Independent Foreign Fiction Prize 2007
Explore the 2007 Independent Foreign Fiction Prize nominees—celebrating the best in translated fiction. Discover award-winning foreign books and acclaimed international authors from this prestigious literary competition.
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The Moldavian Pimp
by Edgardo Cozarinsky
Set in the Argentine capital and Paris, and ranging in time from the 1920s to beyond the turn of the century, this short novel is about Jewish immigrants, and the related stories that are collected and retold by the author in a fictional light.
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My Father's Notebook
by Kader Abdolah
Aga Akbar, the youngest of seven children and the illegitimate son of a Persian nobleman, is a deaf-mute. He makes use of a rudimentary sign language to get by in the world, but his deepest thoughts and feelings go unexpressed. Hoping to free the boy from his emotional confinement, his uncle asks him to visit a cave on nearby Saffron Mountain and to copy a three-thousand-year-old cuneiform inscription -- an order of the first king of Persia and the destination of many pilgrimages. Through the rest of his life, Aga Akbar uses these cuneiform characters to fill his notebook with writings only he can understand. Years later, his political-dissident son, Ishmael, has been forced to flee Iran. From his new home in the Netherlands, he attempts to translate the notebook, and in the process he tells his father's story, his own story, and the story of twentieth-century Iran -- from the building of the first railroad to the struggles for power among the shah, the communists, and the mullahs, and ending with the revolution. Rich in the myths of Persia and peopled with characters of rare archetypal power, this stunning and ambitious novel by Kader Abdolah masterfully charts a culture's troubled voyage into modernity. Just as poignantly, it is a magnificent, timeless tale of a son's love for his father.
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The Book of Chameleons
by José Eduardo Agualusa
Felix Ventura is a man with an unusual occupation. If your lineage isn't sufficiently distinguished, he'll change that for you. If your family history isn't quite as glorious as you'd like, he can make you a new one. Felix Ventura is a seller of pasts.
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I'll Steal You Away
by Niccolò Ammaniti
Ischiano Scalo. A place where even the main road out of town gives up after a couple of miles, where escape from a life of boredom and emptiness is almost impossible. Forced into crimes he never wanted to commit, 11-year-old Pietro reaches crisis point when his parents ignore his pleas for support and his schoolteacher turns her back on him.
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The Old Child & Other Stories
by Jenny Erpenbeck
The Old Child & Other Stories introduces in English one of Germany's most original and brilliant young authors, Jenny Erpenbeck.
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Kiffe Kiffe Tomorrow
by Faïza Guène
Struggling with an overworked mother, an absent father, and the challenges of life within the infamous Paradise projects of suburban Paris, fifteen-year-old French Muslim Doria endures a parade of social workers, experiences a first kiss, and assumes a philosophical outlook regarding her circumstances. A first novel. Original. 75,000 first printing.
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The Successor
by Ismail Kadare
"This, Ismail Kadare's most recent novel, is a fictional inquiry into the still-unexplained death of Mehmet Shehu, the man who for decades was the designated Number Two political figure in Communist dictator Enver Hoxha's ironfisted and increasingly paranoid regime." "On the night of December 13, 1981, the so-called Successor was shot dead, sometime between midnight and early morning. Did he commit suicide or was he murdered? This is the burning question. There are a number of potential murderers: the architect in charge of renovating the Successor's new quarters, who knew of the secret underground passage to his home; a rising political figure, Adrian Hasobeu, who if the current successor were to disappear would surely be named Number Two; the dictator himself - known to his countrymen as the Guide - now ailing and almost blind, unable to countenance even the idea of being replaced; and, incredibly, the Successor's wife." "The Successor combines a tantalizing mystery with a historical novel (Who killed Mehmet Shehu?), a psychological examination (How do you live in a world where nothing is sure?), and an analysis of a dictatorship so repressive that its followers treat it as a religious faith, where love, and indeed all personal relations, are subject to the whims and demands of the state."--BOOK JACKET.
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Stick Out Your Tongue
by Ma Jian
When this book was published in Chinese in 1997, the government accused Ma Jian of "harming the fraternal solidarity of the national minorities," and a blanket ban was placed on his future work. With its publication in English, including a new Afterword by the author that sets the book in its personal and political context, readers get a rare glimpse of Tibet through Chinese eyes.
