Your sneak preview of books coming out in 2021 from around the world, updated each season.
By THE NEW YORK TIMES
Thoka Maer
ARGENTINA
American Delirium
When the deer population begins to attack a small Midwestern city, an ex-hippie senior trains a group of retirees to hunt the animals while a group of protesters decide to live in the woods.
BRAZIL
Antonio
On the verge of becoming a father, a man in Brazil tries to piece together a painful family past from three conflicting accounts.
BRAZIL
An Apprenticeship, or The Book of Pleasures
A woman struggles to be freed of solitude and sadness until she meets Ulisses, a guide who leads her into the fullness of pleasure and life.
ISRAEL
Aquarium
Two deaf sisters are raised in seclusion by deaf parents, until they are one day separated and begin to learn how to exist in the outside world.
TUNISIA
The Ardent Swarm
When hornets swarm one of a bee whisperer’s beehives, he ventures to the city to save his bees from destruction.
GREECE
Aristophanes: Four Plays
Four works by the fifth-century comic playwright range from a caricature of Socrates to the story of a woman who persuades her fellow females to withhold sex from their warmongering lovers until they negotiate peace.
KOREA
Arriving in a Thick Fog
Four novellas take the reader through the maze of a mind’s layers, emphasizing not events but ideas.
FRANCE
The Art of Losing
A novel spanning three generations traces a history of Algeria, how one carries the loss of a country and what deep rifts can be created from rebuilding one’s community.
SPAIN
The Art of Wearing a Trench Coat
Here are 13 stories about wearing a trench coat, admiring Humphrey Bogart and adopting a dog in light of a failing marriage.
JAPAN
At the End of the Matinee
A guitarist and a journalist meet after a concert in Tokyo and bond instantly but struggle to find the courage to explore it.
HUNGARY
The Bone Fire
Growing up under an Eastern European dictatorship, a teenager is adopted by her mystic grandmother after her parents die in a car accident.
REPUBLIC OF CONGO
The Bridgetower Sonata
A violin prodigy of mixed race takes 18th-century Europe by storm, becoming a court favorite of the Prince of Wales and befriending Ludwig Van Beethoven.
CROATIA
Café Europa Revisited
A sculpture of Alexander the Great, an immigrant with a parrot and a memorial ceremony of a Soviet-led army invasion spotlight life in Eastern Europe post-Communism.
ITALY
The Children’s Train
With thousands of other children, a 7-year-old takes a train across the peninsula of Italy to start a new life after World War II.
FRANCE
Cleopatra
An Italian paleontologist reconstructs the life of the Egyptian queen, from the assassination of Julius Caesar to the birth of the Augustan Empire.
SPAIN
Come On Up
Portraits of contemporary Barcelona detail an economic crisis divided by a secessionist movement and families adjusting to a new normal.
GERMANY
The Communicating Vessels
In a book of 140 entries, Mayröcker documents her grief over the course of a year after her partner of nearly 50 years dies.
FRANCE
Consent
A director of one of France’s leading publishing houses reflects on the disturbing romantic relationship she had as a teenager with a famous, much older writer.
DENMARK
The Copenhagen Trilogy
Three volumes of the 20th-century Danish poet’s memoirs, in one hardcover edition, explore motherhood, abortion and addiction.
CHILE
Cowboy Graves
Three novellas take the reader from a teenager recruited by a secret society in Paris, to a fighter plane writing poetry in the sky, to a fight for socialism in Chile.
Dear Ms. Schubert: Poems
Written by a Mr. Butterfly, these brief, playful poems show the intimacies of love while maintaining deep cultural skepticism.
RUSSIA
The Death of Vazir-Mukhtar
A leading figure of the Russian formalist school traces the last year in the life of Alexander Griboedov, who was murdered in 1829 in an attack on the Russian embassy in Tehran.
FRANCE
Ellis Island
With lists, inventories and prose meditations, Perec brings to life the stories of the 16 million people who passed through Ellis Island.
ROMANIA
FEM
Through a letter, a 21st-century Scheherazade recounts her life to a man she is ready to leave.
JAPAN
First Person Singular
Eight short stories touch on basketball, jazz and the fluid, dreamlike memories of childhood.
ITALY
Genesis
An examination of the universe undertakes the question: What exactly happened at the beginning of life on earth?
CZECHOSLOVAKIA
The Gentle Barbarian
This portrait of Vladimir Boudnik, one of the greatest Czech artists of the 1960s, recreates a friendship in Prague and the strange atmosphere of Czechoslovakia under Communism.
