Hope Road Publishing

Hope Road Publishing is an independent press that champions writers from Africa, Asia and the Caribbean, giving platform to stories and voices that the mainstream publishing world tends to pass over. Their list spans adult literary fiction and books for young readers, and the catalogue shows a range that goes well beyond a single genre or tone.

The young-adult side of the list includes Rehan Khan's Chronicles of Will Ryde and Awa, a three-book adventure series set in the sixteenth-century Ottoman world, and Juan Villoro's The Wild Book, an adventure in which the books in a boy's uncle's library move on their own and choose their reader. Nicola Garrard's 21 Miles, written by a secondary-school teacher with experience volunteering in Calais refugee camps, follows two seventeen-year-olds over a single day between Dover and Calais and puts the reader inside the refugee crisis through the eyes of teenagers.

On the adult side, Small Boat by Vincent Delecroix, translated by Helen Stevenson, arrived in 2025 and was longlisted for the International Booker Prize. The novel is built around a real 2021 Channel disaster in which a migrant dinghy capsized with 27 dead; Delecroix, a philosopher, follows the woman who took the emergency calls as she faces questioning and refuses to be made a scapegoat for what she argues is the failure of an entire system. It is a short, unflinching book that interrogates who bears responsibility when borders and bureaucracy let people drown.

A reader browsing Hope Road's catalogue will find a publisher that takes a position. The books concern migration, cultural exchange, and the stories that tend to be absent from bestseller lists. The prose ranges from the fast, plot-driven adventure of Khan's Istanbul sagas to the sparse, morally complex voice of Delecroix's narrator. What threads them together is a commitment to characters whose experiences do not need explaining to a reader who has grown up inside a single national narrative.