The Translator

A fiercely intelligent and thought-provoking literary exploration of the refugee crisis and the power of resistance by the highly acclaimed author of Learwife

Anne is a quiet, respectable translator and polyglot in an unnamed modern European city who receives word that she will be arrested in twenty-four hours. The right-wing government has discovered her secret: she's been translating the letters of a young activist known as Pytheas who finds refugees safe passage over the mountains. His letters have become widespread symbols of political resistance, and the government is intent on finding their author. She is equally intent on protecting him.

On her final day of freedom, Anne walks her beloved city, makes her last preparations, and hunts desperately for the person who has betrayed her secret. Since her reckoning is upon her, how best can she use the time she has left?

The Translator focuses on a less-studied aspect of refugee journeys: the experiences of helpers, translators, couriers, and activists along the migrant route. In distinctively beautiful and stylistically inventive prose, interspersed with the Pytheas letters, J.R. Thorp asks: what might compel someone whose life has been a model of bourgeois respectability to commit an act of radical political tenderness.