CZECH REPUBLIC
Gerta
When Allied forces liberate Nazi-occupied Moravia, a woman with Nazi-aligned roots seeks forgiveness in a divided postwar world.
FRANCE
Hidden Wonders
Through stories and images, an investigation of everyday objects reveals a hidden elegance and their relation to mathematics and physics.
MEXICO
Horizontal Vertigo
Villoro wanders Mexico City, describing the people and landscapes he sees and revealing the triumphs of the city’s cultural and political history.
JAPAN
An I-Novel
A Japanese graduate student decides to move back to Japan after two decades in America, ready to write in her mother tongue.
IRAQ
I’m in Seattle, Where Are You?
In a chance encounter with an African-American soldier, a student at the University of Baghdad falls in love and journeys to the United States.
ITALY
If You Kept a Record of Sins
A young man in Italy travels to attend the funeral of his mother, who left him to build her business in Romania.
FRANCE
The Impudent Ones
In a blend of memoir and fiction, a novel introduces the affairs and scandals of the Taneran family in postwar France.
FRANCE
In Concrete
When a father obtains a concrete mixer, his obsession with modernizing his family’s life leads to one daughter becoming trapped in concrete.
RUSSIA
In Memory of Memory
When her aunt dies, the narrator goes through a memory trove of photographs and letters that tell a century’s worth of stories of life in Russia.
CÔTE D’IVOIRE
In the Company of Men
A fable of the Ebola outbreak, complete with a healer’s potions, university closings and an ancient baobab tree.
FRANCE
The Island of Happiness
Madame d’Aulnoy’s 17th-century French fairy tales are interpreted by the feminist visual artist Natalie Frank in surreal, contemporary images.
JAPAN
Lady Joker, Volume 1
In 1955 Tokyo, five men who meet weekly at the racetrack to bet on horses decide to kidnap the chief executive of Japan’s largest beer conglomerate for money.
IRAN
Layli and Majnun
Written by a 12th-century Persian poet, this famous love story of the Middle East tells of star-crossed lovers whose union is derailed by their families.
RUSSIA
The Little Devil and Other Stories
The range of Russian mythology is showcased in stories of the supernatural, rural grotesques and deep religious faith in intense revolutionary settings.
POLAND
The Lost Soul
In an illustrated meditation on society and fulfillment, a man moves to a house far from all he knows to search for his soul.
GERMANY
Love in Case of Emergency
Five very different women enter new chapters in their lives, weathering infidelity, divorce, childlessness and friendship.
FRANCE (MARTINIQUE)
Mahagony
Over centuries, the lives of characters on the French Caribbean island of Martinique link back to a mahogany tree.
GREECE
Mechanisms of Loss: Two Novellas
Two novellas explore sabotaged love: A man roams the streets of Athens reflecting on his turbulent marriage, and two people have a conversation filled with mixed signals.
ROME
Meditations
The 16th emperor of Rome recorded his thoughts in notebooks, providing insight to the inner life of a devoted and private stoic.
HAITI
The Mediterranean Wall
Three women — from Nigeria, Eritrea and Syria — bond in their struggle to escape Europe, leaving their former lives behind.
ARGENTINA
Mona
When a Peruvian writer in California is nominated for a high-profile literary award, she finds herself in a small Swedish village with famous international authors and her own demons.
CHINA
Monkey King
Monkey King, a shape-shifting trickster with a penchant for trouble, must protect a pious monk in search of Buddhist sutras.
ITALY
The Monopoly of Man
A prominent 19th-century activist reveals the sexism of her colleagues and criticizes liberal-bourgeois feminism.
SOUTH KOREA
My Brilliant Life
In a final gift to his parents, Areum documents his life through stories of his family and his love.
BOSNIA
My Heart
Hospitalized after a heart attack, a writer reflects on his family’s experience in the Bosnian War and their life in America as refugees.
CHILE
Nancy
In a novel filled with photographs, X-rays and Bible verses, a woman on her deathbed looks back on the smugglers, missionaries, family members and others she has encountered.
RUSSIA
Notes From a Dead House
In what is often referred to as the first great prison memoir, Dostoevsky’s novel based on his time in a Siberian prison camp surfaces the horrifying conditions, feuds, betrayals and acts of kindness he witnessed.
UKRAINE
The Orphanage
During ongoing conflict in eastern Ukraine, a Ukrainian language teacher goes to an orphanage in occupied territory to rescue his nephew and bring him home.
ARGENTINA
Out of the Cage
The freakish death of Aurora Berro becomes a mix of vaudeville and tragicomedy as she narrates from a limbo state, her family at first unaware that anything has happened.
