We are living at a time when dystopias seem a fact of reality, not simply a genre of fiction, when ushering in the unthinkable seems a hair’s breadth away. Agnes Lidbeck’s All My Love (Peirene Press, £12.99), in a fluent and exciting translation by Nichola Smalley, is an interesting if not entirely plausible novel, centred on an intimate quartet of relationships, its background a national crisis that ushers in a terrifying political dictatorship and its traumatic aftermath. In 2010s Sweden, best friends Julia and Petra meet Johannes and Axel while heading off to their respective families’ ski cabins for a holiday. Petra fixes on Axel, who Julia has in her sights. Johannes is also interested in Petra, but is embroiled in rowing with his dominating father about his future career. After a deeply erotic, confused and drunken threesome with Axel, Julia and Petra break friends. More than 15 years later, Petra, now a doctor, is married to Johannes, a lawyer, whom she met again after finishing a coercive control relationship with Axel. Julia is a single parent and left-wing journalist, and reconnects with Petra when she has her daughter, Sandra, who happens to be Axel’s child, conceived during a brief affair. Their friendship is more tentative this time – Julia chides Petra for being oblivious to the rising tide of fascism in their country, with Axel a prominent member of the incoming regime. When Julia is disappeared, Petra has to make a choice that will backfire on her own family. None of this is particularly satisfactory in terms of plot, but Lidbeck’s writing is compellingly beautiful, and Johannes’s early-onset dementia coinciding with a society’s need to forget is haunting. In 2017, horrifying footage of a young man drowning in Venice’s Grand Canal to the taunts of passersby (and despite attempts by others to help) was circulated on social media. Italian magistrates investigated whether the death was an accident or suicide and, above all, the overt failure to help a person in danger. The man, 22-year-old Pateh Sabally, from Gambia, had been a refugee in Italy since 2015. He had left his backpack near the Scalzi Bridge before plunging into the water. In the wise, justifiably angry and compassionate Venice Requiem (Small Axes, £8.99), in a lyrical translation by Ros Schwartz, Khalid Lyamlahy examines Venice through African eyes and reflects on the lengths Sabally went to reach Italy and what he found there to drive him to despair. “The refugee’s travel kit is like an extension of their body, a prolongation of their memory,” he writes. The Venice of centuries of storied history, besieged now by hordes of tourists, is by contrast something of a facade, “a replica”. Lyamlahy takes us through events leading up to the tragedy, always humanising Sabally by addressing him as “you”, set against the cynicism and complicity of onlookers and of policy. “It’s a parlous attempt to corral a hypothesis, to try to give you back your dignity.”A novel narrated entirely by farm animals has some precedent, but Milk and Blood by Agnes de Clairville (Linden Editions £12.99), translated with customary verve by Frank Wynne, is no George Orwell satire. Instead, the daily life of the inhabitants of a failing farm in the French countryside is brilliantly laid bare through the observations and polyphonic cri de coeur of the livestock, in chapters narrated variously by “the piebald cow” and “the spaniel bitch” whose survival is contingent on their “master” and his family – who are, in turn, economically dependent on them. It is also a summation of the brute practices of farming (de Clairville, who trained as a scientist, is necessarily unsentimental): “the lightning bolt hit my neck, throwing me off. How long was I unconscious, a second, a minute, an hour? The shock had paralysed every muscle. I no longer feel my ruptured teats, nothing but precise overwhelming pain in every organ, and I low, my mother lying limp before me.” Beyond this world of agony and violence is human silence – and a dreadful family secret that only the animals witness and only the animals can betray.[ Sara Baume on the best new fiction in translationOpens in new window ]Chiquitita (Akoya Publishing, £12.99), in a luminous translation from Norwegian by Seán Kinsella, is an unusual and astonishing novel in that it is truly a product of global literature and also of our interconnected world. Its author, Pedro Carmona-Alvarez, is originally from Chile; he and his family fled to Argentina when he was 10 and later moved to Norway. His subject is a family from an unidentified African country whose story is told through a child, Marisol: “I’m the first child, the daughter. I have the same name as the virgin and the sun.” Marisol recounts her earliest memories: “It starts by the sea. There is the sea … but it’s not really a scene. Just a series of things.” Out of these inchoate impressions she recalls shocks, from the prosaic – wetting the bed – to horror: the experience of female genital mutilation. When she is five, Marisol and her parents flee civil war and Carmona-Alvarez is unsparing about the effect on a young psyche of witnessing almost unspeakable violence. Marisol punctuates her dreamlike account of life in a refugee camp and long after, when her family is accepted into a European country, with the repeated incantation “later later later” – that’s her older self, finding education, love and acceptance, and her middle-aged self “in a green jumper” never entirely able to escape the buried trauma.“Death is as unreasonable as a foreign language in this country from which I’ll soon disappear, like a flick knife disappears.” Chiquitita is a stunning achievement.Set against the backdrop of the final years of the military dictatorship of Mobutu Sese Seko, the first and only president of then Zaire, now Democratic Republic of Congo, The Villain’s Dance (And Other Stories, £14.99) by Fiston Mwanza Mujila, in a sublimely rich translation by Roland Glasser, is a raucous and fevered novel, full of magical realism and vivid characterisation, musical with the strains of mambo and jazz, propulsive and violent. On the mining-zone borders of Zaire and Angola in the late 1990s, a group of street kids, an expatriate Austrian and shady secret-service agents navigate the possibilities of scooping up the spoils of a nation poor in infrastructure but rich in diamonds as the country lurches towards civil war. The whole is overseen by a self-style, mystical godlike figure and is never less than aware of the legacy of Belgian and Portuguese colonial rule. Initially separate strands converge towards the novel’s culmination and its ultimate destination: the Mambo de la Fête, a frenzied dance gathering that lasts from dusk till dawn. Here is an example of Mulija’s exuberant prose: “The city of Lubumbashi hadn’t aged a bit. Just as back in the day those living in La Cité on the outskirts would pile Downtown as soon as the Angelus struck to their jobs as manservants, cooks, houseboys, gardeners, mechanics, builders, and errand boys for the Belgians, the French, or the Americans and had to leave by night-fall in pain of prison or a thrashing, the inhabitants of Kamalondo stepped over the rails separating La Cité (or what was left of it) and Downtown each God-given morning and rushed to regain their hearths as soon as night fell…” What the book sometimes loses in coherence, it more than makes up for in swagger and energy. Claudia Piñeiro has been called the “queen of crime fiction” and somewhat more clumsily “the Hitchcock of the river Plate” in her native Argentina, but her novels are much more than thrillers: they are close psychological examinations – almost forensic – of that which lies beneath the surface of society, excavations of hypocrisy and shame. Claudia Piñeiro, author of Cathedrals Cathedrals, (Charco Press, £11.99), in a fine translation by Frances Riddle, is one of her strongest novels to date. Lia left home 30 years ago, cutting off ties, following the terrible death of her 17-year-old sister Ana, a devout Catholic, whose body was found dismembered and burned in a remote field. Ana’s death remains a mystery, with no one convicted of the crime. Their father is determined to have justice for his daughter and get the case reopened. As a means of revealing the perpetrator, Piñeiro alternates a number of unreliable narratives to unearth religious fanaticism, violent expediency and the stigma of abortion in a typically multidimensional work that spans generations of state- and self-censorship. Catherine Taylor is author of The Stirrings, winner of the 2024 TLS Ackerley Prize