberation which dismantles the tyranny of the family. It becomes a mirror in which we glimpse something that, even if we have not known it, affects us all.

The International Booker Prize-shortlisted masterpiece on grief and loss, from one of France's most original writers at work todayA Leopard-Skin Hat may be Anne Serre’s most moving novel yet. A masterpiece of simplicity, emotion and elegance, it is the story of an intense friendship between the Narrator and his close childhood friend, Fanny, who suffers from profound psychological disorders.A series of short scenes paints the portrait of a strong-willed and tormented young woman battling many demons, and of the Narrator’s loving and anguished attachment to her. Serre poignantly depicts the bewildering back and forth between hope and despair involved in such a relationship, while playfully calling into question the very form of the novel. Written in the aftermath of the death of the author’s little sister, A Leopard-Skin Hat is both the celebration of a tragically foreshortened life and a valedictory farewell.Translated from French by Mark Hutchinson.

'Visionary... almost as if David Lynch had dramatised the prophetic books of William Blake' Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times 'This is writing of overwhelming accomplishment' Chris Power, Observer An enthralling, hallucinatory masterwork by one of Central Europe’s most celebrated novelists‘We exist between the past and future like the vermiform body of a butterfly, in between its two wings’Beneath the streets of communist Bucharest linger hidden passageways, lost to memory. Here, sprawling hospitals give way to travelling circuses and underground jazz clubs, and Cartarescu’s childhood, prehistory and visionary fever dreams are woven into the landscape of the city, haunted by secret police and zombie hoards.Part visceral dream-memoir, part phantasmic pilgrimage, Mircea Cartarescu’s Blinding is one of the most widely heralded literary sensations in contemporary Romania, and a fascinating, kaleidoscopic journey into the past.

An electrifying novel about the Nazi who reinvented himself, Albert Speer‘Which is the most seductive, truth or fiction?’This is the story of Albert Speer: The protégé. The ‘good Nazi’. The star. The mythmaker.In 1969 Speer, Hitler’s favourite architect and Minister of Armaments and War Production, publishes his memoirs. Rewriting his own past, claiming to have known nothing about the Final Solution, he declares himself ‘collectively responsible, but not individually guilty’.It is one of the greatest lies in history.Jean-Noël Orengo’s electrifying novel is the story of a man who saved his skin through the countless fictions he created about himself. A man with a talent for survival, who dazzled those around him with his monuments to power and then, escaping death, reinvented himself as a bestselling author. A man once described as the Führer's unrequited love.It is a story of power and ambition, self-interest and self-deceit – and what happens in a war over the truth.

‘We exist between the past and future like the vermiform body of a butterfly, in between its two wings’Beneath the streets of communist Bucharest linger hidden passageways, lost to memory. Here, sprawling hospitals give way to travelling circuses and underground jazz clubs, and Cartarescu’s childhood, prehistory and visionary fever dreams are woven into the landscape of the city, haunted by secret police and zombie hoards.Part visceral dream-memoir, part phantasmic pilgrimage, Mircea Cartarescu’s Blinding is one of the most widely heralded literary sensations in contemporary Romania, and a fascinating, kaleidoscopic journey into the past.Translated from Romanian by Sean Cotter

Never before translated short stories by the legendary Ágota Kristóf 'One of the 20th century's greatest writers' Camilla Grudova'Pure genius' Max PorterI don’t care: it’s not even pretty. The song is sad, and old, so old.I Don't Care presents the best short fiction by the Hungarian master Ágota Kristóf, selected by the author herself and available in English for the first time. Written immediately before her acclaimed Notebook trilogy, the works here oscillate between parables, surrealist anecdotes, and stories animated by a realism stripped to the bone. By turns harrowing and whimsical, cruel and sharply funny, Kristóf’s world shifts our gaze to a shared reality, past and present. Here exile and existential alienation are undeniable – as is the force of every sentence, making for extraordinary and essential reading.Translated from French by Chris Andrews

From one of Denmark’s most revered authors, a startlingly original novel about a migrant’s fate, told across several generationsThis is the story of a young woman who is spirited away to St. Petersburg from Copenhagen by a lovestruck admirer. When she dies after the Revolution, her ashes are carried back to Denmark, igniting a chain reaction of further stories, told and retold by the women in her family against a shifting ground of meaning. We meet murderers and fable-like characters, such as the hilarious and unsettling Viktor Blanke, who manages to seduce not one but three generations of mothers and daughters. Natalja, we discover, cannot be held in one place. Rather than giving in to the tragedy that befalls her, she wills herself to become someone else, reinventing her family’s narrative one irresistible tale at a time.Tantalizing and full of wit, this remarkable, shape-shifting novel is available in English for the first time.Translated by Denise Newman