FRANCE
Painting Time
A young artist comes of age when she graduates from a famous art school and eventually gets a job working on a reproduction of the world’s most famous Paleolithic cave art.
GERMANY
The Passenger
In the 1930s, a respected Jewish businessman who served in the Great War journeys across Germany in fear of persecution.
INDIA
Poems of the First Buddhist Women
This translation of one of the oldest surviving literatures written by some of the first Buddhist women — or Theris — recount their lives pre-ordination and their joy in liberation.
FRANCE
Poetics of Work
As Lyon erupts in chaos, a poet walks the streets smoking cannabis, eating bananas and reading stories of life under the Third Reich.
ARGENTINA
Proceed With Caution: Stories and a Novella
A novella about a 1980s Argentine submarine crew during the Falklands War, and stories of whaling towns and baby birds, toe the line between the supernatural and natural.
SPAIN
Rabbit Island
Stories set in dingy hotel rooms, shape-shifting cities and graveyards try to make sense of neglected interior lives, the failure of institutions and the death of God.
AUSTRALIA
The Rain Heron
An army unit goes to the mountains in search of a mythical heron, disrupting the life of a quiet, solitary woman.
DEMOCRATIC REPUBLIC OF CONGO
Refugee
A migrant embarks on a six-year journey from the Democratic Republic of Congo to the Netherlands, encountering crooked customs officials, Saharan ambushes and unbearable living conditions.
EGYPT
The Republic of False Truths
In Cairo in 2011, the lives of a general, a young teacher, an out-of-work actor and a television personality collide in a showing of class divides and revolution.
CHINA
The Secret Talker
A woman’s quiet, perfect life in California is upended when a secret admirer forces her to confront her dark past in China.
ISRAEL
The Slaughterman’s Daughter
With the help of a mute ex-soldier, a Jewish woman in 19th-century Russia sets off to find her sister’s husband.
JAPAN
Terminal Boredom: Stories
In dark and playful stories, the renowned Japanese science fiction writer reveals friction between the sexes and universal class differences, whatever universe they may belong to.
ITALY
Three O’Clock in the Morning
A father and son are forced to spend two sleepless nights exploring Marseilles, eventually reconnecting over poetry, death and redemption.
SWEDEN
To Cook a Bear
When a maid is found dead in the forest and another is severely injured, a runaway and a pastor try to track down the murderer.
FRANCE
Tomorrow They Won’t Dare to Murder Us
Based on a true story: A “pied-noir” revolutionary is caught planting a bomb in a factory during the Algerian War and condemned to death.
RUSSIA
The Tool & the Butterflies
An aging man tries to find his place in modern society after a loss of ego and a delicate organ, which has reappeared in a faraway village.
CHINA
Top Graduate Zhang Xie
In the first extant play in the Chinese southern dramatic tradition, a scholar journeys to the capital to take the imperial exams, beginning a series of events that will change his life forever.
CHILE
The Twilight Zone
The narrator, fascinated since childhood by the confessions of a secret agent in the Pinochet regime, investigates what resistance means in a repressive dictatorship.
RUSSIA
Untraceable
At the brink of the Soviet Union’s collapse, a ruthless chemist faces the consequences of creating an undetectable poison that has no antidote.
LEBANON
Voices of the Lost
Six letters written in a war-torn country contain confessions, from an undocumented immigrant writing his former lover and from an escaped torturer detailing his crimes for his mother.
CROATIA
We Trade Our Night for Someone Else’s Day
A journalist assigned to write a puff piece about a crime of passion — in which a Croatian teacher fell in love with her Serbian student and murdered her husband — becomes determined to bring justice instead.
NORWAY
White Shadow
Ingrid, alone on an island while war rages in Norway, finds bodies from a bombed ship washing ashore, with one victim still alive.
ITALY
The World in a Selfie
The author deconstructs the politics of sightseeing, from Francis Bacon to Mark Twain, exploring the importance of tourism and the search for authenticity within it.
CHINA
The World Turned Upside Down
The only history of the Cultural Revolution by an independent scholar based in mainland China, documenting the decade-long class struggle.
GERMANY
Yesterday’s Tomorrow
An examination of how the Hitler-Stalin Pact, the Great Terror of 1937 and the failure of the European left to prevent National Socialism all contributed to the collapse of the Communist revolution.
NETHERLANDS
Your Story, My Story
Through a fictional work comes the true love story of the literary icons Sylvia Plath and Ted Hughes, as told from Hughes’s point of view.
ALGERIA
Zabor, or The Psalms
In this fable, an ostracized son compulsively writes a world of wonder and strangeness in hopes of saving his father.
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