Want to experience a different perspective on stories and adventures?
Why not try a book that has been translated to English?
Poignant, thrilling or eccentric there is a translated novel that will appeal to your tastes.
Not sure where to look? Here are some to start …

FER Fiction:
My Brilliant Friend by Elena Ferrante, translated by Ann Goldstein
Mystery surrounds the Italian novelist’s identity, but there is no doubt about her brilliance. Beginning in the 1950s Elena and Lila grow up in Naples, Italy, mirroring two different aspects of their nation.

eBook
The Summer Book by Tove Jansson
An elderly artist and her six-year-old grand-daughter are away a summer together on a tiny island in the gulf of Finland. As the two learn to adjust to each other's fears, whims and yearnings, a fierce yet understated love emerges - one that encompasses not only the summer inhabitants but the very island itself.

LEM Mystery:
Alex by Pierre Lemaitre, translated by Frank Wynne
Pierre Lemaitre writes horribly disturbing, excellently plotted French thrillers. In the award-winning Alex, the eponymous heroine is kidnapped and subjected to a horrendous ordeal; commandant Camille Verhœven just hopes he can find her before her time runs out. A cracking thriller.

THU Fiction:
Ru by Kim Thúy
A book of rare beauty: Ru is a lullaby of Vietnam and a love letter to a new homeland. Ru: In Vietnamese it means lullaby; in French it is a small stream, but also signifies a flow - of tears, blood, and money. Kim Thuy's Ru is literature at its most crystalline: the flow of a life on the tides of unrest and on to more peaceful waters. In vignettes of exquisite clarity, sharp observation and sly wit, we are carried along on an unforgettable journey from a palatial residence in Saigon to a crowded and muddy Malaysian refugee camp, and onward to a new life in Quebec. Moving seamlessly from past to present, from history to memory and back again, Ru is a book that celebrates life in all its wonder: its moments of beauty and sensuality, brutality and sorrow, comfort and comedy.

GAL Fiction:
In the gold of time by Claudie Gallay
A world weary young father holidays by the sea near Dieppe with his reproachfully perfect wife and their twin daughters. A chance meeting with an eccentric old lady leads to intense encounters in her mysterious home, full of old photographs and strange objects, sacred ceremonial masks once belonging to the Hopi Indians of Arizona. The old woman takes comfort in her new companion, and he, in turn, is drawn by her secrets. As he begins to push his family into the background, her stirring tales of the Hopi become the only salve to his despondent soul.

VAR Saga:
The discreet hero by Mario Vargas Llosa
The Discreet Hero, follows two fascinating characters whose lives are destined to intersect: neat, endearing Felícito Yanaqué, a small businessman in Piura, Peru, who finds himself the victim of blackmail; and Ismael Carrera, a successful owner of an insurance company in Lima, who cooks up a plan to avenge himself against the two lazy sons who want him dead. Felícito and Ismael are, each in his own way, quiet, discreet rebels: honorable men trying to seize control of their destinies in a social and political climate where all can seem set in stone, predetermined. They are hardly vigilantes, but each is determined to live according to his own personal ideals and desires--which means forcibly rising above the pettiness of their surroundings.

You know the one, that book that you should have read, the award winner, the one all your friends were talking about but you just never got around to reading it. Well now is your chance….

CAT NZ Fiction: The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton  

JAM Romance: 50 Shades of Grey by E L James

HUL NZ Fiction: The Bone People by Keri Hulme  

AUS Classic: Pride and Prejudice by Jane Austen  

796.333MCC: Richie McCaw : The Open Side by Greg McGee  

LEE Fiction: To kill a mockingbird by Harper Lee  

DOS Classic: Crime and Punishment by Fyodor Dostoevsky

Welcome to week one of our 2017 Reading Challenge.

This week we are forgetting the old adage of "never judging a book by its cover". Stunning, beautiful, striking, horrifying or intriguing. No matter what comes to mind take a chance and let the cover decide.
Need a starting point? Here are some covers that we found…

MOR Romance: Night Circus by Erin Morgenstern

SIN NZ Fiction: Archangel’s Shadows by Nalini Singh  594.147: Spirals in time by Helen Scales

LEV Mystery: Killing Cupid by Laura Levine

RYA SF Fantasy: The Waking Fire by Anthony Ryan  GOL Romance: Discovering Stella by K.M. Golland

KAZ Historical: The Painter of Souls by Phillip Kazan

Comment below or follow us on Facebook to let us know what cover you have chosen.