Troll: A Love Story

One of the things that should make fiction in translation so appealing to science fiction readers is that the stories are often built around very different cultures, traditions, and assumptions so that we are immediately immersed in an alien world. In Johanna Sinisalo's novel, which has also been translated as Not Before Sundown, Finnish folklore reveals a world in which trolls are real creatures. The story concerns the relationship between a gay photographer and an injured troll he comes across, but interspersed throughout the book are newspaper articles, jokes and other bits and pieces that build up a detailed picture of this alternate reality.Why it's on the listEven before The Three-Body Problem won the Hugo Award, Troll: A Love Story won the Tiptree Award, making it the first translated work to win a major sf award.