OPT INDIE BOOKS OF THE YEAR
This year, we were drawn to tales of resilience and transformation, whether through profound explorations of identity, critiques of modern society, or reimaginings of myth and folklore. From deeply personal narratives to genre-defying experiments, these books reflected the complexities of our world in fresh, unforgettable ways.
Featuring some of the best writers and translators from across the globe, brought to you by some of the very best small presses here in the U.K. From intimate, character-driven stories to experimental, boundary-pushing collections, we delved into tales of survival, belonging, and reinvention, often with a focus on underrepresented voices and perspectives. These books left us awed, haunted, and hopeful—just the way the best stories should.
So here’s to 2024: a year of discovery, adventure, and the power of small press publishing.
Take a browse of our year of books below!
Ghost Mountain
by Ronan Hession
PREORDER
Ghost Mountain, is a simple fable-like novel about a mountain that appears suddenly, and the way in which its manifestation ripples through the lives of characters in the surrounding community. It looks at the uncertain fragile sense of self we hold inside ourselves, and our human compulsion to project it into the uncertain world around us, whether we're ready or not. It is also about the presence of absence, and how it shadows us in our lives.
Mountains are at once unmistakably present yet never truly fathomable.
Published by Bluemoose Books Ltd
Cairn
by Kathleen Jamie
PREORDER
Cairn: A marker on open land, a memorial, a viewpoint shared by strangers. For the last five years poet and author Kathleen Jamie has been turning her attention to a new form of writing: micro-essays, prose poems, notes and fragments. Placed together, like the stones of a wayside cairn, they mark a changing psychic and physical landscape.
The virtuosity of these short pieces is both subtle and deceptive. Jamie's intent 'noticing' of the natural world is suffused with a clear-eyed awareness of all we endanger. She considers the future her children face, while recalling her own childhood and notes the lost innocence in the way we respond to the dramas of nature.
With meticulous care she marks the point she has reached, in life and within the cascading crises of our times. Cairn resonates with a beauty and wisdom that only an artist of Jamie's calibre could achieve.
Published by Sort of Books
Not a River
by Selva Almada
Three men go out fishing, returning to a favourite spot on the river despite their memories of a terrible accident there years earlier. As a long, sultry day passes, they drink and cook and talk and dance, and try to overcome the ghosts of their past. But they are outsiders, and this intimate, peculiar moment also puts them at odds with the inhabitants of this watery universe, both human and otherwise.
The forest presses close, and violence seems inevitable, but can another tragedy be avoided? Rippling across time like the river that runs through it, Selva Almada's latest novel is the finest expression yet of her compelling style and singular vision of rural Argentina. This masterful novel reveals once again Selva Almada's unique voice and extraordinary sensitivity, allowing its characters to shine and express in action what the depths of their souls harbour.
Published by Charco Press
Queenless
by Mira Marcinów
Translated by Maggie Zebracka
POLITYKA PASSPORT PRIZE 2020
Republic of Consciousness Prize Reading Club Pick for August
Shortlisted for the Conrad Prize 2020
Shortlisted for the Nike Literary Award 2020
Shortlisted for the O!Lśnienia Award 2020
Shortlisted for the Empik Discovery Award 2020
In post-Soviet Poland, a young woman tries to fill the space left by
her eccentric mother while struggling to fit in modern life.
Playing with form and content, Queenless is a fierceless story about the desire to live; about great, crazy and greedy love between a mother and a daughter.
Marcinów finds her own language to describe loss
and extreme intimacy: trance-like, strong, witty, yet
trembling, cruelly honest, full of tenderness and longing.
Published by Héloïse Press
Headshot
by Rita Bullwinkel
Headshot is the story of the eight best teenage girl boxers in the United States, told over the two days of a championship tournament and structured as a series of face-offs. As the girls’ pasts and futures collide, the specific joy and violence of the sport comes to life with electric energy, and a portrait emerges of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness and sheer physical pleasure that motivates each of these young women to fight.
This is a novel about the radicalness and strangeness of being physically intimate with another human when you are measuring your own body, through competition, against theirs. What does the intimacy of a physical competition feel like? What does it mean to walk through life in the bodies we’ve been given, and what does it mean to use those bodies with abandon?