Longlisted for the International Booker Prize 2026The internationally acclaimed masterpiece from one of Iran's most influential writers - a powerful and essential tale of female freedom 'The best feminist novel I know. It's thrilling, beautiful and hilarious' Johanne Lykke Holm'A courageous, talented woman, and above all, a great writer' Marjane Satrapi, author of Persepolis Women Without Men traces the interwoven destinies of five women – including a wealthy middle-aged housewife, a sex worker and a schoolteacher – as they arrive by different paths to live together in an abundant garden on the outskirts of Tehran.Drawing on elements of Islamic mysticism and recent Iranian history, this unforgettable novel depicts women escaping the narrow confines of family and society, and imagines their future living in a world without men.Translated from Persian by Faridoun Farrokh

Virtue and Rosalind is where our wildest dreams come true. That popular, but not very brilliant, author who’s winning all the prizes? Our writer-protagonist will bump her off. Uncle Henri who walked off during a family picnic and never came back? Rather than blame him, she admires his will to radically renounce the past for a woman in a red skirt, revisiting the picnic site like sacred ground.But our heroine has more to accomplish on her present course, which glimmers at every turn with material for new characters, new novels. Central to this are her relationships with other women, who she regards as the finest and most meticulous lacemakers: absorbed in what they’re doing, creating something rather beautiful. They share her love of art – and of keeping an ample distance away from all the rest. After all, our darkest secrets live in the family.International Booker shortlistee Anne Serre reaffirms herself a master of literary form and innovation. Reading her, we read a hundred books at once. At first we might not recognise ourselves in this dazzling hall of mirrors, but by the end of it, we know just who we are.

The best in short fiction from around the world, from celebrated anthologist and author John Freeman and award-winning novelist Rabih AlameddineIn The Penguin Book of the International Short Story, writers from different nations, languages and sensibilities come together in a globe-spanning and long overdue tour of modern fiction. In ‘Super-Frog Saves Tokyo’, Haruki Murakami presents a man who believes a giant amphibian is enlisting him to protect his city from an impending earthquake. In ‘War of the Clowns’, Mozambique’s Mia Couto sketches a perfect allegory for our divided culture. In the predecessor story to her iconic novel The Vegetarian, Han Kang depicts a protagonist quietly undergoing an unlikely transformation in a high-rise in Seoul. A Colm Tóibín character thinks, ‘I do not even believe in Ireland’, while Carol Bensimon reflects from Brazil, ‘All great ideas seem like bad ones at some point’. Salman Rushdie brings us to unsettled rural India, Olga Tokarczuk to a circus exhibit, Abdellah Taïa to the queer Arab world, Ted Chiang to a far-off galaxy.For a long time, it was the norm for three quarters of the stories in international anthologies to be American or English. In this collection, the work of thoughtful and accomplished translators opens the door wide for those curious about what lies beyond the Western canon and classroom. Writers from six continents, ranging from new voices to literary icons, each offer a window into a distinct point of view, both transcending and illuminating their place of origin. They offer not only captivating prose, but a reminder of the power of the imagination across space and time.

'A Finnish masterpiece of autofiction... a dreamy, complex and therefore so very human portrait of the formation of a great artist' Financial Times A riveting, funny coming-of-age story: the second volume in Pirkko Saisio's award-winning Helsinki trilogyTeenaged Pirkko can’t decide which she hates most: God, her communist father, or her growing breasts. Grandpa has moved into the room long promised to her, and Mother, overworked and distant, tries to keep the peace between her headstrong daughter and husband. It's 1960s Finland and Pirkko has fun getting into trouble. That is, until her teacher suggests she might have what it takes to be a real writer. Then the historic summer of 1968 arrives, which Pirkko spends working at a Swiss orphanage where no one understands her and, as much as her family drive her mad, she’s homesick for the first time.As the world shifts and swirls around her, Pirkko must make sense of it all – including her own sexual identity. A funny, unique coming-of-age story and an intimate portrait of a life lived in language, Backlight is the second volume in Pirkko Saisio's award-winning Helsinki trilogy.

