In Translation

Women In Translation month sale

For our Women in Translation month sale, get 20% off selected titles until the end of August. Browse here.

Recent acquisitions

We are thrilled to share some of the exciting new books that Scribe will be publishing in 2024. Returning to Scribe with their next works, we have Bora Chung with a new short story collection to follow up her International Booker–shortlisted collection, Cursed Bunny, as well as a tender new novel from Elisa Shua Dusapin, author of Winter in Sokcho and The Pachinko Parlour.

Your Utopia

By the internationally acclaimed author of *Cursed Bunny*, in another thrilling translation from the Korean by Anton Hur, *Your Utopia* is full of tales of loss and discovery, idealism and dystopia, death and immortality. “Nothing concentrates the mind like Chung’s terrors, which will shrivel you to a bouillon cube of your most primal instincts” (*Vulture*), yet these stories are suffused with Chung's inimitable wry humour and surprisingly tender moments, too — often between unexpected subjects.
In ‘The Center for Immortality Research’, a low-level employee runs herself ragged planning a fancy gala…

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Vladivostok Circus

Tonight is the opening night. There are birds perched everywhere, on the power lines, the guy ropes, the strings of light that festoon the tent … when I think of all those little bodies suspended between earth and sky, it makes me smile to remind myself that for some of them, their first flight begins with a fall.
Nathalie arrives at the circus in Vladivostok, Russia, fresh out of fashion school in Geneva. She is there to design the costumes for a trio of artists who are due to perform one of the most dangerous acts of all: the Russian Bar.
As winter approaches, the season at Vladivostok is winding down,…

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New and upcoming

One of the wonderful things about translated fiction is how it can open up foreign stories and settings to us, bringing with them their histories. These novels take us from Indonesia to Belgium, South Korea to the US, and Japan to Germany, set in periods from the early 1900s up to the modern day.

Mater 2-10

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE**
**International Booker–nominated virtuoso Hwang Sok-yong is back with another powerful story — an epic tale that threads together a century of Korean history.**
In contemporary Seoul, a laid-off worker stages a months-long sit-in atop a sixteen-storey factory chimney. During the long and lonely nights, he talks to his ancestors, chewing on the meaning of life, on wisdom passed down the generations.
Through the lives of those ancestors, three generations of railroad workers, *Mater 2-10* vividly portrays the struggles of ordinary Koreans, starting from the…

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Birth Canal

**This dazzling novella from a rising star of Indonesian literature explores generational legacies, lost loves, the damage that war does to men, and the damage that men do to women.**
In today’s Jakarta, an unnamed man tells the story of his lifelong friend Nastiti, and what happened on the day she vanished. In the Dutch East Indies’ Semarang, a young Indo-Dutch girl, Rukmini, is captured by the Japanese military and is forced into prostitution. Years later, Arini travels to the Netherlands to share her mother’s dark past with a researcher.
After the American occupation of Japan in WWII ends, a former…

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Can’t I Go Instead

**Two women's lives and identities are intertwined — through World War II and the Korean War — revealing the harsh realities of class division in the early part of the 20th century.**
*Can't I Go Instead* follows the lives of the daughter of a Korean nobleman and her maidservant in the early 20th century. When the daughter’s suitor is arrested as a Korean Independence activist, and she is implicated during the investigation, she is quickly forced into marriage to one of her father’s Japanese employees and shipped off to the United States. At the same time, her maidservant is sent in her mistress's place…

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Sisters in Arms

‘We don’t exist in this world. Here we’re neither Germans nor refugees; we aren’t newsreaders or experts. We’re some kind of joker in the pack, and they don’t know if they can use us for anything.’
Kasih, Hani, and Saya have shared a deep friendship since school and the years they lived in the same public housing estate. Kasih and Hani still live in the same city, but now Saya is returning and they have a lot to catch up on. Yet amid the laughter and determination of their sisterhood, it’s clear to the three young women that they haven’t escaped the racism that has accompanied their…

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Owlish

**A professor falls in love with a mechanical ballerina in a mordant and uncanny fable of contemporary Hong Kong.**
In the mountainous city of Nevers, there lives a professor of literature called Q. He has a dull marriage and a lacklustre career, but also a scrumptious collection of antique dolls locked away in his cupboard. And soon Q lands his crowning acquisition: a music box ballerina named Aliss who tantalisingly springs to life. Guided by his mysterious friend Owlish and inspired by an inexplicably familiar painting, Q embarks on an all-consuming love affair with Aliss, oblivious to the sinister forces…

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Award winners

A fun bonus for translated work is that it can go into more than one award pool. The books can be entered for relevant awards in their original language and territory — and then go on to be entered into translation-eligible awards in the new language editions! These books have been in the final running for the prestigious International Booker Prize, and won prestigious awards in their home territories.