Funny, propulsive, obsessive and ecstatic, Headshot is equal parts subtle and intense, as it brings us to the sidelines of the ring and above and beyond it, examining closely the eight girls’ lives, which intersect for a moment – a universe that shimmers and resonates.
Published by Daunt Books
Seaglass
by Kathryn Tann
On a windswept stretch of the Durham coastline, there’s treasure to be found: jewels of shining sea glass, swept in by the tide after years at sea. Gathered together in a jar on the windowsill, each seaworn pebble is a moment in time, a glinting archive of unknowable lives. Seaglass is a collection of such moments; essays blending creative non-fiction with nature writing and memoir, and portraying with powerful observation and moving honesty the journey of a young woman navigating modern adulthood. The stories draw a map of Kathryn’s life, from Manchester to the South Wales coastline and out to the Thousand Islands in Canada’s Saint Lawrence River. Traversing wilderness, natural history, travel and water – rivers, lakes, coastlines and leisure centres – Seaglass explores shared experiences, anxieties, confidence and contentment.
Published by University of Wales Press
Fragile Animals
by Genevieve Jagger
When an ex-catholic woman develops a sexual relationship with a vampire, she is forced to confront the memories that haunt her religious past. Struggling to deal with the familial trauma of her Catholic upbringing, hotel cleaner, Noelle, travels to the Isle of Bute. There, she meets a man who claims to be a vampire, and a relationship blooms between them based solely on confession.
But as talk turns sacrilegious, and the weather outside grows colder, Noelle struggles to come to terms with her blasphemous sexuality. She becomes hounded by memories of her past: her mother’s affair with the local priest, and the part she played in ending it.
Published by 404 Ink
The Heart of the Woods
by Wyl Menmuir
Just as a parent leaves a legacy to their child, a tree leaves a legacy to its surroundings. A deep and explorative companion piece to the Roger Deakin Award-winning The Draw of The Sea. Throughout history, trees have determined the tools we use, the boats we build, the stories we tell about the world and ourselves, the songs we sing, and some of our most important rituals.
As such, our lives are intertwined with those of the trees and woodlands around us. In this journey deep into the woods, Wyl Menmuir travels the length and breadth of Britain and Ireland to meet the people who plant trees, the ecologists who study them, those who shape beautiful objects and tools from wood, and those who use them to help others. Wyl also explores how our relationship with trees is enduring, now and in the future – what we get out of spending time around trees, the ways in which our relationship with them has changed over time, and the ways in which our future is interconnected with theirs.
Written in close collaboration with makers, crafters, bodgers, and woodsmen and women in order to better understand the woods they know so well, the joys and frustrations of working with a living material, and the stories of their craft and skills, The Heart of The Woods will delight anyone who enjoys walking among the trees, and anyone who, when lost, has found themselves in the woods.
Published by Aurum
Elevator in Sai Gon
by Thuan
A Vietnamese woman living in Paris travels back to Sài Gòn for her estranged mother’s funeral. Her brother had recently built a new house and staged a grotesquely lavish ceremony for their mother to inaugurate what was rumoured to be the first elevator in a private home in the country. But shortly after the ceremony, in the middle of the night, their mother dies after mysteriously falling down the elevator shaft.
Following the funeral, the daughter becomes increasingly fascinated with her family’s history, and begins to investigate and track an enigmatic figure, Paul Polotski, who emerges from her mother’s notebook. Like an amateur sleuth, she trails Polotski through the streets of Paris, sneaking behind him as he goes about his usual routines; meanwhile, she researches her mother’s past—zigzagging across France and Asia—trying to find clues to the spiralling, deepening questions her mother left behind unanswered—and perhaps unanswerable.
Published by Tilted Axis Press
The Seers
by Sulaiman Addonia
The Seers follows the first years of a homeless Eritrean refugee in London. Set around a foster home in Kilburn and in the squares of Bloomsbury, where its protagonist Hannah sleeps, the novel grapples with how agency is given to the sexual lives of refugees, presenting gender-fluid, trans and androgynous African immigrants, and insisting that the erotic and intimate side of life is as much a part of someone’s story as ‘land and nations’ are. Hannah arrives in London with her mother’s diary, containing a disturbing sexual story taking place in Keren, Eritrea, where the Allies defeated the Italians in the Second World War.
