August is a big month for women; on Tuesday we celebrated the 100-year anniversary of the 19th Amendment that gave many women the right to vote, though it would be years until Native Americans, Chinese immigrants, and Black women were fully granted that basic right. For only the third time in history, a female Vice Presidential candidate is on a major party ticket. And in the literary world we celebrate Women in Translation month, the focus of this week's Friday Five.

Celestial Bodies is the 2019 Booker Prize award-winning story of three sisters in Oman who each choose a distinct path as they approach womanhood, running up against evolving societal expectations as they reckon with love, sacrifice, and what it means to be both an independent being in charge of one's fate.

Sofia Segovia's The Murmur of Bees lives on our Recommended Table, endorsed by several staff members. It is a work of historical fiction based in magical realism, a "human narrative" that the The Washington Post notes "is sure to draw comparisons to Latin American greats, such as Isabel Allende." The story, set during the Mexican Revolution and the 1918 flu pandemic, follows a gifted child who harnesses the power of visions available only to him as he works to help his adoptive family escape trouble.

The Vegetarian, a slim South Korean novel, isn't for the faint of heart. Another Booker Prize winner (2016), it starts innocently enough when the female protagonist decides she wants to become a vegetarian and throws out all the meat in her freezer. Her husband, apparently displeased with this sudden turn of events (you wonder how he might react to something slightly more disruptive like say, a global pandemic) loses his cool and domestic chaos ensues.

National Book Award finalist The Memory Police, penned by one of Japan's most acclaimed authors, focuses on an island where an authoritarian police force is slowly erasing the inhabitants' memories of everything they've ever known - green beans, emeralds, ribbons - a slow bleed of small items plus entire categories, birds and flowers to name two. Complete oblivion seems possible but Ogawa's meditative prose dampens the terror and allows the reader to sink into the narrative with both eyes open.

Finally, Breasts and Eggs by Mieko Kawakami caught my eye earlier this Spring when a New York Times review by Katie Kitamura suggested it as a next-generation Murakami (while noting that his depictions of females haven't always aged well, up for debate on another platform). In this book, the female form, what it is and what we imagine it should be, is dissected by characters with divergent beliefs, making it perfect for a feisty book club discussion.