October's recommendation: Night Watch, by Sergei Lukyanenko.
America is generally very bad at paying attention to fiction written in other languages, and it seems particularly true in the genres of science fiction and fantasy. I'm fairly certain this is the first such novel I've read in translation; I started another two at various points, but never quite got into them.
I got into Night Watch, though I'll admit it's far from a perfect book. To some extent, though, I feel iffy about judging Lukyanenko's work. How much of the style comes, not from him, but from his translator Andrew Bromfield? Would I feel differently about some of the concepts if they were presented with different words? Are my quibbles with the book, or the translation?
I can't answer these questions, but I know that despite its flaws, I enjoyed Night Watch, and am looking forward to its sequel, Day Watch. They're urban fantasies set in Moscow, and half the time I'm as fascinated by post-Soviet Russia as I am by the mystical content; vampires and werewolves are familiar fare, but the mundane stuff isn't. Lukyanenko manages some interesting twists on the standards, though. The basic breakdown is that supernatural people are collectively called Others; they divide themselves into the Light Others and the Dark Others; and each side has a police force whose job it is to monitor and regulate their opposite numbers. The Light Others, therefore, comprise the Night Watch, and the Dark Others make up the Day Watch.
It's a little difficult to discuss the book without thinking of the movie, which I saw before I read its source. This page isn't for film recommendations, but I'll say that the movie is intriguing; for one thing, the subtitles are integrated into the images, so that a vampire's telepathic lure for a boy appears as red words in various places around the screen, which dissolve into swirls of blood as they fade. The two renditions are fairly different -- for one thing, the movie tells the story of the first third of the book, and makes a pretty radical change to the plot -- and I think I might, perhaps, like the movie better. But they end up doing different enough things that I'm more than happy to like both. In either case, they're concerned with the balance between the Light and Dark Others, who may or may not be on the verge of finding a way to defeat each other for good. And there are some thorny moral dilemmas along the way, largely concerned with the pragmatic compromises the Night Watch protagonists have to make; they have to license vampires to feed on people, for example (thereby condemning some innocent humans to death), and they trade favors with both the offenders they catch and the Day Watch who catch them at their own infractions. There are times when you distinctly wonder how much difference there really is between the two sides.
The novel of Day Watch is supposed to come out in February of next year; I'm not sure if there's an official release date for the film in the West, nor have I seen it yet. I'm glad, though, that Lukyanenko's books became a big enough hit in Russia to become movies, and that the movies became such blockbusters there that film and book alike are getting released in the U.S. We see little enough material from Russia here, and I appreciate the chance to experience some of it.