The 21 Best Translated Novels of the 1980s

Books that crossed a language border and stayed on shelves for decades, some chart-toppers and some stubborn cult objects.

1. 1
   The Name of the Rose

   Umberto Eco's 1980 medieval monastery murder mystery, a worldwide bestseller.
   1000pts
2. 2
   The Palace of Dreams

   Ismail Kadare's 1981 allegory of a state bureaucracy that collects and interprets citizens' dreams.
   999pts
3. 3
   Love in the Time of Cholera

   Gabriel García Márquez's 1985 novel of a love that waits more than fifty years.
   800pts
4. 4
   The House of the Spirits

   Isabel Allende's 1982 family saga of magical realism across generations in Chile.
   799pts
5. 5
   Kitchen

   Banana Yoshimoto's 1988 gentle novella of grief and found family in Tokyo.
   709pts
6. 6
   Cassandra

   Christa Wolf's 1983 retelling of the Trojan War through the eyes of the doomed prophetess.
   709pts
7. 7
   Dance Dance Dance

   Murakami's 1988 sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, a ghostly search through Tokyo and Hokkaido.
   600pts
8. 8
   Baltasar and Blimunda

   Saramago's 1982 love story set amid the Inquisition and the building of a flying machine.
   600pts
9. 9
   Perfume

   Patrick Süskind's 1985 tale of a murderous perfumer in eighteenth-century France.
   600pts
10. 10
    The Alchemist

    Paulo Coelho's 1988 parable of a shepherd boy following his dream to Egypt.
    600pts
11. 11
    Foucault's Pendulum

    Eco's 1988 conspiracy novel about editors who invent a secret history and then see it come true.
    600pts
12. 12
    Red Sorghum

    Mo Yan's 1986 saga of a Shandong family through the Japanese invasion.
    466pts
13. 13
    Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World

    Murakami's 1985 dual-narrative novel of data thieves and a walled town without shadows.
    466pts
14. 14
    Dictionary of the Khazars

    Milorad Pavić's 1984 'lexicon novel' that can be read in any order.
    466pts
15. 15
    Norwegian Wood

    Murakami's 1987 coming-of-age novel of love and loss in 1960s Tokyo.
    466pts
16. 16
    Mr Palomar

    Italo Calvino's 1983 meditative novel of a man who tries to observe the world precisely.
    466pts
17. 17
    A Wild Sheep Chase

    Haruki Murakami's 1982 surreal detective quest across Japan.
    466pts
18. 18
    Life and Fate

    Vasily Grossman's epic novel of the Battle of Stalingrad, published in 1980 after being suppressed in the USSR.
    0pts
19. 19
    The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis

    José Saramago's 1984 novel in which a poet's heteronym returns to Lisbon in 1936.
    0pts
20. 20
    The War of the End of the World

    Mario Vargas Llosa's 1981 epic of the Canudos rebellion in Brazil.
    0pts
21. 21
    Chronicle of a Death Foretold

    García Márquez's 1981 reconstruction of a murder everyone in town saw coming.
    0pts

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