This is a choice of the handful of Swiss authors, classic and modern, whose works have been translated into English. Almost all are German- Swiss. The couple of 1930s novels by the Lausannois writer Charles-Ferdinand Ramuz that have been translated into English – Terror on the Mountain and When the Mountain Fell, virtually the only works by any French-Swiss authors to be published in English – are now out of print. The array of writings by the great Ticinese poet and novelist Francesco Chiesa, who died in 1973 at the age of 102, have yet to find an English translator, as do any by Romansh writers (bar a single out-of-print anthology).

Reto R. Bezzola, The Curly-Horned Cow: Anthology of Swiss-Romansh Literature (o/p). The sole translation into English of any Romansh writing, now out of print.

Michael Butler & Malcolm Pender (eds), Rejection and Emancipation (Berg). Study of writing in German-speaking Switzerland between 1945 and 1991, with lit-crit essays on Frisch and Dürrenmatt, as well as Meyer, Loetscher, Schriber and others.

Max Frisch, Man in the Holocene (Harcourt Brace). The most striking of the six novels by Frisch, who was born in Zürich in 1911 and is acclaimed as one of the century’s greatest writers. This is a haunting but moving meditation on mortality, illuminating the slow decay of an old man’s thought processes as he approaches death. Frisch’s other novels are Bluebeard, Gantenbein, Homo Faber, his acclaimed masterpiece I’m Not Stiller, and Montauk.

Jeremias Gotthelf, The Black Spider (Knightscross). Stories, tales and morality pieces from the nineteenth-century Emmental, as told by Gotthelf, a cleric turned author.

Hermann Hesse, Steppenwolf (Penguin). Hesse’s best-known work, profound social deconstruction wrapped up as fantasy, which weaves strands of eastern religion and mysticism into the compelling tale of a middle-aged misanthrope’s progress towards social and spiritual maturity, “violently misunderstood” according to Hesse. Of his dozens of other works, Siddhartha is a graceful retelling of the legend of the Buddha; Narziss and Goldmund is a picaresque portrait of two monks, one a scholar, the other a bohemian; and The Glass Bead Game is a monumental utopian novel, set in a future where an elite group develops a game that resolves the world’s conflicts.

Zoë Jenny, The Pollen Room (Bloomsbury). An understated, mesmeric novel, translated from the German, poetically chronicling a marriage breakup through the eyes of a child. This is the first novel by Jenny, who was born in Basel in 1974.

Gottfried Keller, Green Henry (John Calder). Massive tome of a novel, and a highly celebrated Bildungsroman, charting the Zürich-born author’s country, youth and philosophy, written between 1846 and 1855 to a backdrop of unrequited love in Berlin.

Johanna Spyri, Heidi (Penguin). Perhaps the most famous book ever written about Switzerland, but a hopelessly moralistic, cloying tale for all that. Spyri nonetheless expertly evokes the folksiness and stolid culture of the Swiss alpine farmers and effortlessly pulls heartstrings for her cheese-munching, milk-quaffing heroine.

Beat Sterchi, The Cow (Faber, UK). Newly translated epic first novel set in a dairy farm and an abattoir, focusing on the experiences of a Spanish guest worker in Switzerland. The Guardian praised its “uncompromising magnificence as a work of art”.

Robert Walser, Masquerade and other stories (Quartet). Improvised prose poems and poetic short stories from Walser’s life in four cities (Zürich, Berlin, Biel/Bienne and Bern) over the period 1899–1933, tracing influences on and similarities with Kafka and other avant-garde modernists of the time. Walser, born in Biel in 1878, published seven novels, of which three dating from his years in Berlin showcase to best effect his fluent, ironic social observation (The Tanner Siblings, 1907; The Handyman, 1908; Jakob von Gunten, 1909). All remain untranslated. After 1933, Walser spent his last 22 years in an asylum near Appenzell. “I wrote nothing more,” he said. “What for? My world had been obliterated by the Nazis.”