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Your Face Tomorrow
by Javier Marías
Your Face Tomorrow, Javier Marias's dazzling unfolding magnum opus, is a novel in three parts, which began with Volume One: Fever and Spear. Described as a "brilliant dark novel" (Scotland on Sunday), the book now takes a wild swerve in its new volume. Skillfully constructed around a central perplexing and mesmerizing scene in a nightclub, Volume Two: Dance and Dream again features Jacques Deza. In Volume One he was hired by MI6 as a person of extraordinarily sophisticated powers of perception. In Volume Two Deza discovers the dark side of his new employer when Tupra, his spy-master boss, brings out a sword and uses it in a way that appalls Deza: You can't just go around hurting and killing people like that. Why not? asks Tupra. Searching meditations on favors and jealousy, knowledge and the deep human desire not to know, violence and death play against memories of the Spanish Civil War as Deza's world becomes increasingly murky.
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Wizard of the Crow
by Ngũgĩ wa Thiongơo
The individual stories of characters both powerful and ordinary create a kaleidoscopic portrait of postcolonial Africa in the twentieth century, in a novel set in the Free Republic of Aburiria.
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Havana Black
by Leonardo Padura
"The brutally mutilated body of Miguel Forcade is discovered washed up on a Havana beach. Head smashed in by a baseball bat, genitals cut off by a blunt knife. Forcade was once responsible for confiscating art works from the bourgeoisie fleeing the revolution. Had he really returned from exile just to visit his ailing father?" "Lieutenant Mario Conde immerses himself in Cuba's dark history, expropriations of priceless paintings now vanished without trace, corruption and old families who appear to have lost much, but not everything." "Padura evokes the disillusionment of a generation who embraced the revolutionary cause and now struggles to survive in a decaying city threatened by hurricane Felix. Yet this novel is a eulogy to Cuba, to its music and sensuality, and to the great friendships of those who chose to stay and fight for survival."--BOOK JACKET.
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A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear
by Atiq Rahimi
"Set in Kabul just before the Soviet invasion of December 1979, this extraordinary book is both the story of a student in fear for his life, and the story of Afghanistan - a beautiful, wounded country torn apart by religion and politics. Its action takes place over just two nights; its events are triggered by the random persecution of a young man as he makes his way home one evening, a little drunk, and is set upon by soldiers. Beaten to a pulp, Farhad is dragged by a strange woman into her house where he spends the night half believing he has died and is suffering the deserved punishment of an infidel. Yet as the reality of his situation starts to assert itself and he learns the terrible story of the woman who harbours him, he begins to feel an impossible and forbidden love for her - a love that embodies an angry compassion for the suffering of Afghanistan's women, and the yearning for a lost home." "A Thousand Rooms of Dream and Fear is a novel of interiors. It unfolds almost entirely within the confines of a house, a mosque and a mind. As Rahimi leads us through his claustrophobic labyrinth - as maze-like as the patterns on an Afghan carpet - he takes us ever deeper into the soul and imagination of his country."--BOOK JACKET.
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Seeing
by José Saramago
Four years after a bizarre blindness plague hits the capital, the political arena is thrown into turmoil when election day is marked by an unprecedented turnout of blank ballots and rebellious acts that prompt a state of emergency declaration.
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Shyness and Dignity
by Dag Solstad
"A meditative portrayal of one man's overwhelming inability to connect with contemporary society Elias Rukla begins yet another day under the leaden Oslo sky. At the high school where he teaches, a novel insight into Ibsen's The Wild Duck grips him with a passion so intense that he barely notices the disinterest of his students. After the lesson, when a broken umbrella provokes an unpredictable rage, he barely notices the students' intense curiosity. He soon realizes, however, that this day will be the decisive day of his life. Dag Solstad, praised in Norway as one of the most innovative novelists of his generation, offers an intricate and richly drawn portrait of a man who feels irrevocably alienated from contemporary culture, politics, and, ultimately, humanity."--Publisher's website.
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Grace
by Linn Ullmann
A haunting meditation on the beauty of life in the face of human mortality follow's one man's search for meaning in the face of terminal cancer and the inevitable arrival of Death.
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The Speed of Light
by Javier Cercas
A young would-be writer from Catalonia meets Vietnam veteran Rodney Falk at a Midwestern university in 1987, but it is only years later, after he has become a successful novelist, that he begins to understand what Rodney had revealed about evil and guilt. Original. 10,000 first printing.
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The Book About Blanche and Marie
by Per Olov Enquist
This novel is based on a true story of the remarkable relationship between the famous scientist, Marie Curie, and her assistant, Blanche Wittman.