A Guide To All The Books On The International Booker Prize 2026 Longlist
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Every year, the International reminds us that the most urgent, alive fiction being written right now isn't in English. This year's thirteen books — chosen from 128 submissions and translated from 11 languages — span four decades of original publication dates. There are witch trials and war deserters, penal colonies and Persian gardens, a queer conquistador loose in the South American jungles.
What unites these books isn't theme or geography, but the attention. These are writers who look at history, violence, power and desire and refuse the comfortable distance of being tame. While some are newly translated, some are from the late eighties.
Here's your guide to every one of them.
Taiwan Travelogue by Yáng Shuāng-zǐ, (translated by Lin King)
A Japanese novelist arrives in Japanese-occupied Taiwan in 1938, officially on imperial business, actually hungry — for food, for the island, for her interpreter. Disguised as a rediscovered colonial text, this novel won Taiwan's highest literary honour. Here, you’ll find a love story about two women, and also about what language does to power, and power does to love.
The Wax Child by Olga Ravn (translated by Martin Aitken)
The novel is based on a real 17th-century Danish witch trial, and is narrated partly through a wax figurine that a noblewoman moulds and carries under her arm for warmth. Ravn — already a cult figure in European literary fiction — writes fear the way other writers write beauty. Once suspicion of witchcraft takes hold, the novel suggests, no evidence of innocence is ever quite enough.
Women Without Men by Shahrnush Parsipur (translated by Faridoun Farrokh)
Written in 1989, Parsipur was actually imprisoned for her writing.
In this novel, five women — a housewife, a sex worker, a schoolteacher — converge on a garden outside Tehran and imagine a life outside male governance. The book draws on Islamic mysticism and recent Iranian history. It’s still banned in Iran.
The Witch by Marie Ndiaye (Translated by Jordan Stump)
NDiaye is one of France's most precise writers, and this book is about a mediocre witch in a mediocre marriage whose twin daughters turn out to be far more powerful than she ever was. Originally published in 1996, it's witty and dreamlike and genuinely unsettling on the subject of motherhood, inheritance, and the grief of being surpassed by the people you made.
The Duke by Matteo Melchiorre (Translated by Antonella Lettieri)
An eccentric aristocrat — the last of his line — lives in a crumbling villa above a tiny Dolomite village, largely ignored. Then someone starts stealing timber from his land and he has to decide whether he wants to act or not. Melchiorre is a historian of mountains and forests, and it shows: this is a novel with texture and weather and pace, asking sharp questions about privilege, land and what we owe the past.
On Earth As It Is Beneath by Ana Paula Maia (Translated by Padma Viswanathan)
The book features a Brazilian penal colony that was built on land where enslaved people were tortured and killed. As the prison winds down, the warden introduces a full-moon hunt: prisoners released into the forest, rifles raised. Spare and brutal, this is a novel about institutional violence.
The Director by Daniel Kehlmann (Translated by Ross Benjamin)
G.W. Pabst, a real person and one of Germany’s great cinema director, feels the Nazis to Hollywood, fails to break through, and eventually finds himself back in Austria. Kehlmann (who also wrote Measuring the World) is excellent at the slow, self-deceiving logic of moral compromise.
She Who Remains by Rene Karabash (Translated by Izidora Angel)
In the Albanian mountains, governed by a code of customary law called the Kanun, a woman escapes an arranged marriage by becoming a "sworn virgin" — renouncing her gender to live as a man. Years later, now Matija, she tells her story to a journalist. This is a book on identity, freedom, and the violence societies build into their social contracts.
Small Comfort by Ia Genberg (translated by Kira Josefsson)
Five interconnected stories about money — which is to say, about everything. A child star turned thief. A suspicious death at a pharmaceutical company. A couple performing marital happiness to secure an inheritance. Genberg is wickedly precise about the way financial anxiety warps how we love and lie, and this is the kind of short story collection that makes you feel lightly implicated by the end.
The Deserters by Mathias Énard (Translated by Charlotte Mandell)
Énard won the Prix Goncourt for Compass and writes with a scholar's depth and a novelist's nerve. Here, two narratives run in parallel: a soldier fleeing a nameless war through Mediterranean scrubland, and a conference in 2001 mourning an East German mathematician who survived Buchenwald. War, loyalty, what survives catastrophe. The oblique structure is the point.
The Remembered Soldier by Anjet Daanje (translated by David McKay)
Flanders, 1922. After serving as a soldier in the Great War, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Many women respond to a newspaper ad hoping that he’s their husband who was previously lost in the war. One of them takes him home. What follows is a love story built on uncertainty — he can't verify her account of who he was, and neither, entirely, can we.
We Are Green and Trembling by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara (translated by Robin Myers)
Someone born a girl escapes a Spanish convent, spends decades living as a man called Antonio — soldier, mule driver, sword-fighter, conquistador — and writes a letter home from the jungle about all of it. Based on a real person from the 1600s. It's violent and funny and strange in equal measure, and it treats the brutality of colonial Latin America not as backdrop but as the actual subject.
The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran by Shida Bazyar (translated by Ruth Martin)
This book follows one Iranian family across four decades through four different voices — a revolutionary in 1979, his wife listening to the radio in German exile ten years later, their daughter visiting a Tehran she barely recognises in 1999, their son in Germany watching the 2009 Green Revolution unfold from a distance. What Bazyar is really writing about is what happens to ordinary family life when history keeps intervening.