Top 23 Translated Novels of the 2000s

Nobel laureates, Nordic crime and one unfinished wartime manuscript share this shelf. Every book here had to cross a language barrier to reach English readers.

1. 1
   2666

   Roberto Bolaño's posthumous 2004 Spanish epic circling a string of murders in a Mexican border city.
   1000pts
2. 2
   Kafka on the Shore

   Haruki Murakami's 2002 dreamlike novel about a runaway teenager and an old man who talks to cats.
   757pts
3. 3
   The Solitude of Prime Numbers

   Paolo Giordano's 2008 Strega Prize-winning Italian debut about two damaged, inseparable outsiders.
   537pts
4. 4
   The Girl with the Dragon Tattoo

   Stieg Larsson's 2005 Swedish thriller that launched the Millennium series and a global Nordic noir boom.
   537pts
5. 5
   The Shadow of the Wind

   Carlos Ruiz Zafón's 2001 Barcelona mystery about a boy who discovers a forgotten book and its vanishing author.
   537pts
6. 6
   The Museum of Innocence

   Orhan Pamuk's 2008 novel of obsessive love in 1970s Istanbul, later built as a real museum.
   537pts
7. 7
   Wolf Totem

   Jiang Rong's 2004 Chinese bestseller about a student sent to live among Mongolian herders and wolves.
   537pts
8. 8
   Soldiers of Salamis

   Javier Cercas's 2001 Spanish novel investigating why a soldier spared a fascist writer at the end of the Civil War.
   454pts
9. 9
   Brothers

   Yu Hua's sprawling 2005–06 Chinese satire following two stepbrothers from the Cultural Revolution to the boom years.
   454pts
10. 10
    Life and Death Are Wearing Me Out

    Mo Yan's 2006 Chinese novel told by a landowner reincarnated as a string of farm animals.
    454pts
11. 11
    Let the Right One In

    John Ajvide Lindqvist's 2004 Swedish horror novel about a bullied boy and the vampire next door.
    454pts
12. 12
    Austerlitz

    W. G. Sebald's 2001 German novel about a man piecing together the childhood the Holocaust erased.
    454pts
13. 13
    The Days of Abandonment

    Elena Ferrante's raw 2002 Italian novel about a woman unravelling after her husband leaves.
    353pts
14. 14
    The Elegance of the Hedgehog

    Muriel Barbery's 2006 French bestseller about a secretly brilliant Paris concierge and a precocious girl.
    353pts
15. 15
    Your Face Tomorrow

    Javier Marías's three-volume Spanish novel of espionage and interpretation, published 2002 to 2007.
    353pts
16. 16
    Suite Française

    Irène Némirovsky's unfinished novel of occupied France, written in the 1940s and first published in 2004.
    0pts
17. 17
    I'm Not Scared

    Niccolò Ammaniti's 2001 Italian novel about a boy who finds a kidnapped child hidden in a hole.
    0pts
18. 18
    Out Stealing Horses

    Per Petterson's 2003 Norwegian novel of an old man recalling one fateful summer of his boyhood.
    0pts
19. 19
    Measuring the World

    Daniel Kehlmann's 2005 German comic novel pairing the explorer Humboldt and the mathematician Gauss.
    0pts
20. 20
    The Hunger Angel

    Herta Müller's 2009 German novel of a young man deported to a Soviet labour camp, published the year she won the Nobel.
    0pts
21. 21
    Snow

    Orhan Pamuk's 2002 political novel about a poet stranded in the snowbound Turkish city of Kars.
    0pts
22. 22
    The Kindly Ones

    Jonathan Littell's Prix Goncourt-winning 2006 French novel narrated by an SS officer.
    0pts
23. 23
    The Housekeeper and the Professor

    Yōko Ogawa's 2003 Japanese novel about a mathematician whose memory lasts only 80 minutes.
    0pts

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