OPT INDIE BOOKS OF THE YEAR
Featuring a carefully curated selection of 25 of our favourite small press, indie, and self-published reads from the year, chosen from our weekly Featured Five lists and the most popular event highlights from over the past 12 months.
With almost half of the books coming directly from our in-person events and book clubs in the Newcastle area, this year’s list reflects the reading community we serve. As you’d expect, there’s a strong emphasis on reading across borders, with over a quarter of the titles being works in translation. Alongside this, we’re also proud to champion the literary talent on our doorstep, with 20% of the list coming from writers rooted here in the North.
Together, we hope these books offer a dynamic, thoughtful, and truly representative snapshot of our reading year.
Take a browse of our year of books below!
The Palace on the Higher Hill
by Karim Kattan
Faysal receives a mysterious letter about the death of aunt he can't remember. Leaving his lover and his life in Europe behind, he returns to the village of his birth in Palestine and to his family's extraordinary, deserted house, the palace on the higher hill. With a backdrop of violence and the permanent threat from settlers, Faysal wanders the once-lavish rooms as characters from the past return to shed light on his family story and on the story of his people.
In beautiful, angry prose, Karim Kattan introduces us to an intimate Palestine of the imagination where dreams and nightmares are in constant conflict. With hints of One Hundred Years of Solitude and Brideshead Revisited, he gives a nuanced deeply moving vision of the tragedy of war and a picture of his homeland that feels entirely new to English-speaking readers. The book won the 2021 Prix des Cinq Continents de la Francophonie.
Published by Foundry Editions
Heartlamp: Selected Stories
by Banu Mushtaq
In the twelve stories of Heart Lamp, Banu Mushtaq exquisitely captures the everyday lives of women and girls in Muslim communities in southern India. Praised for their dry and gentle humour, these portraits of family and community tensions have garnered both censure from conservative quarters as well India’s most prestigious literary awards. ‘A significant presence in Kannada literature, Banu Mushtaq reveals the varied realities of contemporary women with rare talent and art.
Deepa Bhasthi’s rich translation captures the original’s nuances of voice, context and experience, bringing this important work into English for new readers in India and internationally.’ PEN Presents Selection Panel
Published by And Other Stories
Lexicon of Affinities
by Ida Vitale
A prowl through words reveals the unstable character of the cosmos. With entries as varied as ‘elbow’, ‘Ophelia’, ‘progress’, the painter Giorgio Morandi, ‘chess’, ‘Eulalia’ (a friend of the author’s aunt), and ‘unicorn’, Ida Vitale constructs a dictionary of her long and passionately engaged artistic life. Taking the reader by the arm, she invites us to become her confidant, sharing her remarkable 20th century as a member of a storied generation of Latin American writers, of whom she is the last remaining alive.
It’s a compendium of friendship, travel, reading, and the endless opportunities she found for 'the joyful possibility of creation.' Like every dictionary, Lexicon of Affinities seeks to impose order on chaos, even if in its exuberant, whimsical profusion it lays bare the unstable character of the cosmos.
Published by Charco Press
Between the Salt and the Ash
A Journey into the Soul of Northumbria by Jake Morris-Campbell
A writer's quest to understand the deep past and uncertain future of his homeland. After inheriting his great-grandfather’s Davy lamp, Jake Morris-Campbell sets out on a pilgrimage across his homeland. Travelling from the Holy Island of Lindisfarne to Durham Cathedral, he asks what new ways might be made through the old north.
This region, a hub of early Christian Britain and later strongly defined by industry and class, now faces an uncertain future. But it remains a unique and starkly beautiful part of the country, with a deep history that is intimately entwined with the idea of Englishness. Jake’s journey along the ‘Camino of the North’ sees him explore the shifting nature of individual and regional identity across thirteen-hundred years of social change.
At the same time, it challenges him to reconsider his own calling as a writer and how it relates to the lives of the people he meets along the way. Between the salt and the ash asks what stories the North East can tell about itself in the wake of Christianity and coal. Rejecting the damaging trope of ‘left behind’ communities, Jake uncovers neglected seams of culture and history, while offering a heartfelt celebration of the place he calls hyem.
