The other night, I was at an award ceremony. No, not the Booker Prize, but one nearly as influential, at least as far as translated literature is concerned.

Held at the Warwick Business School at the Shard in London, the seventh annual prize-giving for the Warwick Prize for Women in Translation celebrated a shortlist of eight titles drawn from 153 eligible entries (nearly three times as many as the award attracted in 2017). This year, the shortlist featured texts from two new source languages: Danish and Vietnamese. It being the first year the award welcomed self-translations, there was also one of these on the shortlist: the fantastic graphic novel Your Wish is My Command by 26-year-old Egyptian Deena Mohammed (pictured on the left of the screen above). This went on to win – an exciting choice.

One of the highlights of the evening was the fact that the translators of each of the shortlisted titles appeared either virtually or in person to talk briefly about the books and read an excerpt. Sometimes harrowing, sometimes amusing and invariably thought-provoking, these presentations provided brilliant windows into the works in contention, confirming once more the key role translators play in championing books from elsewhere. Indeed, it was Peter Sherwood’s delivery of two extracts from his translation of Krisztina Tóth’s Barcode that led me to seek it out and choose it as my latest Book of the month.

Though first published in Hungarian in 2006, this collection of fifteen stories feels startlingly fresh. Some of this may have to do with the fact that the majority of the pieces focus on childhood and adolescence, unpacking experiences that have a timeless universality (or at least feel relatable to those of us who were children in the late twentieth century). An American penfriend comes to stay and turns a schoolyard crush sour; a class detention pushes an anxious girl to make a false confession; friends in a deprived housing estate trade rumours about the grotesque demise of former residents while the authorities embark on a project with much more damaging consequences.

Yet the content is only a small part of the book’s power. The stories centring adult experiences – lost love, difficult neighbours, traumatising brushes with medical staff and airport officials – contain a similar compelling immediacy, pointing to something much more subtle and skilful at work in the writing.

There is a virtuosic quality in the leaps Tóth makes. Concision is made much of in anglophone creative writing teaching, with students encouraged to cut all unnecessary words. Tóth’s approach is somewhat different: she sets up her worlds so convincingly that she can afford to skip several steps in her narration, trusting that her reader will keep up. During a beach scene, we jump to a discussion about going to ‘fetch it’ and know immediately that ice-cream is on the cards; the discovery that a child has worms is conveyed through an expletive.

A similar dexterity is at work on the structural level. Tóth constructs many of the stories like essays or pieces of creative life writing: several apparently disconnected episodes or themes are introduced and then brought together to form a point. Between them, Tóth leaves gaps, trusting the reader to infer what is going on behind the scenes.

Though it’s risky and potentially reductive to try to explain a writer’s techniques too neatly, a key glimmers tantalisingly in the title story: ‘Tepid Milk (Barcode Lines)’. There, the narrator describes her method for writing secrets in her school books:

‘I often wrote very personal messages in the bottom margins. I drew the letters extra long, so they became distorted and stick-like, which made the written words look like parallel stripes. And when I also made the stem of the letters a little thicker, the secret looked like a barcode: to decipher it you had to look at it from a different angle.’

These are, in some ways, stories that invite us to consider them from multiple angles. Less like the photographs to which short stories are often compared in anglophone discourse, these are more akin to snowglobes that we can turn and consider from a range of perspectives, seeing what reveals itself and catches the light.

Much as he did at the WIT ceremony, Peter Sherwood brings Tóth’s work to life on the page. His lovely line in cosy colloquialism complements the stories’ conversational and sometimes confessional feel, as well as playing up the moments of humour. This also makes the darkness that lurks in the margins and occasionally spills into the centre all the more menacing.

Seventeen years after it made its appearance in its original language, it is a joy to see this brilliant collection reach the anglophone world. ‘A classic is a book that has never finished saying what it has to say,’ wrote Italo Calvino in The Uses of Literature, translated by Patrick Creagh. In English, Barcode has just begun to speak.

Barcode by Krisztina Tóth, translated from the Hungarian by Peter Sherwood (Jantar Publishing, 2023)