Death and the Penguin by Andrey Kurkov translated by George BirdHarvill, £6.99, 240ppAndrey Kurkov, born in St Petersburg in 1961, now lives in Kiev. After military service as a prison warder, he worked as a journalist and cameraman. He writes screenplays, and has published four novels, and children's books. In Death and the Penguin, Viktor is a struggling writer who lands a job preparing future obituaries for a newspaper. He also picks up two friends: Misha the penguin, and Misha the mafioso, his twin guides through the absurdities of post-Soviet Ukraine. For the judges, this "evocative, funny and moving" satire-thriller marks a return to the "tradition of surreal and subversive Russian humour", in a book of "spare and beautiful" descriptions.Austerlitz by W G Sebald translated by Anthea BellHamish Hamilton, £16.99, 432ppW G "Max" Sebald, born in the Bavarian Alps in 1944, was killed in a car-crash near his Norfolk home in December 2001.

He set up the British Centre for Literary Translation at the University of East Anglia, where he taught for many years after leaving Germany, and achieved huge acclaim after the appearance in English of The Emigrants in 1996. In Austerlitz, a Prague-born ?gr?cholar recalls the trauma of his early life in a single 415-page paragraph that moves in Sebald's trademark style between countries and periods, and fact and fiction. To the judges this was "a work of the first magnitude", well served by the writer's "close and successful relationship" with his translator. Only in London by Hanan Al-Shaykh translated by Catherine CobhamBloomsbury, £16.99, 276ppHanan Al-Shaykh grew up in Beirut but now lives with her family in London.

She left her homeland during the civil war in Lebanon, a conflict that informs her novel Beirut Blues. Only in London is her fourth book, her first comedy, and the first set in her adoptive city. In a scenario that mingles 1001 Nights-style Arabic storytelling with urban sitcom, a quartet of characters negotiate the romantic pitfalls of their life in the capital's "Little Arabia". Our judges relished the book's elements of "fable and fantasy" and its "politically incorrect", "rude and funny", erotic escapades; they also appreciated its shrewd, rueful depiction of people on the move who "operate between languages".The following eight titles – all outstanding – reached our long-list but narrowly missed the final cut:Two Brothers by Bernardo Atxaga (translated by Margaret Jull Costa; Harvill, £10): a Basque version of Of Mice and Men, as an orphaned boy defends his handicapped brother in a limpid fable of loyalty and betrayal, with a tragic d?uement.Under the Frangipani by Mia Couto (tr. David Brookshaw; Serpent's Tail, £10): Mozambique's leading writer melds African folklore with an Agatha Christie-style investigation, as a murder reveals the human cost of the country's civil war.I'm Off by Jean Echenoz (tr.