Ten Essential Reads for Women in Translation Month 2025

With Women in Translation Month in full swing, we’ve gathered ten essential books from our catalogue written and/or translated by women. While by no means an exhaustive list, we hope these selections will inspire you to read more books by women in translation.

PS) As a bonus, we’re having a flash sale. That’s right our Women in Translation Month sale is on now!

Save 25% off all titles in our Literature in Translation Series written and/or translated by women until August 31, 2025.
Use discount code WITMONTH25 at checkout to save.

*Sale excludes forthcoming releases and subscription packages.

Without further ado, here’s our Women in Translation Month Essential Reading List:

Ceasaria by Hanna Nordenhök, translated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel

On a remote country estate in nineteenth-century Sweden, a renowned obstetrician keeps a young girl named Caesaria as a trophy: she was the first baby he delivered by caesarean section. She lives a dollhouse existence, characterized by supervision and punishment, assault and incarceration. Told in lush, elegant, and dreamlike prose, Caesaria narrates her confinement in the doctor’s mansion and encounters with its mysterious inhabitants and visitors.

As The Andes Disappeared by Caroline Dawson, translated from French by Anita Anand

Caroline is seven years old when her family flees Pinochet’s regime, leaving Chile for Montreal on Christmas Eve, 1986. She fears Santa won’t find them on the plane but wakes to find a new doll at her side, her mother preserving the holiday even amidst persecution and turmoil. This symbol of care is repeated throughout their relocation as her parents work tirelessly to provide the family with a new vision of the future. Once in Canada, Caroline accompanies her parents as they clean banks at night. She experiences racist microaggressions at school, discovers Québécois popular culture, and explores her love of reading and writing in French. Slowly, the Andean peaks disappear from Caroline’s drawings and a fracture between her parents’ identity and her own begins to grow.

Not Even the Sound of a River by Hélène Dorion, translated from French by Jonathan Kaplansky

Hanna drives down the St. Lawrence River to her late mother’s hometown, hoping to find out more about the distant woman who began to reveal herself only through notebooks discovered in her effects. As the river widens, so does Hanna’s understanding of the matriarchs in her family. She learns that her mother’s one true love, Antoine, died on the St. Lawrence when she was twenty, and that her grandmother also lost a young love to the same water. Both women remained shipwrecked after these tragedies, their tales mirroring other survivors’—such as the few who did not perish in the Empress of Ireland sinking when more than a thousand people lost their lives on the river in 1914.

Sugaring Off by Fanny Britt, translated from French by Susan Ouriou

On the surface, Adam and Marion are the embodiment of success: wealthy, attractive, in love. While holidaying in Martha’s Vineyard, Adam surfs into a local young woman, Celia. The accident leaves her injured and financially at risk; for Adam and Marion, it opens a fault of loneliness, rage, and desires that have too long been ignored.

Nauetakuan, a silence for a noise by Natasha Kanapé Fontaine, translated from French by Howard Scott

Monica, a young woman studying art history in Montreal, has lost touch with her Innu roots. When an exhibition unexpectedly articulates a deep, intergenerational wound, she begins to search for stronger connections to her Indigeneity. A new friendship with Katherine, an Indigenous woman whose life is filled with culture and community, emphasizes for Monica the possibilities of turning from assimilation and toxic masculinity to something deeper and more universal. A timely, riveting story of reclamation, matriarchies, and the healing power of traditional teachings, Nauetakuan, a silence for a noise affirms how reconnecting to lineage and community can transform Indigenous futures.

The Singularity by Balsam Karam, translated from Swedish by Saskia Vogel

In an unnamed coastal city filled with refugees, the mother of a displaced family calls out her daughter’s name as she wanders the cliffside road where the child once worked. The mother searches and searches until, spent from grief, she throws herself into the sea, leaving her other children behind. Bearing witness to the suicide is another woman—on a business trip, with a swollen belly that later gives birth to a stillborn baby. In the wake of her pain, the second woman remembers other losses—of a language, a country, an identity—when once, her family fled a distant war.

Blue Notes by Anne Cathrine Bomann, translated from Danish by Caroline Waight

A Danish university research group is finishing its study of a new medicine, Callocain: the world’s first pill for grief. But psychology professor Thorsten Gjeldsted suspects that someone has manipulated the test results to hide a disturbing side effect. When no one believes him, he teams up with two young students to investigate: Anna, who has recently experienced traumatic grief herself, and Shadi, whose statistical skills might prevent her from living a quiet life in the shadows. Together, these sleuthing academics try to discover what’s really happening before the drug becomes widely available.

The Employees by Olga Ravn, translated from Danish by Martin Aitken

Funny and doom-drenched, The Employees chronicles the fate of the Six-Thousand Ship. The human and humanoid crew members alike complain about their daily tasks in a series of staff reports and memos. When the ship takes on a number of strange objects from the planet New Discovery, the crew become strangely and deeply attached to them, and start aching for the same things—warmth and intimacy, loved ones who have passed, shopping and child-rearing, and faraway Earth, which now only persists in memory—even as tensions boil toward mutiny, especially among the humanoids.

you by Chantal Neveu, translated from French by Erín Moure

you demonstrates with exceptional beauty how in the interval between words or verses, language can glimmer, absorb, and refract the changing realities and attractions of an all too human relationship. Personal autonomy and the formation of “self” are nourished here by multiples—I, you, s/he. The voice in you reclaims life from change and time and affirms it anew.

Elevator in Sài Gòn by Thuận, translated from Vietnamese by Nguyễn An Lý

A Vietnamese woman living in Paris travels back to Sài Gòn for her estranged mother’s funeral. Her brother had recently built a new house there and staged a grotesquely lavish ceremony for their mother to inaugurate what was rumoured to be the first elevator in a private home in the country. But shortly after the ceremony, in the middle of the night, their mother dies after mysteriously falling down the elevator shaft.