'A Finnish masterpiece of autofiction... a dreamy, complex and therefore so very human portrait of the formation of a great artist' Financial Times‘This is where she would like to belong, here in the kingdom of women, where words are sharp but gazes are soft.’In 1970s Helsinki, a revolutionary storm is blowing through Pirkko Saisio’s university. She has moved out of her family home, joined a communist theatre, and fallen in love for the first time. Her newly shaved head looks unmistakably modern, and Bertold Brecht lives on her windowsill to profess God-like words of wisdom.Playful, moving and original, this autofictional coming-of-age story embeds the reader in a world where art and activism are irrevocably intertwined, and where queer love, still a crime, thrives in underground bars.In her mesmerizing account of radical politics and sexual awakening, Pirkko Saisio offers a series of farewells, to her mother, to the idealism of youth, to friends and lovers, and finally to her grown daughter. The grand finale of the award-winning Helsinki trilogy, The Red Book of Farewells embraces the revolutionary potential of moving on.Translated from Finnish by Mia Spangenberg

An electrifying novel about the Nazi who reinvented himself, Albert Speer‘Which is the most seductive, truth or fiction?’This is the story of Albert Speer: The protégé. The ‘good Nazi’. The star. The mythmaker.In 1969 Speer, Hitler’s favourite architect and Minister of Armaments and War Production, publishes his memoirs. Rewriting his own past, claiming to have known nothing about the Final Solution, he declares himself ‘collectively responsible, but not individually guilty’.It is one of the greatest lies in history.Jean-Noël Orengo’s electrifying novel is the story of a man who saved his skin through the countless fictions he created about himself. A man with a talent for survival, who dazzled those around him with his monuments to power and then, escaping death, reinvented himself as a bestselling author. A man once described as the Führer's unrequited love.It is a story of power and ambition, self-interest and self-deceit – and what happens in a war over the truth.

'Visionary... almost as if David Lynch had dramatised the prophetic books of William Blake' Boyd Tonkin, Financial Times 'This is writing of overwhelming accomplishment' Chris Power, Observer An enthralling, hallucinatory masterwork by one of Central Europe’s most celebrated novelists‘We exist between the past and future like the vermiform body of a butterfly, in between its two wings’Beneath the streets of communist Bucharest linger hidden passageways, lost to memory. Here, sprawling hospitals give way to travelling circuses and underground jazz clubs, and Cartarescu’s childhood, prehistory and visionary fever dreams are woven into the landscape of the city, haunted by secret police and zombie hoards.Part visceral dream-memoir, part phantasmic pilgrimage, Mircea Cartarescu’s Blinding is one of the most widely heralded literary sensations in contemporary Romania, and a fascinating, kaleidoscopic journey into the past.

'A book that confronts the purity of fact, the tyranny of memory, and the totalitarianism of family like no other' Jhumpa Lahiri'Intense, sharply imagined and fascinating' Colm Toibin'On that day, ten years ago, I saw my parents for the last time. Since then I’ve changed phone numbers, houses, continents, I’ve erected an impregnable wall and put an ocean between us. They’ve been the best ten years of my life.'A son is celebrating a bittersweet anniversary. It is a decade since he saw his parents: the father who ruled through petty acts of intimidation and fear, the mother who silently accepted it, fitting herself in the spaces around others’ lives. As he looks back, he recalls the airless family home, unsettled only by the ringing of a telephone, or a visitor who was soon rejected. And he remembers how he became possessed by the irrepressible desire to be free, to live his own life. But can you ever escape the grip of your origins?At once unflinchingly honest and razor sharp, The Anniversary is above all a novel of liberation which dismantles the tyranny of the family. It becomes a mirror in which we glimpse something that, even if we have not known it, affects us all.

Never before translated short stories by the legendary Ágota Kristóf 'One of the 20th century's greatest writers' Camilla Grudova'Pure genius' Max PorterI don’t care: it’s not even pretty. The song is sad, and old, so old.I Don't Care presents the best short fiction by the Hungarian master Ágota Kristóf, selected by the author herself and available in English for the first time. Written immediately before her acclaimed Notebook trilogy, the works here oscillate between parables, surrealist anecdotes, and stories animated by a realism stripped to the bone. By turns harrowing and whimsical, cruel and sharply funny, Kristóf’s world shifts our gaze to a shared reality, past and present. Here exile and existential alienation are undeniable – as is the force of every sentence, making for extraordinary and essential reading.Translated from French by Chris Andrews

From one of Denmark’s most revered authors, a startlingly original novel about a migrant’s fate, told across several generationsThis is the story of a young woman who is spirited away to St. Petersburg from Copenhagen by a lovestruck admirer. When she dies after the Revolution, her ashes are carried back to Denmark, igniting a chain reaction of further stories, told and retold by the women in her family against a shifting ground of meaning. We meet murderers and fable-like characters, such as the hilarious and unsettling Viktor Blanke, who manages to seduce not one but three generations of mothers and daughters. Natalja, we discover, cannot be held in one place. Rather than giving in to the tragedy that befalls her, she wills herself to become someone else, reinventing her family’s narrative one irresistible tale at a time.Tantalizing and full of wit, this remarkable, shape-shifting novel is available in English for the first time.Translated by Denise Newman