Published by Manchester University Press
Human, Animal
by Seth Insua
Dairy farmer George Calvert is fighting to keep the family business afloat. Worried about the future but resistant to change, he refuses to face the reality of his failing farm, his elderly mother's declining health and his troubled relationship with his youngest son, Tom. Newly returned from university, Tom isolates himself in his childhood bedroom, guarding the truth of his burgeoning identity.
When animal rights activists break into the cowshed one morning and Tom appears to side with the protesters, father and son lock horns. As the Calverts begin to unravel, a decades-old secret surfaces - one that might rip them apart completely, or finally unite them. A deeply moving debut about one family's struggle to find connection in a rapidly changing world, Human, Animal is an ode to the wild, a journey of self-discovery and a hopeful path to common ground.
Published by Verve Books
Wild Boar
by Hannah Lutz
To witness. To contain. To hunt.
People in Småland are being provoked into action by a destructive species. It moves in packs at night. Gardens are being destroyed, farmland churned up.
Yet its illusiveness draws in both visitors and inhabitants. The forests of this stony province are home to a growing population of wild boar once on the verge of extinction. Told by three people newly arrived in an isolated community, Wild Boar is a compelling and poetic debut from Finnish/Swedish author Hannah Lutz about animals and people, their places in a changing ecosystem, and their capacities to grow and to destroy.
Published by The Emma Press
(Don't) Call Mum
by Matt Wesolowski
Leo is just trying to catch his train back home to the village of Malacstone in North East England. But there’s disorder at the station, and when a loud young man heading for London boards the train accidentally, a usually easy journey descends into darkness and chaos. The train soon breaks down in the middle of nowhere, and as night falls, something...or someone steps out of the distance. Is it a man or something far more sinister?
When one of the passengers goes missing, Leo fears that a folkloric tale whispered to him in childhood might be the culprit.
(Don’t) Call Mum blends Matt Wesolowski’s trademark voice of mystery, folklore and humour in this heart-racing tale.
Published by Wild Hunt Books
Fair : The Life-Art of Translation (Indie Edition)
by Jen Calleja
Fair: The Life-Art of Translation, is a satirical, refreshing and brilliantly playful book about learning the art of translation, being a bookworker in the publishing industry, growing up, family, and class. Loosely set in an imagined book fair/art fair/fun fair, in which every stall or ride imitates a real-world scenario or dilemma which must be observed and negotiated, the book moves between personal memories and larger questions about the role of the literary translator in publishing, about fairness and hard work, about the ways we define success, and what it means – and whether it is possible – to make a living as an artist. Fair is also interested in questions of upbringing, background, support, how different people function in the workplace, and the ways in which people are excluded or made invisible in different cultural and creative industries.
It connects literary translation to its siblings in other creative arts to show how creative and subjective a practice it is while upholding the ethics and politics at play when we translate someone else’s work. Blurring the lines between memoir, autofiction, satire and polemic, Fair is a singularly inventive and illuminating book by one of the UK’s most original and admired writers and translators.
Published by Prototype Publishing
Supporting Act
by Agnes Lidbeck
The social contract is non-negotiable. The woman must be a mother. The woman must be desirable.
The woman must be a caregiver. When Anna gives birth, she surrenders completely to motherhood, reshaping her body, identity and purpose, shielding herself from the burden of her own desires. But as her marriage crumbles and her children grow independent, she needs a new role.
An affair with an ageing writer, Ivan, offers her a new narrative, a way to rewrite herself. But no role lasts forever, and sooner or later Anna must confront the woman beneath the performance.
Published by Peirene Press Ltd
The Coin
by Yasmin Zaher
Shortlisted for the 2025 Dylan Thomas Prize
A bold and unabashed novel about a young Palestinian woman's unraveling as she teaches at a New York City middle school, gets caught up in a scheme reselling Birkin bags, and strives to gain control over her body and mind. The Coin's narrator is a wealthy Palestinian woman with impeccable style and meticulous hygiene. And yet the ideal self, the ideal life, remains just out of reach: her inheritance is inaccessible, her homeland exists only in her memory and her attempt to thrive in America seems doomed from the start.