In a gripping, continuous paragraph, The Seers moves between the present day and the past to explore intergenerational histories, colonial trauma, and the realities of the UK asylum system and its impact on young refugees.
Published by Prototype Publishing Ltd.
The Empusium
by Olga Tokarczuk
PREORDER - 26 Sep 2024
In September 1913, Mieczyslaw Wojnicz, a student suffering from tuberculosis, arrives at Wilhelm Opitz’s Guesthouse for Gentlemen, a health resort in what is now western Poland. Every day, its residents gather in the dining room to imbibe the hallucinogenic local liqueur, to obsess over money and status, and to discuss the great issues of the day: Will there be war? Monarchy or democracy? Do devils exist? Are women inherently inferior? Meanwhile, disturbing things are beginning to happen in the guesthouse and its surroundings. As stories of shocking events in the nearby highlands reach the men, a sense of dread builds.
Someone – or something – seems to be watching them and attempting to infiltrate their world. Little does Mieczyslaw realise, as he attempts to unravel both the truths within himself and the mystery of the sinister forces beyond, that they have already chosen their next target. A century after the publication of The Magic Mountain, Olga Tokarczuk revisits Thomas Mann territory and lays claim to it, blending horror story, comedy, folklore and feminist parable with brilliant storytelling.
Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions
Above Us the Sea
by Ania Card
'Maybe when we looked away from it, it could only be for a fragmented moment. Maybe our gaze always returned, our eyes always finding the sea.'
It's after a night in Cardiff's loudest gay bar that Toni first lays eyes on Gav, a retired Welsh boxer, and his boyfriend Karol, an aspiring Polish photographer. The trio soon fall into an intimate, ambiguous love triangle.
After a tragic event at a beach in Swansea, the trio are ripped apart, and Toni escapes to London, becoming caught between a convenient, loveless relationship and an illicit, lustful affair. Lost halfway between the British future she has always wanted, and the Eastern European past she has been running from, Toni can only wonder where and with whom she really belongs. Above Us the Sea is an ode to the tangled remains of lost loves and the imprints left by grieving souls, yearning for connection.
This is a story of aching and emerging, intimacy and distance, set against an increasingly hostile landscape.
Published by Dead Ink
The Proposal
by Myung-hoon Bae
Translated by Stella Kim.
In The Proposal, a space opera romance set against the backdrop of a looming colossal war between Earth and a mysterious adversary, a story of love unfolds through a series of intimate letters. This poignant novella explores how a space-born soldier’s gradual involvement with an escalating conflict intertwines with a heartfelt proposal to his Earth-born partner, revealing the intricate dance of love and duty at the edge of an interstellar conflict.
Translated by Stella Kim, The Proposal reflects on the distances that separate us—both physically and emotionally—and celebrates the resilience of the human spirit, ever striving to overcome these divides.
Published by Honford Star
Lying Perfectly Still
by Laura Fish
A gripping story of exploitation and cultural collision... Following the shocking death of her father, Koliwe leaves her life in Oxford behind when she travels to AIDS-ravaged Eswatini to take a job as an aid worker. But the Southern Africa she encounters is a far cry from the stories her late artist father told.
As she becomes enmeshed with Thandi, a local girl hiding a disturbing past, Koliwe feels increasingly split between her English identity and her rediscovered African roots as Xolile. When Thandi goes missing, Koliwe's search for the truth leads her deep into the mountains, where the harsh realities of wealth and poverty, tradition and modernity, clash. Harrowing yet richly evocative, Lying Perfectly Still, written from an insider's perspective, offers a searing exposé of the exploitation that has plagued the international development sector.
A powerful exploration of cultural identity, family secrets, and hard truths.
Published by Fly On The Wall Press
Set My Heart on Fire
by Izumi Suzuki
Hope I'm in for a good time, I thought. Even if it's just for tonight. Set in the underground bar and club scene of 1970s Tokyo, Set My Heart On Fire tells the story of Izumi in her turbulent twenties.
