And with that, the fourth month of the year has officially closed its doors. We are already four months into 2026; a third of the year has already gone by! How time flies! I hope the first four months of the year have been kind to everyone. As time takes its natural course, I hope you were able to generate momentum as you pursued your goals and aspirations. But before I could wave goodbye to the fourth month of the year, let me share the book titles I acquired during the month. After having a bookless March – yes, I was not able to secure a copy of any book in March – I tried to make it up for it in April. Interestingly, all the books I secured were translations and were just recently released. Three were also nominated for the International Booker Prize. Without ado, here are the books I acquired in April.

Title: Sisters in Yellow
Author: Mieko Kawakami
Translators (from Japanese): Laurel Taylor and Hitomi Yoshio
Publisher: Alfred A. Knopf
Publishing Date: 2026 (2023)
No. of Pages: 430

Synopsis: 

Hana has nothing – she’s fifteen years old and living in a tiny apartment in a suburb of Tokyo with her young mother, a hostess at a local dive bar. They have no money, no security. Then Kimiko appears. She’s a bright light in Hana’s dark world. Together they set up Lemon, a bar that, despite its shabby setting and seedy clientele, becomes a haven for Hana. Suddenly she has a job she loves, friends to share her days with, and the glittering promise of money. She feels like a normal girl. She feels invincible.

But in the narrow alleys of Sangenjaya, nothing is as it seems. Soon all of Hana’s hope, her optimism, and her drive will be pushed to the limit…

A story of enduring friendship and deep betrayal, Sisters in Yellow is a masterpiece of teenage dreams and adult cruelties that confirms Mieko Kawakami as one of the great writers of her generation.

Title: Days at the Torunka Café
Author: Satoshi Yagisawa
Translator (from Japanese): Eric Ozawa
Publisher: Harper Perennial
Publishing Date: 2025 (2022)
No. of Pages: 225

Synopsis: 

Tucked away on a narrow side street in Tokyo is the Torunka Café, a neighborhood nook where the passersby are as likely to be local cats as tourists. Its regulars include Chinatsu Yukimura, a mysterious young woman who always leavese behind a napkin folded into the shape of a ballerina; Hiroyuki Numata, a middle-aged man who’s returned to the neighborhood searching for the happy life he once gave up; and Shizuku Tachibana, the café owner’s teenage daughter, who is still coming to terms with her sister’s death as she falls in love for the first time.

While Torunka Café serves up a perfect cup of coffee, it also provides these sundry souls with nourishment far more lasting. Satoshi Yagisawa brilliantly illuminates the periods in our lives when we feel lost – and how we find our way again.

Title: The Wax Child
Author: Olga Ravn
Translator (from Danish): Martin Aitken
Publisher: Viking
Publishing Date: 2025 (2023)
No. of Pages: 178

Synopsis: 

It was a black night in the year 1620 when Christenze Kruckow made the wax child, when she melted down beeswax and set it in the image of a small human. For days, she carried it tucked beneath her arm, shaping it with the warmth of her flesh, giving it life. She fashioned for it eyes and ears that cannot open, and yet – it watches and listens.

It looks on as Christenze is haunted by rumour, it hears what the people whisper. It sees how, in the candlelight, she gazes with love at her friends, and hears the things they say in the shadows. It knows pine forest, misty fjord and the crackle of the burning pyre. It observes the violence in men’s eyes and the cruelty of their laws. In time, it begins to understand that once a suspicion of witchcraft has taken hold, it can prove impossible to shake…

Based on an infamous seventeenth-century Danish witch trial, The Wax Child is a mesmerizing, frightening vision of a time when witches and magic were as real to the human mind as soil and seawater.

Title: She Who Remains
Author: Rene Karabash
Translator (from Bulgarian): Izidora Angel
Publisher: Peirene Press Ltd.
Publishing Date: 2026 (2018)
No. of Pages: 155

Synopsis: 

High in the Accursed Mountains, in a village ruled by the ancient laws of the Kanun, Bekija escapes an arranged marriage by becoming a sworn virgin, renouncing her womanhood to live as a man. Her decision sets off a brutal chain of events, destroying her family and separating her from the one she loves most. Years later, as Bekija – now Matja – tells their story to a vising journalist, long-buried truths come to light, along with the realization of all that might have been.

Title: The Remembered Soldier
Author: Anjet Daanje
Translator (from Dutch): David McKay
Publisher: New Vessel Press
Publishing Date: 2025 (2019)
No. of Pages: 562

Synopsis: 

Flanders 1922. After serving as a soldier in the Great War, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Countless women, responding to a newspaper ad, visit him there in the hope of finding their spouse who vanished in battle. One day a woman, Julienne, appears and recognizes Noon as her husband, the photographer Amand Coppens, and takes him home against medical advice. But their miraculous reunion doesn’t turn out the way that Julienne wants her envious friends to believe. Only gradually do the two grow close, and Amand’s biography is pieced together on the basis of Julienne’s stories about him. But how can he be certain that she’s telling the truth? In The Remembered Soldier, Anjet Daanje immerses us in the psyche of a war-traumatized man who has lost his identity. When Amand comes to doubt Julienne’s word, the reader is caught up in a riveting spiral of confusion that only the greatest of literature can achieve.