In New York, she strives to put down roots. She teaches at a school for underprivileged boys, where her eccentric methods cross boundaries. She befriends a homeless swindler, and the two participate in a pyramid scheme reselling Birkin bags.
But America is stifling her - her wilfulness, her sexuality, her principles. In an attempt to regain control, she becomes preoccupied with purity, cleanliness and self-image, all while drawing her students into her obsessions. In an unforgettable denouement, her childhood memories converge with her material and existential statelessness and the narrator unravels spectacularly.
In enthralling, sensory prose, The Coin explores nature and civilisation, beauty and justice, class and belonging - all while resisting easy moralising. Provocative, wry and inviting, The Coin marks the arrival of a major new literary voice.
Published by Footnote Press
Muckle Flugga
by Michael Pedersen
Life on a remote island is turned upside down by a stranger's arrival, testing bonds of family and tradition and leaving a young dreamer's future hanging in the balance. It's no ordinary existence on the rugged isle of Muckle Flugga. The elements run riot and the very rocks that shape the place begin to shift under their influence.
The only human inhabitants are the lighthouse keeper, known as The Father, and his otherworldly son, Ouse. Them, and the occasional lodger to keep the wolf from the door. When one of those lodgers - Firth, a chaotic writer - arrives from Edinburgh, the limits of the world the keeper and his son cling to begin to crumble.
A tug of war ensues between Firth and the lighthouse keeper for Ouse's affections - and his future. As old and new ways collide, and life-changing decisions loom, what will the tides leave standing in their wake?
Published by Faber Faber
To Rest Our Minds and Bodies
by Harriet Armstrong
In her final year of a degree in psychology, and struggling to relate to the world around her and find her place within it, a young woman drifts from lectures on gifts, vision, the history of global warming, and study groups discussing babies manipulating objects. Yet nothing seems to bring her closer to the great insight she's been promised - except, perhaps, for her budding interest in a fellow student named Luke, a postgraduate in computer sciences, with whom a series of seemingly mundane encounters provides her with a hint of what she might be looking for - a hidden meaning to all that surrounds her. But a chasm between them that grows and shrinks unexpectedly calls into question whether he might be as incomprehensible as the world around her.
She yearns, and continues to endeavour to shape her experiences and environment - a Louise Bourgeois exhibition, the underwhelming men she meets on Tinder, a Mitski song, the dreams she has of Luke's ex-girlfriend - she narrates all as she grapples with questions of embodiment and subjectivity. Set in an unnamed campus in England in the early 2020s, To Rest Our Minds and Bodies queries the nature of one's experience, mapping the disintegration of a young woman's sense of self and her struggle to keep a grip on reality. From a voice as unique as it is relatable, and in prose that is keenly observant, delightfully wry, and utterly despairing, the anonymous narrator of this unconventional coming-of-age novel is as brave as she is unforgettable.
Published by Les Fugitives
Slanting Towards the Sea
by Lidija Hilje
While we were together, Vlaho and I joked that we had more anniversaries than Croatia had islands.
Ivona and Vlaho meet as students at the turn of the millennium in Zagreb.
Everything smells of freedom and possibility.
Red Hot Chili Peppers are pumping through the speakers of a bar in the city centre and cheap beer is overflowing; newly democratic Croatia is alive with hope and promise.
They fall in love instantly.
A decade later, Ivona has returned to her childhood home in Zadar to look after her ailing father.
She and Vlaho are divorced, yet she finds herself welcomed into his family life by him and his wife.
But when a new man enters Ivona’s life, the trio’s carefully curated dynamic is disturbed, forcing a reckoning for all involved.
Slanting Towards the Sea explores what it means to come of age in a country younger than oneself, as it sets a sensual, decades-long love story against the wild beauty of an emerging Croatia.
From the cobbled alleyways of Cavtat, a small town near Dubrovnik, to the rugged, glimmering coastline of Zadar, and the bustling streets of Zagreb in the early 2000s, this is a story of longing, buried resentment and claiming a life of your own.
Published by Daunt Books
Beast
by Lulu Allison
Beast explores how dreams and desires can both liberate or confine the dreamer. Eve, a young self-taught musician sits on a bench overlooking the grassy crossroads of a model village. She is dreaming of the power of music.
