The best recent translated fiction – review roundup

Key points

• The Guardian's translated fiction roundup covers four new books from Serbian, Catalan, Danish and Uzbek authors.
• Barbi Marković's Minihorror follows Mini and Miki through very short, fantastical stories set in Austria.
• Pol Guasch's Paradise Burns moves between narrators and time to explore why a young man named Líton died.

The Guardian's latest translated fiction roundup reviews four new books: Minihorror by Barbi Marković, Paradise Burns by Pol Guasch, Hafni Says by Helle Helle and Googling for Soul by Hamid Ismailov.

The collection spans Serbian, Catalan, Danish and Uzbek writing, with translators including Jen Calleja, Mara Faye Lethem, Martin Aitken and a team for Ismailov's book.

Short stories and shifting narrators

Minihorror, translated by Jen Calleja, is a collection of very short stories about Mini and Miki, a sometime couple living in Austria. The review describes visits to both families, including a pit Mini is made to climb down and a dog she draws that comes alive and attacks her.

Paradise Burns, translated by Mara Faye Lethem, is set in a changed climate where young men join a firefighting service. Its central characters are friends Rita and Líton, but Líton is dead when the book begins, so the jumpy narrative moves backward to find out why.

I don't want to be me. I want to change who I am.

— Hafni, in Helle Helle's Hafni Says

Departures and exile

Hafni Says, translated by Martin Aitken, follows 48-year-old Hafni as she leaves her husband by taking a road trip through Denmark. The review calls it a subtle story of a woman stuck in her life who says, "I don't want to be me. I want to change who I am."

Googling for Soul, by Hamid Ismailov, is a sequence of stories about Uzbeks, often exiled in Russia. The review notes that Ismailov was forced to flee Uzbekistan in 1992, and describes the book as mixing rampant action, blunt comedy and real horror.