Minihorror and Paradise Burns lead this month's translated fiction

Two translated novels top this month's fiction roundup: Barbi Marković's Minihorror (Faber, £14.99), translated from Serbian by Jen Calleja, and Pol Guasch's Paradise Burns (Peninsula, £12.99), translated from Catalan by Mara Faye Lethem.

The roundup, published by the Guardian's books desk on 30 October, pairs two books that share almost nothing except ambition. One compresses dread into miniature stories. The other runs a whole life backward through a burning climate.

What makes Minihorror work?

Marković's collection of very short stories follows Mini and Miki — the Disney mouse names, rendered in Serbian — a sometime boyfriend and girlfriend living in Austria. The stories are eccentric, fantastical and, in the reviewer's words, "bursting with weird life."

The mechanism is simple: domestic scenes tip into the surreal without warning. Mini visits her family, who gather round a pit and make her climb down into it. When she tells Miki "they're dragging me down," he takes it as a metaphor. At Miki's family home, a dog Mini draws on a card comes alive and attacks her.

The tonal range swings fast. One moment the couple is "having fun like a couple in an advert"; the next, a hair dye goes wrong and "Mini looks like a 13-year-old dog." The review situates the book in a Bernhardian register (the gloom of Thomas Bernhard, the Austrian novelist) — "in summary, everything's tainted, and existence is a particular hardship" — while keeping an antic, physical energy underneath it.

The reviewer's verdict lands on the book's own ambivalence: "Miki isn't sure what to think about life. Is it good? Is it bad?" It's everything — which is the point.

How does Paradise Burns tell its story?

Guasch's novel opens with a death. Líton, one of the two central characters, is already gone when the book begins — "twenty-four short years, a life as fleeting as a shooting comet." His friend Rita survives him, and the story moves backward to find out why he died.

The setting is a world reshaped by climate change: "One only knows it's winter now by the shrunken days and long nights." Young men there join a firefighting service and fight "wildfire simulations of blazes that could not be put out" — training for fires no one can control.

Structurally, the novel flits briskly from present to past and from narrator to narrator. It moves through Rita's childhood diary, three "crafty old biddies" in the neighbourhood, and Líton's relationship with his lover René. The book's own line makes the method explicit: "Stories, if you give them an order, aren't stories but lies."

Inside that hectic structure, the review finds a steady core: a tribute to friendship, and to how a friend "has to be the net beneath the tightrope that is life."

What does this change for readers?

Both books argue that translation is carrying the experimental weight right now — a Serbian-born Austrian writer and a Catalan writer, both published by major UK presses at paperback prices under £15. For readers who want formal risk without losing emotional stakes, these two are the roundup's clear recommendations.