Through a series of disarmingly frank vignettes, author Izumi Suzuki presents an unforgettable portrait of a young woman encountering missteps and miscommunication, good music and unreliable men, powerful drugs and disorientating meds. Izumi usually keeps her relationships short but complicated, until she meets Jun. Set My Heart on Fire is a visceral novel about mistaken relationships and the convolutions of desire, about regret and acceptance.
Pulsing through the narration is the protagonist's love of music, a vital soundtrack spanning the Zombies, T. Rex and the Rolling Stones as well as underground Japanese psychedelic-rock bands such as the Tigers and the Tempters.
Published by Verso Books
Brandy Sour
by Constantia Soteriou
The Winner of the 2023 Cypriot National Book Prize
When it was built in the 1950s, nothing symbolised Cyprus entering the modern world like the Ledra Palace Hotel. In Constantia Soteriou’s jewel of a novella, the ambitions and shortcomings of the island’s turbulent twentieth century are played out by its occupants. Among them we meet the king in exile who needs to drown his sorrows with a drink disguised to look like tea; the porter who, among the English roses of the hotel's gardens, secretly plants a rose from his village to make his rosebud infusions; the UN officer who drinks lemonade to deal with the heat and the lies; and the cleaning lady who always carries her holy water with her.
They are reluctant actors in history, evocatively captured in this moving, personal, and highly original portrait of civil strife and division.
Published by Foundry Editions
Fire Exit
by Morgan Talty
A lone white man lives beside the river on the edge of the Penobscot reservation in Maine. Charles spends his days doing odd jobs, looking after his depressive mother, and staring across the water to the house in which his half-Native daughter Elizabeth has grown up, unaware of his existence, her paternity hidden to protect her tribal status. Yet the cracks in the foundations of Elizabeth’s life are beginning to show, and Charles can see Elizabeth is struggling, much like his own mother does.
He firmly believes the truth will set them all free – but the price of it may be the destruction of them all. A deeply layered story of family and blood ties, full of quiet, beautiful, and dignified sentences, Fire Exit shows us kinship from all angles, and its capacity to break down, re-form, fade, or strengthen, while always remaining a part of us. 'Utterly consuming … spellbinding and quietly devastating … a sober reckoning with what love can and cannot do, what healing is and is not possible in our families.
The novel absolutely smoulders.' Tommy Orange
Published by And Other Stories
Bound
A Memoir of Making and Remaking
by Maddie Ballard
In a new home, relationships shift, and ties fray. Bound: A Memoir of Making and Remaking is a collection of essays about sewing and knowing who you are. Each chapter in this sewist's diary charts the crafting of a different garment.
From a lining embroidered with the Cantonese names of her female ancestors to a dressing gown holding the body of a beloved friend, Maddie Ballard navigates love, personal connections, and self-care, drafting her own patterns for ways of living. Lyrical, probing, soothing and wise, Bound is a strikingly original debut and a quiet celebration of the remarkable, everyday process of making and re-making: of cloth, of clothing, and of ourselves.
Published by The Emma Press
The Heart in Winter
by Kevin Barry
What if we ride out tonight?What if we ride out and never once look back?October, 1891. Butte, Montana. A hard winter approaches across the Rocky Mountains.
The city is rich on copper mines and rampant with vice and debauchery among a hard-living crowd of immigrant Irish workers. Here we find Tom Rourke, a young poet and balladmaker, but also a doper, a drinker and a fearsome degenerate. Just as he feels his life is heading nowhere fast, Polly Gillespie arrives in town as the new bride of the devout mine captain Long Anthony Harrington.
A thunderbolt love affair takes spark between Tom and Polly and they strike out west on a stolen horse, moving through the badlands of Montana and Idaho. Briefly an idyll of wild romance perfects itself. But a posse of deranged Cornish gunsmen are soon in hot pursuit of the lovers, and closing in fast .
Published by Canongate Books
The Horse
by Willy Vlautin
Willy Vlautin's most personal novel yet - a poetic and deeply moving story about what it really takes to be a musician. 'There's a horse', he whispered. 'An old horse that's standing in front of my house.