Her dreams reach into the cosmos, summoning Demon and his rabbit familiar. Eve longs to harness the divine in service of her music. But will she instead make a deal with Demon for worldly success? Demon dreads the terrible price he will pay for failure and thus begins a long battle for Eve’s soul.
Published by Bluemoose Books
Helm
by Sarah Hall
Helm is a ferocious, mischievous wind - a subject of folklore and wonder - who has blasted the sublime landscape of the Eden Valley since the very dawn of time.
This is Helm's life story, formed from the chronicles of those the wind enchanted: the Neolithic tribe who tried to placate it, the Dark Age wizard priest who wanted to banish it, the Victorian steam engineer who attempted to capture it - and the farmer's daughter who fell in love. But now Dr Selima Sutar, surrounded by measuring instruments, alone in her observation hut, fears the end is nigh. Vital and audacious, Helm is the elemental tale of a unique life force - and of a relationship: between nature and people, neither of whom can weather life without the other.
Published by Faber & Faber
Culpability
by Bruce Holsinger
When the Cassidy-Shaws’ driverless minivan fatally collides with an oncoming car, seventeen-year-old Charlie is in the driver’s seat. His father, Noah, is beside him, and in the back with his younger siblings is his mother, Lorelei—a renowned AI researcher—who is lost in her work. During a weeklong retreat on the Chesapeake Bay, the Cassidy-Shaws wrestle with the moral fallout of the crash as a routine police enquiry starts to unravel.
As Lorelei’s increasingly odd behaviour stirs her husband’s suspicions that there may be a darker truth behind the incident, the arrival of tech billionaire Daniel Monet (who has a mysterious history with Lorelei) cements them. When Charlie falls for Monet’s teenage daughter, tensions among the Cassidy-Shaws reach breaking point. A psychosocial thriller and a propulsive family drama, Culpability explores a world newly shaped by non-human forces such as chatbots and autonomous cars, and forces us to examine our own relationship to artificial intelligence, and the nuanced ways in which we are all, in fact, culpable.
Published by Europa Editions
Girls To The Front
by Lucy Nichol
She’s with the band.
She wants them dead.
A dead body. A woman with blood on her hands. Will footage on an old videotape and some dark magic uncover the truth?
When Roma finds an old VHS tape in a house clearance box, she’s drawn into a deadly crime that took place over 30 years ago.
Roma’s discoveries lead her towards a rock band with a bad reputation - and a meeting with a mysterious woman named Kat. But are the crimes on the tape really confined to the past?
A revenge thriller teeming with feminist fury and 90s nostalgia.
"Propulsive, fierce and hugely satisfying, Girls to the Front is a feminist tour de force!" Lisa Timoney, author of The Daughter She Gave Away
“A dark, feminist thriller with a punk protagonist exacting her revenge like a real life Martha Splatterhead.” Adem Tepedelen, Co-author of Mud Ride: A Messy Trip Through the Grunge Explosion
"Girls to the Front shines a powerful light on neglected aspects of an era so formative for those in my generation. It is Lucy Nichol's most powerful work so far." Guy Mankowski, author of bestselling substack biography 'I Know How to Live: The Life of Kristen Pfaff'
"A dark, but disturbingly accurate, look into misogyny in the music industry, the power of female rage, and why safe spaces for everyone at live music shows are crucial." Cheri Amour, music journalist and author of Come Away With ESG
The Water That May Come
by Amy Lilwall
As rising seas threaten to engulf Britain, four lives are on the brink: Pinko, a privileged heir clinging to decadence; Jane, a working-class veterinary nurse racing to reunite her family; her pregnant teenage daughter Ashleigh, grappling with impending motherhood; and humble young artist Gavin. With sanctuary beckoning across the Channel, each faces impossible choices. Who will they save? What will they sacrifice?A lyrical, thought-provoking novel which blurs borders and challenges notions of identity and belonging.
In a future where we all may become refugees, it asks: how far would you go to stay afloat?
