International Booker 2026

May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She’s been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda. Instead, Chizuko longs to experience real island life and to taste as much of its authentic cuisine as her famously monstrous appetite can bear.Soon a Taiwanese woman—who is younger even than she is, and who shares the characters of her name—is hired as her interpreter and makes her dreams come true. The charming, erudite, meticulous Chizuru arranges Chizuko’s travels all over the Land of the South and also proves to be an exceptional cook. Over scenic train rides and braised pork rice, lively banter and winter melon tea, Chizuko grows infatuated with her companion and intent on drawing her closer. But something causes Chizuru to keep her distance. It’s only after a heartbreaking separation that Chizuko begins to grasp what the “something” is.Disguised as a translation of a rediscovered text by a Japanese writer, Taiwan Travelogue unburies lost colonial histories and deftly reveals how power dynamics inflect our most intimate relationships.A bittersweet story of love between two women, nested in an artful exploration of language, history, and power.EndorsementsWinner of Taiwan’s highest literary honor, the Golden Tripod Award.

In a small, sleepy town, a mediocre witch, in a mediocre marriage, tries to pass on her gifts to her twin daughters, who, it becomes immediately apparent, have skills far beyond her own.Lucie comes from a long line of witches, powers passed down from mother to daughter. Her own mother was formidable in her powers but ashamed of her magic. Perhaps as a result, Lucie's own gift is weak: she can see into the future sometimes—but more often she can only see the present of some other location. Not very useful. And the worst part? All she can ever see are insignificant details—a scrap of outfit, the colour of the sky. Lucie's children are initiated into their family's peculiar womanhood when they reach twelve years of age, and in a few short months Maud and Lise are crying the curious tears of blood that denote their magical powers. Once initiated, they take off quickly and literally fly the nest.Witty, dreamlike, vaguely unsettling, and utterly enchanting (pun intended), The Witch brings the mysteries of womanhood and motherhood into sharp relief and leaves us teetering on the edge, unbalanced by questions as seemingly unbreakable relationships break down left and right. Who is to blame for family failures? And how can you—can you?—build a nest that no one wants to fly?

It was a black night in the year 1620 when Christenze Krukow made the wax child, when she melted down beeswax and set it in the image of a small human. For days, she carried it tucked beneath her arm, shaping it with the warmth of her flesh, giving it life. She fashioned for it eyes and ears that cannot open, and yet — it watches and listens.It looks on as Christenze is haunted by rumour, it hears what the people whisper. It sees how, in the candlelight, she gazes with love at her friends, and hears the things they say in the shadows. It knows pine forest, misty fjord and the crackle of the burning pyre. It observes the violence in men’s eyes and the cruelty of their laws. In time, it begins to understand that once a suspicion of witchcraft has taken hold, it can prove impossible to shake…Based on an infamous seventeenth century Danish witch trial, The Wax Child is the extraordinary new novel from Olga Ravn, one of the most acclaimed and original writers at work today: a mesmerising, frightening vision of a time when witches and magic were as real to the human mind as soil and seawater.An extraordinary vision of witchcraft from one of the world's most acclaimed authorsEndorsements'Dark and strange and beautiful and completely gripping.' — Mark Haddon

Outside Vallorgana, a tiny, isolated village high in the foothills of the Dolomites, the 'Duke' lives in the villa of his aristocratic ancestors. The last in the centuries-old line of the Cimamontes, he spends his days on his land and absorbed in the family archive, tolerated, if gently ridiculed, by the villagers who are his neighbours. When he finds out that the village's big man is taking timber from his land, he has a decision to make. Will he stay in his glorious, cerebral isolation or will he honour his ancestral blood and take action against this affront?Matteo Melchiorre’s portrait of the idiosyncratic character of the Duke and the world of Vallorgana is a sweeping feat of literary imagination. With the pace, panorama and plot twists of a great nineteenth-century classic, the breathless story of the Duke’s ensuing feud unfolds, asking some big twenty-first-century questions about our relationships with privilege, the past, the natural world and each other.

On land where enslaved people were once tortured and murdered, the state built a penal colony in the wilderness, where inmates could be rehabilitated, but never escape. Now, decades later, and having only succeeded in trapping men, not changing them for the better, its operations are winding down. But in the prison’s waning days, a new horror is unleashed: every full-moon night, the inmates are released, the warden is armed with rifles, and the hunt begins. Every man plans his escape, not knowing if his end will come at the hands of a familiar face, or from the unknown dangers beyond the prison walls.

We Are Green and Trembling is a reimagining of history and the life of Antonio de Erauso, a Basque nun turned war lieutenant during the Spanish Conquista in 17th-century Argentina — a fascinating, largely forgotten figure from world history and one of South America’s most famous trans men.Having left the Basque Country behind many years ago, Antonio has travelled across the Americas, reinventing himself every time. Now, Antonio is hiding deep in the jungle with two young Guaraní girls, having escaped imprisonment and a death sentence.The novel is a searing criticism of conquest and colonialism, religious tyranny and the treatment of women and indigenous people; a queer reclamation set in the rainforest — itself a magical, surreal space for transformation.