He's blind and he won't eat and I don't know what to do.'67-year-old Al Ward is several years into an isolated stint living on old mining land in Nevada left to him by his great uncle. One morning, the horse arrives outside his home, seemingly unable to feed itself or stay safe from coyote attacks. 6000 feet up, 30 miles from the nearest town and broken by alcoholism and anxiety, Al must decide what to do.
Intercut with Al's present-day story are episodes from his long life as a songwriter and guitarist. Beginning in Reno, we follow his chequered career as a touring musician, struggling to make ends meet and to survive the reality of a like devoid of the glitz and glamour of mainstream success. Vlautin's new novel is a gorgeous homage to the uncelebrated musicians who make our lives more joyful, and, as always, an exploration of loneliness, humanity and resilience.
Published by Faber & Faber
A Sunny Place for Shady People
by Mariana Enriquez
Mariana Enriquez's A Sunny Place for Shady People is her first story collection since the International Booker Prize-shortlisted The Dangers of Smoking in Bed. Featuring achingly human characters whose lives intertwine with ghosts, the occult and the macabre, the stories explore love, womanhood, LGBTQ counterculture, parenthood and Argentina's brutal past.
Published by Granta Books
A Simple Intervention
by Yael Inokai
A ground-breaking surgical intervention promises to free people from psychological disorders. The procedure is painless, the risks are minimal, and patients are calmer and more compliant after healing. The doctor promises them a new and productive life, free from suffering - can it be so simple?Meret is a nurse on the surgical ward.
The hospital is her home, and her uniform is her identity. She supports her patients through their interventions and is proud to be a part of the solution. But when she falls in love with another nurse, she crosses an invisible boundary and her certainty in the system begins to crumble.
With echoes of Kazuo Ishiguro and Margaret Atwood, this is the story of a world of rigid hierarchies and a love with its own rules.
Published by Peirene Press Ltd
Goblinhood: Goblin As A Mode
by Jen Calleja
As formally inventive as readers have come to expect from one of the most daring writers around, and as wild and tricky as its subject matter requires, Goblinhood: Goblin as a Mode presents us with a series of essays and poems that playfully, artfully propound Jen Calleja's theory of ‘goblin hood’—a theory that takes in all aspects of pop culture from film, literature and art as well as the author’s personal and original examinations of grief, lust, family histories and the physical fact of living in the world as it is.Goblinhood is a perpetually and variously curious, visceral addition to Calleja’s remarkable oeuvre.
Published by Rough Trade Books
Reservoir Bitches
by Dahlia de la Cerda
A debut linked story collection of gritty, streetwise, and wickedly funny fiction from Mexico. Life’s a bitch. That’s why you gotta rattle her cage, even if she’s foaming at the mouth.
In the linked stories of Reservoir Bitches, thirteen Mexican women prod the bitch that is Life as they fight, sew, skirt, cheat, cry, and lie their way through their tangled circumstances. From the all-powerful daughter of a cartel boss to the victim of transfemicide, from a houseful of spinster seamstresses to a socialite who supports her politician husband by faking Indigenous roots, these women spit on their own reduction and invent new ways to survive, telling their stories in bold, unapologetic voices. At once social critique and black comedy, Reservoir Bitches is a raucous debut from one of Mexico’s most thrilling new writers.
Published by Scribe Publications
My Favourite
by Sarah Jollien-Fardel
In 1970s Switzerland, high up in the Valais mountains, is a village where everyone knows everything, and no one says anything. Jeanne learns from an early age to dodge her father’s abuse, but her mother and sister resign themselves to his brutality. One day when she is eight he attacks her viciously, angered by her self-assurance.
Convinced that the village doctor will put an end to their nightmare, she is shocked by his silence. From then on, Jeanne’s hatred of her father and her disgust at the doctor’s cowardice drive her on. At boarding school she experiences five years of respite, but is then triggered by an unbearable replica of the violence that started it all.
Moving to Lausanne, unable to come to terms with her past and to engage fully with life, she nevertheless finds solace in the arms of lovers and in the waters of Lake Geneva, while further tragedy fuels her rage. My Favourite is a powerful novel about departure and return, of love, guilt and shame, and the paralysing effects of trauma. Sarah JollienFardel forcefully describes the price to be paid for Jeanne’s hard-won emancipation, as history inexorably repeats itself.
Published by The Indigo Press
