Women In Translation Month 2021

August is Women In Translation Month — an initiative started in 2014 by book blogger Meytal Radzinski who had two goals in mind:

Increase the dialogue and discussion about women writers in translation
Read more books by women in translation

We’re proud to have a long list of translated fiction and nonfiction titles by women authors — from Elisa Shua Dusapin’s intimate and beautiful novel Winter In Sokcho to Sayragul Sauytbay’s shocking exposé The Chief Witness.

We’ll be celebrating WIT Month with giveaways on our social channels, fiction reading recommendations, and 20% off a selection of Scribe titles by women in translation for all of August — browse below and use the code WIT2021 to receive 20% off your purchase at the checkout.

Follow along on Instagram and Twitter, and share your own reading recommendations with the hashtags #womenintranslation and #WITMonth.

Fiction

The Liquid Land

**A town that doesn’t want to be found. A countess who rules over the memories of an entire community. A hole in the earth that threatens to drag them all into its depths.**
When her parents die in a car accident, the highly talented physicist Ruth Schwarz is confronted with an almost intractable problem. Her parents’ will calls for them to be buried in their childhood home — but for strangers, Gross-Einland is a village that remains stubbornly hidden from view.
When Ruth finally finds her way there, she makes a disturbing discovery: beneath the town lies a vast cavern that seems to exert a strange…

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Winter in Sokcho

**Winner of the Prix Robert Walser — a beautiful, unexpected novel from a debut French-Korean author.**
It’s winter in Sokcho, a tourist town on the border between South and North Korea. The cold slows everything down. Bodies are red and raw, the fish turn venomous, beyond the beach guns point out from the North’s watchtowers. A young French-Korean woman works as a receptionist in a tired guesthouse. One evening, an unexpected guest arrives: a French cartoonist determined to find inspiration in this desolate landscape. The two form an uneasy relationship. When she agrees to accompany him on trips to…

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The Union of Synchronised Swimmers

**It’s summer behind the Iron Curtain, and six girls are about to swim their way to the Olympics — and a new life.**
In an unnamed Soviet state, six girls meet each day to swim. At first, they play, splashing each other and floating languidly on the water’s surface. But soon the game becomes something more.
They hone their bodies relentlessly. Their skin shades into bruises. They barter cigarettes stolen from the factory where they work for swimsuits to stretch over their sunburnt skin. They tear their legs into splits, flick them back and forth, like herons. They force themselves to stop breathing.
When…

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Prosopagnosia

**A sly and playful novel about the many faces we all have.**
Fifteen-year-old Berta says that beautiful things aren’t made for her, or that she isn’t destined to have them, or that the only things she deserves are ugly. It’s why her main activity, when she’s not at school, is playing the ‘prosopagnosia game’ — standing in front of the mirror and holding her breath until she can no longer recognise her own face. An ibis is the only animal she wants for a pet.
Berta’s mother is in her forties. By her own estimation, she is at least twenty kilos overweight, and her husband has just left her. Her…

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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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Higher Ground

**A prize-winning novel about class, money, creativity, and motherhood, that ultimately reveals what happens when the hypocrisies we live by are exposed ...**
Resi is a writer in her mid-forties, married to Sven, a painter. They live, with their four children, in an apartment building in Berlin, where their lease is controlled by some of their closest friends. Those same friends live communally nearby, in a house they co-own and have built together. Only Resi and Sven, the token artists of their social circle, are renting. As the years have passed, Resi has watched her once-dear friends become more and more…

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Elly

**LONGLISTED FOR THE CWA DAGGER AWARD FOR FICTION IN TRANSLATION**
**A missing child is a nightmare for any family. But what happens when they come back?**
Eleven-year-old Elly is missing. After an extensive police search she is presumed dead, and her family must learn to live with a gaping hole in their lives. Then, four years later, she reappears. But soon her parents and sister are plagued by doubts. Is this stranger really the same little girl who went missing? And if not, who is she?
*Elly* is a gripping tale of grief, longing, and doubt, which takes every parent’s greatest fear and lets it play out to an…