The Eighth Life

**AN *OBSERVER* BOOK OF THE YEAR**
‘That night Stasia took an oath, swearing to learn the recipe by heart and destroy the paper. And when she was lying in her bed again, recalling the taste with all her senses, she was sure that this secret recipe could heal wounds, avert catastrophes, and bring people happiness. But she was wrong.’
At the start of the twentieth century, on the edge of the Russian Empire, a family prospers. It owes its success to a delicious chocolate recipe, passed down the generations with great solemnity and caution. A caution which is justified: this is a recipe for ecstasy that carries…

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Pink Slime

**Winner of the Uruguayan National Literature Prize for Fiction, the Bartolomé-Hidalgo Fiction Prize, and the Sor Juana Inés de la Cruz Literature Prize.**
A port city is in the grips of an ecological crisis. The river has filled with toxic algae, and a deadly ‘red wind’ blows through its streets; much of the coast has been evacuated as the wealthy migrate inland to safety, leaving the rest to shelter in abandoned houses as blackouts and food shortages abound.
The unnamed narrator is one of those who has stayed. She spends her days trying to disentangle herself from the two relationships that had once…

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A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding

**LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE**
**Are we free to create our own destinies or are we just part of a system beyond our control?**
**A joyful family saga about free will, forgiveness, and how we are all interconnected.**
In October 1989, a set of triplets is born, and it is this moment their father chooses to reveal his affair. Pandemonium ensues.
Over two decades later, Sebastian is recruited to join a mysterious organisation, the London Institute of Cognitive Science, where he meets Laura Kadinsky, a patient whose inability to see the world in three dimensions is not the only thing about her that…

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Cursed Bunny

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2022 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE AND WINNER OF A PEN/HEIM TRANSLATION GRANT.**
A woman is haunted by her own bodily waste. A pregnant woman is told she must find a father for her unborn baby or face horrific consequences. A young monster, forced to fight, discovers the extent of his power.
This genre-defying collection of short stories blurs the lines between magical realism, horror, and science fiction. Using elements of the fantastic and surreal, Chung exposes the very real horrors and cruelties of patriarchy and capitalism in modern society, gliding effortlessly from terrifying to wryly…

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What I’d Rather Not Think About

**SHORTLISTED FOR THE 2024 INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE**
**What if one half of a pair of twins no longer wants to live? What if the other can’t live without them?**
This question lies at the heart of Jente Posthuma’s deceptively simple *What I’d Rather Not Think About*. The narrator is a twin whose brother has recently taken his own life. She looks back on their childhood, and tells of their adult lives: how her brother tried to find happiness, but lost himself in various men and the Bhagwan movement, though never completely.
In brief, precise vignettes, full of gentle melancholy and surprising humour, Posthuma…

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Selected nonfiction

When you think of translated books, you may often think of fiction, but there is also lots of nonfiction on offer. As a publishing house proud of our origins in serious nonfiction, Scribe has published a wide array of nonfiction that originated in languages from around the world, including Swedish, German, French, and more.

The Autists

**An incisive and deeply candid account that explores autistic women in culture, myth, and society through the prism of the author’s own diagnosis.**
Until the 1980s, autism was regarded as a condition found mostly in boys. Even in our time, autistic girls and women have largely remained invisible. When portrayed in popular culture, women on the spectrum often appear simply as copies of their male counterparts — talented and socially awkward.
Yet autistic women exist, and always have. They are varied in their interests and in their experiences. Autism may be relatively new as a term and a diagnosis, but…

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Zen in the Garden

**Spring, summer, autumn, and winter: wherever you are, the seasons come and go, bringing changes both welcome and unexpected.**
Japanese by birth, but transplanted to Europe in adulthood, Miki Sakamoto has spent a lifetime tending her garden and reflecting on its mysteries. *Why do primulas bloom in snow? Do the trees really ‘talk’ to one another? What are the blackbirds saying today? And is there a mindful way to deal with an aphid infestation?*
From rising early to walk barefoot on the grass each morning, to afternoons and evenings spent sipping tea in her gazebo or watching fireflies as she recalls her…

