The best recent translated fiction – review roundup

Minihorror by Barbi Marković; Paradise Burns by Pol Guasch; Hafni Says by Helle Helle; Googling for Soul by Hamid Ismailov Minihorror by Barbi Marković, translated by Jen Calleja (Faber, £14. 99) This eccentric and fantastical collection of very short stories is bursting with weird life. Mini and Miki (the Disney mouse names in Serbian) are a sometime boyfriend and girlfriend living in Austria. They visit Mini’s family, who gather round a pit and make her climb down into it (when she told Miki “they’re dragging me down”, he thought it was a metaphor). They visit Miki’s family, where a dog Mini draws on a card comes alive and attacks her.

Things swing from hopeful – “they’re having fun like a couple in an advert” – to dismal: a hair dye goes wrong and “Mini looks like a 13-year-old dog”. Minihorror combines a Bernhardian comic gloom (“in summary, everything’s tainted, and existence is a particular hardship”) with antic energy. “Miki isn’t sure what to think about life. Is it good? Is it bad? ” It’s everything, just like this book. Paradise Burns by Pol Guasch, translated by Mara Faye Lethem (Peninsula, £12. 99) “Stories, if you give them an order, aren’t stories but lies. ” Catalan author Guasch makes the point vividly in this novel which flits briskly from present to past and from narrator to narrator. It’s set in a changed climate – “One only knows it’s winter now by the shrunken days and long nights” – where…