Contemporary Fiction

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Early Sobrieties

By Michael Deagler

Early Sobrieties is Michael Deagler's first novel, published in 2024. It follows Dennis Monk, a 26-year-old seven months into recovery from alcoholism. His family has pushed him out of the Pennsylvania suburbs, and he drifts between friends' couches in South Philadelphia over one uncertain summer. The book treats early sobriety as an awkward, funny and often unresolved stretch of life rather than a triumphant ending. Dennis has to rebuild friendships, face the people who remember his drinking, and work out what adulthood might look like. The novel won the 2025 PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel, and readers looking for debut novels about recovery will find an unusually specific, comic and humane example.

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The Remainder

By Alia Trabucco Zerán , Sophie Hughes

The Remainder is the debut novel by Chilean writer Alia Trabucco Zerán, first published in Spanish as La Resta in 2015 and rendered into English by translator Sophie Hughes. Set in Santiago against the long shadow of Pinochet's dictatorship, the book follows three young adults—childhood friends whose parents were anti-regime militants—on a hearse-driven journey across the Andes to recover the lost body of one friend's mother. Told in alternating first-person chapters, the novel examines how political violence and inherited loss persist in the generation that never chose them. Shortlisted for the 2019 Man Booker International Prize, it stands as a striking example of translated fiction from Latin America that treats intergenerational trauma with formal originality and emotional precision.

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Phenotypes

By Paulo Scott , Daniel Hahn

Phenotypes is a novel by Brazilian author Paulo Scott, translated into English by Daniel Hahn and published by And Other Stories in 2022. Longlisted for the International Booker Prize, the book follows Federico, a light-skinned mixed-race man who works with disadvantaged Black youth, as he navigates a government commission tasked with creating a technology-based system to classify racial identity for university quota eligibility. Set against the backdrop of 2016 Brazil and the contentious affirmative-action debates, the novel traces decades of family history in Porto Alegre, linking a violent teenage brawl in 1984 to the present-day arrest of Federico's niece for possessing a hidden gun. Scott's interwoven timelines and stream-of-consciousness prose examine how racial classification, privilege, guilt, and intergenerational violence shape individual and collective lives in a society that refuses to name the structures of its own prejudice.

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Boulder

By Eva Baltasar , Julia Sanches

Boulder is a slim, ferocious novel by Catalan writer Eva Baltasar, rendered into English by translator Julia Sanches. A Catalan woman working as a cook on a merchant ship along the Chilean coast falls for Samsa, an Icelandic geologist, and trades her itinerant solitude for domestic life in Reykjavík. When Samsa declares she wants a child, Boulder must face the collision between her fierce need for freedom and her devotion to the relationship. In just over a hundred pages, Baltasar delivers a queer love story that doubles as a meditation on the politics of intimacy and the cost of conformity. The novel won the 2020 Òmnium Prize, and this English translation was shortlisted for the 2023 International Booker Prize.

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Wretchedness

By Andrzej Tichý , Nichola Smalley

In Wretchedness, Andrzej Tichý follows a classical cellist whose brief encounter with a homeless addict by a Malmö canal pulls him back into the life he left behind. That life was a 1990s youth on the city's multi-ethnic margins, full of fights, drugs, raves and friends who never got out. Nichola Smalley translated the novel from Swedish. It unfolds as one restless act of remembering, in which past and present, and the narrator's voice and the voices of others, keep running into each other. The book matters because it pairs this daring form with a hard question: what does someone who escaped owe to those who stayed, and what does their fate say about a country proud of its fairness? The novel was shortlisted for the August Prize and longlisted for the International Booker. It stands among contemporary world literature books that reward readers willing to follow rhythm until meaning comes into focus.

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Disgrace

By J. M. Coetzee

Disgrace follows David Lurie, a middle-aged Cape Town literature professor whose career ends after he abuses his position with a student and refuses to perform the contrition his university expects. He retreats to his daughter Lucy's smallholding in the Eastern Cape, where a violent attack changes both their lives and exposes how far the old order of power has shifted in post-apartheid South Africa. Coetzee's spare, unsettling story examines shame, privilege, desire, and responsibility without offering easy moral comfort. It won the 1999 Booker Prize and is one of the most discussed Booker Prize books of its era. As literary fiction, it rewards slow reading and still provokes strong disagreement.

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Small Boat

By Vincent Delecroix , Helen Stevenson

Small Boat is a short, urgent novel by French philosopher and novelist Vincent Delecroix, rendered into English by Helen Stevenson. Based on the November 2021 English Channel disaster in which an overloaded dinghy capsized and twenty-seven migrants died, the book is narrated by a fictionalized version of the radio operator who received the distress calls. Structured in three parts—her interrogation, the drowning of the passengers, and her life after the event—the novel interrogates individual and collective responsibility, the banality of bureaucratic indifference, and the structural forces that drive people to risk their lives at sea. Shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize and winner of an English PEN Translates award, it is the first of Delecroix's novels to appear in English.

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Sad Grownups

By Amy Stuber

Sad Grownups is Amy Stuber's debut collection of seventeen short stories about adults who feel out of step with the lives they were expected to build. The settings range from a California desert suburb to a Missouri state park, a boys' summer camp and a prep-school fundraiser, and each carries a faint sense of ecological and economic strain. Stuber's characters are parents, teenagers, couples and the grieving, and the book treats their sadness as a reasonable response to circumstances rather than a flaw to be fixed. Humor and metafictional play keep the tone from turning bleak. Published by Stillhouse Press in 2024, it won the 2025 PEN/Robert W. Bingham Prize for Debut Short Story Collection, which makes it a strong pick among short story collections and award-winning books of contemporary American fiction.

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