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Rethinking Our World

**A compelling and persuasive look at the social transformations needed to cope with our environmental crises.**
As this major German bestseller reports, our world is at a tipping point, and we feel it every day. On the one hand, we have never been so well off; on the other hand, we find destruction and crisis everywhere we look. Whether throughout the environment or within society, our systems are under stress.
In this book, Maja Göpel, co-founder of the Scientists for Future initiative and a former secretary-general of the German Advisory Council on Global Change, explains that this new reality didn’t…

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Abortion

‘How better to honour the women who have fought for abortion rights, those who are still fighting around the world, those who have suffered from its illegality, those who still suffer from its limitations, than to continue to talk about it?’
In this timely essay, Pauline Harmange provides an intimate, detailed account of her abortion. Reminiscent of Annie Ernaux’s *Happening*, *Abortion* is nuanced, complex, honest, and precise. Harmange gives voice to the emotions, reflections, and contradictions that someone could experience when they choose to terminate a pregnancy.
At a time in which women’s…

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The Age of Uncertainty

**The epic, page-turning history of how a group of physicists toppled the Newtonian universe in the early decades of the twentieth century.**
Marie Curie, Max Planck, Niels Bohr, Werner Heisenberg, Erwin Schrödinger, and Albert Einstein didn’t only revolutionise physics; they redefined our world and the reality we live in. In *The Age of Uncertainty*, Tobias Hürter brings to life the golden age of physics and its dazzling, flawed, and unforgettable heroes and heroines. He immerses us in a half century of global turmoil against which some of humankind’s greatest and strangest scientific discoveries…

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Cursed Bunny

Bora Chung

RRP: $27.99 Pub date: 28 Feb 2023 Category: Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945) Cover view

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Vladivostok Circus

Elisa Shua Dusapin

RRP: $27.99 Pub date: 3 Apr 2024 Category: Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945) Cover view

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Your Utopia

Bora Chung

RRP: $27.99 Pub date: 30 Jan 2024 Category: Short stories Cover view

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Mater 2-10

Hwang Sok-yong

RRP: $35.00 Pub date: 30 May 2023 Category: Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945) Cover view

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Can’t I Go Instead

Lee Geum-yi

RRP: $32.99 Pub date: 29 Aug 2023 Category: Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945) Cover view

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Sisters in Arms

Shida Bazyar

RRP: $32.99 Pub date: 5 Sep 2023 Category: Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945) Cover view

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Birth Canal

Dias Novita Wuri

RRP: $24.99 Pub date: 4 Jul 2023 Category: Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945) Cover view

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Owlish

Dorothy Tse

RRP: $27.99 Pub date: 2 May 2023 Category: Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945) Cover view

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The Eighth Life

Nino Haratischvili

RRP: $26.99 Pub date: 29 Sep 2020 Category: Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945) Cover view

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Pink Slime

Fernanda Trías

RRP: $29.99 Pub date: 1 Aug 2023 Category: Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945) Cover view

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A System So Magnificent It Is Blinding

Amanda Svensson

RRP: $35.00 Pub date: 5 Jul 2022 Category: Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945) Cover view

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What I’d Rather Not Think About

Jente Posthuma

RRP: $27.99 Pub date: 4 Apr 2023 Category: Modern & contemporary fiction (post c 1945) Cover view

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The Autists

Clara Törnvall

RRP: $29.99 Pub date: 30 May 2023 Category: Collected biographies Cover view

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Zen in the Garden

Miki Sakamoto

RRP: $29.99 Pub date: 2 May 2023 Category: Popular philosophy Cover view

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Rethinking Our World

Maja Göpel

RRP: $29.99 Pub date: 4 Apr 2023 Category: Social forecasting, future studies Cover view

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Abortion

Pauline Harmange

RRP: $19.99 Pub date: 4 Apr 2023 Category: Ethical issues: abortion & birth control Cover view

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The Age of Uncertainty

Tobias Hürter

RRP: $35.00 Pub date: 30 Aug 2022 Category: History of science Cover view

In Translation

Women In Translation month sale

Recent acquisitions

New and upcoming

Award winners

Selected nonfiction

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