# 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.

*By YPB Team · Published October 22, 2026 · https://youpick.best/ranking/the-21-best-translated-novels-of-the-1980s*

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## Current results (no votes yet)

1. **The Name of the Rose** — score 1000/1000
   Umberto Eco's 1980 medieval monastery murder mystery, a worldwide bestseller.
2. **The Palace of Dreams** — score 999/1000
   Ismail Kadare's 1981 allegory of a state bureaucracy that collects and interprets citizens' dreams.
3. **Love in the Time of Cholera** — score 800/1000
   Gabriel García Márquez's 1985 novel of a love that waits more than fifty years.
4. **The House of the Spirits** — score 799/1000
   Isabel Allende's 1982 family saga of magical realism across generations in Chile.
5. **Kitchen** — score 709/1000
   Banana Yoshimoto's 1988 gentle novella of grief and found family in Tokyo.
6. **Cassandra** — score 709/1000
   Christa Wolf's 1983 retelling of the Trojan War through the eyes of the doomed prophetess.
7. **Dance Dance Dance** — score 600/1000
   Murakami's 1988 sequel to A Wild Sheep Chase, a ghostly search through Tokyo and Hokkaido.
8. **Baltasar and Blimunda** — score 600/1000
   Saramago's 1982 love story set amid the Inquisition and the building of a flying machine.
9. **Perfume** — score 600/1000
   Patrick Süskind's 1985 tale of a murderous perfumer in eighteenth-century France.
10. **The Alchemist** — score 600/1000
   Paulo Coelho's 1988 parable of a shepherd boy following his dream to Egypt.
11. **Foucault's Pendulum** — score 600/1000
   Eco's 1988 conspiracy novel about editors who invent a secret history and then see it come true.
12. **Red Sorghum** — score 466/1000
   Mo Yan's 1986 saga of a Shandong family through the Japanese invasion.
13. **Hard-Boiled Wonderland and the End of the World** — score 466/1000
   Murakami's 1985 dual-narrative novel of data thieves and a walled town without shadows.
14. **Dictionary of the Khazars** — score 466/1000
   Milorad Pavić's 1984 'lexicon novel' that can be read in any order.
15. **Norwegian Wood** — score 466/1000
   Murakami's 1987 coming-of-age novel of love and loss in 1960s Tokyo.
16. **Mr Palomar** — score 466/1000
   Italo Calvino's 1983 meditative novel of a man who tries to observe the world precisely.
17. **A Wild Sheep Chase** — score 466/1000
   Haruki Murakami's 1982 surreal detective quest across Japan.
18. **Life and Fate** — score 0/1000
   Vasily Grossman's epic novel of the Battle of Stalingrad, published in 1980 after being suppressed in the USSR.
19. **The Year of the Death of Ricardo Reis** — score 0/1000
   José Saramago's 1984 novel in which a poet's heteronym returns to Lisbon in 1936.
20. **The War of the End of the World** — score 0/1000
   Mario Vargas Llosa's 1981 epic of the Canudos rebellion in Brazil.
21. **Chronicle of a Death Foretold** — score 0/1000
   García Márquez's 1981 reconstruction of a murder everyone in town saw coming.

Tags: books, 80s, fiction, translated