Both Cockroaches by Scholastique Mukasonga, translated from the French by Jordan Stump, and The Child Poet by Homero Aridjis and translated from the Spanish by Chloe Aridjis, have been named to a Best of 2016 list by The Irish Times.

Literary correspondent Eileen Battersby writes about Cockroaches that it’s “[b]eautifully written in graceful, lilting prose” but is also “harrowing reading, made all the more shocking by the way life later went on, as if the genocide had never happened. Mukasonga’s life remains dominated by her ghosts.”

Of The Child Poet, she writes that it is a “[g]lorious memoir explaining how a childhood accident created a major Mexican writer.”

 

You can read the rest of the list here.