Stu Allen's favourite books in translation of the year

Well, it's that time of year for best of year list and I've been asked to put together a list of my favourite books in translation for 2012. I've read over a 100 books in translation this year, a lot of which came out this year...

Where the Tigers Are At Home by Jean Marie Blas de Robles (Dedalus)

This French novel set in North East Brazil follows a French reporter as he writes a book about the polymath Athansisus Kircher, a priest interested in all branches of contemporary knowledge and technology. The action jumps from Brazil to a bio of Kircher. Unusual - one that needs to be read widely.

Other French book: HHhH by Laurent Binet

Satantango by Laszlo Krasznahorkai

A man turns up in a rural Hungarian collective farm - is he the devil ? He helps them see the world in a new light and takes them on a wonderful and frightening dance though the end of communism.

Other Eastern European book: Seven Terrors by Selvedin Avdic

Necropolis by Santiago Gamboa

A Columbia writer, a bit like the Gamboa, a friend of Bolano and Moya gets a strange invite to an International Congress of Biography and Memory in Jerusalem. He listens to the stories of others, particularly to that of a cult member who mysteriously dies hours later.

Other Latin American book: Traveller of the Century by Andres Neumann

The Hunger Angel by Herta Muller

She was going write this with a poet friend who had spent time in the Russian gulags but he died before it was finished so Herta wrote this novel about a poet who was changed forever by the gulag and the people he was there with.

Other German fiction: Winter in the South by Norbert Gstrein

Faces in the Crowd by Valeria Luselli

A Mexican women is looking back on her time in New York and the fact she was haunted by the ghost of lost Mexican poet Gilberto Owen, a figure in the 1920s Harlem renaissance, as she sees how her life and his connected over the time she was there.

Other novellas: The Murder of Halland by Pia Juul