High in the Accursed Mountains, in a village ruled by the ancient laws of the Kanun, Bekja escapes an arranged marriage by becoming a sworn virgin, renouncing her womanhood to live as a man. Her decision sets off a brutal chain of events, destroying her family and separating her from the one she loves the most. Years later, as Bekija – now Matija – tells their story to a visiting journalist, long-buried truths come to light, along with the realisation of all that might have been.

From the successful child actor who has now turned into a failing thief, to an actor hired to give a speech at a stranger's wedding, to a couple feigning married bliss to keep their inheritance, Small Comfort is a brilliantly original examination of the value of people and money.How do financial structures, such as currency, relate to our own emotional landscapes? What does it really mean to be in debt to someone? And what do we lose when we supposedly win?

1979. Behsad, a young communist revolutionary, fights with his friends for a new order after the Shah’s expulsion. He tells of sparking hope, of clandestine political actions, and of how he finds the love of his life in the courageous, intelligent Nahid.1989. Nahid lives her new life in West Germany with Behsad. With their young children, they spend hour after hour in front of the radio, hoping for news from others who went into hiding after the mullahs came to power.1999. Laleh returns to Iran with her mother, Nahid. Between beauty rituals and family secrets, she gets to know a Tehran that hardly matches her childhood memories.2009. Laleh’s brother Mo is more concerned with a friend’s heartbreak than with student demonstrations in Germany. But then the Green Revolution breaks out in Iran and turns the world upside down …A captivating, polyphonic novel of one family’s flight from and return to Iran. A topical, moving novel about revolution, oppression, resistance, and the absolute desire for freedom.

Fleeing a nameless war, an unknown soldier emerges from deep within the Mediterranean scrubland, dirty and exhausted. A chance meeting forces him to rethink his journey, and the price he puts on a life. On 11 September 2001, aboard a small cruise ship on the River Havel near Berlin, a conference of scientists pays homage to the late East German mathematician Paul Heudeber, a Buchenwald survivor and steadfast antifascist who remained loyal to his side of the Berlin Wall despite the collapse of the Communist utopia, unaware that a new era of violence is about to descend. Out of the tension between these narratives, everything that is at stake in times of conflict – in love as in politics – comes to commitment and betrayal, loyalty and lucidity, hope and survival. Translated by Charlotte Mandell, this latest work by Mathias Énard vividly lays bare the devastations of war on the most intimate aspects of our lives.

Shortly after the 1989 publication of Women Without Men in her native Iran, Shahrnush Parsipur was arrested and jailed for her frank and defiant portrayal of women’s sexuality. Now banned in Iran, this small masterpiece was eventually translated into several languages and introduces U.S. readers to the work of a brilliant Persian writer. With a tone that is stark and bold, Women Without Men creates an evocative allegory of life for contemporary Iranian women. In the interwoven destinies of five women, simple situations such as walking down a road or leaving the house become, in the tumult of post-WWII Iran, horrific and defiant as women escape the narrow confines of family and society only to face daunting new challenges.Now in political exile, Shahrnush Parsipur lives in the Bay Area. She is the author of several short story collections including Touba and the Meaning of Night.

Flanders 1922. After serving as a soldier in the Great War, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Countless women, responding to a newspaper ad, visit him there in the hope of finding their spouse who vanished in battle. One day a woman, Julienne, appears and recognizes Noon as her husband, the photographer Amand Coppens, and takes him home against medical advice. But their miraculous reunion doesn’t turn out the way that Julienne wants her envious friends to believe. Only gradually do the two grow close, and Amand’s biography is pieced together on the basis of Julienne’s stories about him. But how can he be certain that she’s telling the truth? In The Remembered Soldier, Anjet Daanje immerses us in the psyche of a war-traumatized man who has lost his identity. When Amand comes to doubt Julienne’s word, the reader is caught up in a riveting spiral of confusion that only the greatest of literature can achieve.An extraordinary love story and a captivating novel about the power of memory and imagination.

G.W. Pabst, one of cinema’s greatest directors of the 20th century, was filming in France when the Nazis seized power. To escape the horrors of the new and unrecognizable Germany, he fled to Hollywood. But now, under the blinding California sun, the world-famous director suddenly looks like a nobody. Not even Greta Garbo, the Hollywood actress whom he made famous, can help him.When he receives word that his elderly mother is ill, he finds himself back in his homeland of Austria, which is now called Ostmark. Pabst, his wife, and his young son are suddenly confronted with the barbaric nature of the regime. So, when Joseph Goebbels—the minister of propaganda in Berlin—sees the potential for using the European film icon for his directorial genius and makes big promises to Pabst and his family, Pabst must consider Goebbels’s thinly veiled order. While Pabst still believes that he will be able to resist these advances, that he will not submit to any dictatorship other than art, he has already taken the first steps into a hopeless entanglement.An artist's life, a pact with the devil, a novel about the dangerous illusions of the silver screen.