Each year the International Booker Prize celebrates translated fiction from around the world, honoring both the author and the translator who share the prize equally. This year, 124 books were in consideration and today the judges announced the six finalists who made the shortlist (the winner will be announced in May—update: the winner is The Discomfort of Evening), including Daniel Kehlmann who worked on his novel Tyll at the New York Public Library during his Cullman Center Fellowship in 2016-2017.

This year's shortlist is made up of books translated from Spanish, Japanese, Farsi, German and Dutch. Most of them are available at the Library and as e-books—get reading!

The Enlightenment of the Greengage Tree by Shokoofeh Azar, translated from Farsi by an anonymous writer (e-book only)

An extraordinarily powerful and evocative literary novel set in Iran in the period immediately after the Islamic Revolution in 1979. Using the lyrical magic realism style of classical Persian storytelling, Azar draws the reader deep into the heart of a family caught in the maelstrom of post-revolutionary chaos and brutality that sweeps across an ancient land and its people.

Tyll by Daniel Kehlmann, translated from by German by Ross Benjamin (e-book and audiobook)

Daniel Kehlmann masterfully weaves the fates of many historical figures into this enchanting work of magical realism and adventure. This account of the seventeenth-century vagabond performer and trickster Tyll Ulenspiegel begins when he's a scrawny boy growing up in a quiet village. When his father, a miller with a secret interest in alchemy and magic, is found out by the church, Tyll is forced to flee with the baker's daughter, Nele. They find safety and companionship with a traveling performer, who teaches Tyll his trade. And so begins a journey of discovery and performance for Tyll, as he travels through a continent devastated by the Thirty Years' War and encounters along the way a hangman, a fraudulent Jesuit scholar, and the exiled King Frederick and Queen Elizabeth of Bohemia.

The Memory Police by Yoko Ogawa, translated from Japanese by Stephen Snyder (e-book)

On an unnamed island off an unnamed coast, objects are disappearing: first hats, then ribbons, birds, roses, until things become much more serious. Most of the island's inhabitants are oblivious to these changes, while those few imbued with the power to recall the lost objects live in fear of the draconian Memory Police, who are committed to ensuring that what has disappeared remains forgotten. When a young woman who is struggling to maintain her career as a novelist discovers that her editor is in danger from the Memory Police, she concocts a plan to hide him beneath her floorboards. As fear and loss close in around them, they cling to her writing as the last way of preserving the past.

Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor, translated from Spanish by Sophie Hughes (e-book) (Spanish language version)

The Witch is dead. And the discovery of her corpse—by a group of children playing near the irrigation canals—propels the whole village into an investigation of how and why this murder occurred. Rumors and suspicions spread. As the novel unfolds in a dazzling linguistic torrent, with each unreliable narrator lingering on new details, new acts of depravity or brutality, Melchor extracts some tiny shred of humanity from these characters that most would write off as utterly irredeemable, forming a lasting portrait of a damned Mexican village.Like Roberto Bolano’s 2666 or Faulkner’s greatest novels, Hurricane Season takes place in a world filled with mythology and violence—real violence, the kind that seeps into the soil, poisoning everything around: it’s a world that becomes more terrifying and more terrifyingly real the deeper you explore it.

The Adventures of China Iron/Las Aventuras de la China Iron by Gabriela Cabezón Cámara, translated from Spanish by Iona Macintyre and Fiona Mackintosh (only Spanish-language version currently available at NYPL) (e-book)

This is a riotous romp taking the reader from the turbulent frontier culture of the pampas deep into indigenous territories. It charts the adventures of Mrs China Iron  in her travels across the pampas in a covered wagon with her new-found friend, soon to become lover, a Scottish woman named Liz. While Liz provides China with a sentimental education and schools her in the nefarious ways of the British Empire, their eyes are opened to the wonders of Argentina’s richly diverse flora and fauna, cultures and languages, as well as to its national struggles. After a clash with Colonel Hernández and a drunken orgy with gauchos, they eventually find refuge and a peaceful future in a utopian indigenous community.

The Discomfort of Evening by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld, translated from Dutch by Michele Hutchison—not yet available at NYPL

Ten-year-old Jas lives with her strictly religious parents and her siblings on a dairy farm where waste and frivolity are akin to sin. One icy morning, the disciplined rhythm of her family’s life is ruptured by a tragic accident, and Jas is convinced she is to blame. As her parents’ suffering makes them increasingly distant, Jas and her siblings develop a curiosity about death that leads them into disturbing rituals and fantasies. Cocooned in her red winter coat, Jas dreams of “the other side” and of salvation, not knowing where this dreaming will finally lead her.