Literary Fiction

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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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The Trial

By Franz Kafka , Willa Muir , Edwin Muir , E. M. Butler , George Steiner

Franz Kafka's The Trial follows Josef K., a senior bank clerk who is arrested one morning by officials who will not name his offence. He is then left free to go about his life while a vast, unreachable court closes in on him. Kafka wrote it in 1914–15 and left it unfinished. It appeared in 1925, after his death, and became one of the most influential works of modernist fiction. Its plain, controlled prose makes bureaucracy, guilt and authority feel both darkly comic and frightening. This Schocken Definitive Edition offers the Willa and Edwin Muir translation with an introduction by George Steiner. For anyone building a list of classic novels to read, it is a short, strange and endlessly debated place to start.

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The Recovery House

By Derek Owusu

In The Recovery House, Derek Owusu follows Jamal, a young writer who wakes in a residential mental health facility after a breakdown. Disoriented, alcoholic, and carrying a diagnosis of borderline personality disorder, Jamal must piece together how he arrived there. The recovery house—creaky beds, watchful nurses, restless corridors—becomes both constraint and shelter. Within its walls, Jamal forms unexpected bonds: a friendship with Joy, who sings The Cranberries into the dark; a weekly Bible study; a Turkish man he connects with over a pot of oxtail. Written in Owusu's unbroken, breathless prose with no chapter breaks, this slim novel interrogates the line between illness and inspiration, faith and doubt, and the ethics of mining one's suffering for story. It is a tender book about what it means to be witnessed, to recover, and to create without destroying the self that creates.

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Countries of Origin

By Javier Fuentes

Countries of Origin is a literary fiction debut about Demetrio, a young pastry chef who has built a respected career in New York in 2007 while living without legal status. When he is forced to return to Madrid, the city of his birth, he arrives as a stranger in his own country. On the way he meets Jacobo, a wealthy Spanish student, and the two begin an ambiguous, charged relationship over one summer. Fuentes uses the romance to look at deeper questions: what home means when a country has rejected you, how class and money shape intimacy, and how a person rebuilds a life from displacement. The book won the PEN/Hemingway Award for debut fiction. Its measured, reflective style makes it a good fit for readers who like character-driven stories about migration and queer desire.

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A Leopard-Skin Hat

By Anne Serre , Mark Hutchinson

A Leopard-Skin Hat is a slim, deeply felt novel by French writer Anne Serre, translated from the 2008 original by Mark Hutchinson. It traces the lifelong friendship between an unnamed Narrator and his childhood friend Fanny, a woman whose profound psychological struggles make her at once the most vivid and most elusive person in his life. Structured as a series of fragmentary scenes spanning decades, the book is as much about the impossibility of fully knowing another person as it is about that person. Written in the aftermath of Serre's own sister's death, the novel becomes a meditation on grief, memory, and the stories we construct to hold the people we lose. Shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize, it stands as a distinctive piece of literary fiction that questions the very conventions of the novel while remaining genuinely moving.

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Calling for a Blanket Dance

By Oscar Hokeah

Oscar Hokeah's first novel follows Ever Geimausaddle, a young man of Kiowa, Cherokee and Mexican heritage, from a traumatic infancy in Oklahoma through a turbulent adulthood. Ever never narrates his own early life. Relatives tell it instead, each from a different generation and with a different stake in who he becomes: grandmothers, a grandfather, cousins, aunts and others. Together they show how a family absorbs harm and tries to answer it with care, ceremony and practical help. The title comes from a powwow custom in which a community gathers to support someone in need. Among the notable debut novels of 2022, this work of literary fiction won the PEN/Hemingway Award for Debut Novel. It is a good choice for readers drawn to family stories, Indigenous life in the present day and multi-voice storytelling.

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Perfection

By Vincenzo Latronico , Sophie Hughes

Perfection is a short, cool-toned novel about Anna and Tom, a couple from southern Europe who move to Berlin in the 2010s and work as freelance designers. They build an enviable life of good taste, travel and online visibility, then slowly find that the life they curated no longer feels like their own. Vincenzo Latronico, writing in Italian and translated by Sophie Hughes, treats the couple as a case study in millennial aspiration, digital work and the gap between how a life looks and how it feels. It is a quick read but a pointed one, and it works well as translated fiction for readers who like their literary fiction brief, ironic and socially observant. It was shortlisted for the 2025 International Booker Prize.

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The Land in Winter

By Andrew Miller

The Land in Winter is a novel about two marriages tested by one unforgiving season. In the winter of 1962–63, a young country doctor, Eric Parry, his wife Irene, and their farming neighbours Bill and Rita Simmons find their West Country lives closed in by snow until there is little left to hide behind. Andrew Miller cares less about what the weather destroys than about what it exposes: the compromises each partner has made, the social distances that marriage was meant to close, and the legacy of a war that ended less than two decades earlier. The book matters because of its sense of proportion. It gives an ordinary domestic crisis the seriousness usually reserved for public upheaval. The novel was shortlisted for the 2025 Booker Prize and won the Walter Scott Prize. It stands out among book club books because it offers four flawed but sympathetic points of view and no easy verdicts.

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