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Nonfiction

The Chief Witness

**A shocking depiction of one of the world’s most ruthless regimes — and the story of one woman’s fight to survive.**
I will never forget the camp. I cannot forget the eyes of the prisoners, expecting me to do something for them. They are innocent. I have to tell their story, to tell about the darkness they are in. It is so easy to suffocate us with the demons of powerlessness, shame, and guilt. But we aren’t the ones who should feel ashamed.
Born in China’s north-western province, Sayragul Sauytbay trained as a doctor before being appointed a senior civil servant. But her life was upended when the…

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Our Hormones, Our Health

**A handbook for how we can use the power of our hormones to master any stage of life.**
Joint pain, weight gain, migraines, acne, sleepless nights, loss of libido — all of these and more can be caused by hormone imbalances. Our health is impacted by our hormones all the way through our lives. So why do we often assume they’re mainly ‘a menopause thing’, and wait until hot flushes arrive before we take them seriously? Many women who experience hormone-related symptoms find that they aren’t acknowledged or treated until menopause hits, despite the impact they can have years before this, on all…

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Parenthood the Swedish Way

**Using the latest research and a wealth of personal experiences, this is the fact-based, no-nonsense approach to birth, child health, and shared child-rearing you have been waiting for.**
Many expectant parents will be surprised and relieved to hear the following: breastfeeding doesn’t protect against allergies; sterilising bottles and dummies is unnecessary in most countries; and if you think you shouldn’t drink alcohol when breastfeeding, you’ve been taken in by plain moralism and not scientific evidence. And by the way, you can forget the housework and prescribed routines: as long as you attend to…

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The Way Through the Woods

**One woman’s journey to overcome grief by delving into an overlooked wonder of nature.**
‘As the world of mushrooms opened up to me I began to see that the path back to life was easier than I had thought. It was simply a matter of gathering delights that flash and sparkle. All I had to do was follow the mushroom trail, even though I still didn’t know where it would lead. What would I find in the great unknown that lay ahead of me? What lay beyond those hilltops and mists and turns in the road?’
When Long Litt Woon loses her husband of 32 years to an unexpected death, she is utterly bereft. An…

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Gut

**The key to living a happier, healthier life is inside us.**
Our gut is almost as important to us as our brain or our heart, yet we know very little about how it works. In *Gut*, Giulia Enders shows that rather than the utilitarian and — let’s be honest — somewhat embarrassing body part we imagine it to be, it is one of the most complex, important, and even miraculous parts of our anatomy. And scientists are only just discovering quite how much it has to offer; new research shows that gut bacteria can play a role in everything from obesity and allergies to Alzheimer’s.
Beginning with the personal…

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The Scandinavian Skincare Bible

**The Swedish bestseller that will revolutionise the way you treat your skin.**
Beautiful, healthy skin is a holy grail for teens with acne and adults with wrinkles alike, and multi-step beauty routines are all the rage. But we know surprisingly little about our largest organ.
Think drinking water will replenish your skin? Think again. More products, better skin? Nope. And an expensive product doesn’t guarantee reliable results. You don’t need to cleanse your skin in the morning; in fact, too much cleansing can be damaging. Toner is redundant, natural products are not always best, and bacteria are not the…

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1947

**As the clock strikes the end of the war, the time begins to turn towards a new age — the one we call now.**
This shift does not happen overnight, from one day to the next; instead, the world vibrates for a number of years. People try to find their way back to homes that are no longer there, or on to an uncertain future across the sea. Some run from their deeds, and most get away. Among the millions in flight across Europe looking for a new home in 1947 is Elisabeth Åsbrink’s father.
In 1947, production begins of the Kalashnikov, Christian Dior creates the New Look, Simone de Beauvoir writes *The Second…*

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Ellis Island

**A *SPECTATOR* BOOK OF THE YEAR**
**A landmark work of history that brings the voices of the past vividly to life, transforming our understanding of the immigrant’s experience in America.**
Ellis Island. How many stories does this tiny patch of land hold? How many people had joyfully embarked on a new life here — or known the despair of being turned away? How many were held there against their will?
To tell its manifold stories, *Ellis Island* draws on unpublished testimonies, memoirs and correspondence from many internees and immigrants, including Russians, Italians, Jews, Japanese, Germans, and Poles, along with…

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