Published by Fly On The Wall Press
Greyhound
by Joanna Pocock
In 2006, in the wake of several miscarriages, Joanna Pocock travelled by Greyhound bus across the US from Detroit to Los Angeles. Seventeen years later, now in her 50s, she undertakes the same journey, revisiting the same cities, edgelands, highways and motels in the footsteps of the few women writers – Simone de Beauvoir, Ethel Mannin and Irma Kurtz – who chronicled their own road trips across the US. In Greyhound, Pocock explores the overlap of place and memory, the individual with the communal, and the privatization of public space as she navigates two very different landscapes – an earlier, less atomized America, and a current one mired in inequality, as it teeters on the brink of environmental catastrophe.
Her focus is on the built-upon environment: the rivers of tarmac, the illuminated gas stations, the sprawling suburbs and the sites of extraction created specifically to fuel contemporary life. Combining memoir, reportage, environmental writing and literary criticism, Greyhound is a moving and immersive book that captures an America in the throes of late capitalism with all its beauty, horror and complexity.
Published by Fitcarraldo Editions
Tamarin
by Priya Hein
Tamarin Bay, Mauritius, is a travel agent’s paradise: a tropical ocean, fishermen unloading their daily catch, children building sandcastles, surfers riding giant waves. But just along the shoreline is the beach of La Preneuse, the taker of souls. The island is haunted with tragedy and the remnants of colonial rule.
But it is also home, where Anita Ram longs to be following the collapse of her marriage. After enduring a shocking betrayal and the sexism and racism of a cold Britain in the early twenty-first century, she finds comfort in simple things; her mother’s cooking, her childhood bedroom, and a handsome architect. Will these be enough for Anita to find happiness again, or will the ghosts of her past consume her?
Published by The Indigo Press
Tender
by Lauren Du Plessis
Nell has curated a perfect museum of the self: a successful career in archaeobotany, a pastel Instagram filled with flowers, and an uncompromising manicure routine. She’s convinced that her veneer of perfection will mask the parts of her she’d rather not think about. When two ‘bog bodies’ are discovered in elaborate floral graves in a Somerset fen, Nell seizes the opportunity to excavate their secrets.
But the deeper she digs into the fertile, waterlogged earth, the more she uncovers memories of her unsettled childhood and strained relationship with her sister… and the more her body manifests her own wildness in ways she can’t ignore. Under the pressure of a blazing summer, Nell whirlwinds into toxic romance, intense friendships, and the brutal process of reconciling her past and her future before the weight of it all buries her, too. Blending folkloric horror with explorations of womanhood against a backdrop of eco-anxiety, Tender burrows into the quiet violence of overcoming and accepting our darkest sides.
Influx Press
Baby Driver
by Jan Kerouac
Introduction by Amanda Fortini
Outsider Classics is Dead Ink's resurrection ground for the strange, the silenced, and the outcast. This series exhumes lost literary voices that were ahead of their time to restore them to the cult status they always deserved. From forgotten masterpieces to once-censored provocations, each title is a reaction against the canon curated for readers who want to stray into the margins and away from the mainstream.
"Was it January or February? The coconut fronds waving, shining like green hair in the sun, gave no clue." Fifteen-year-old Jan is pregnant, gamely living off rice and whatever fish her boyfriend John can catch in Yelapa, Mexico. She and John, who introduced her to Beckett, Kafka, Joyce, and Dostoevsky, are writing a novel together. Before she can leave for Guadalajara where she plans to deliver her baby, she goes into labor three months early, and the baby is stillborn.
She turns sixteen soon after and decides to head north. Jan Kerouac, the only child of Jack Kerouac and Joan Haverty Kerouac, published her autobiographical novel Baby Driver in 1981. Unacknowledged by her father, she is haunted by the absence of his love.
With a graceful, sometimes disturbing detachment and intense lyricism, she explores the freewheeling soul of a woman on her own road. From an adolescence on the Lower East Side of Manhattan dropping LSD and doing time in detention homes, to the peace movement in Haight-Ashbury and Washington state, to traveling by bus through Central America with a madman for a lover, Jan lives by her wits and whims, rhapsodic and irrepressible.
Published by Dead Ink Books
Wolves of Staro Selo
by Zdravka Evtimova
Translated by Yana Ellis
In the deprived Bulgarian neighborhood of Staro Selo, crime rules people’s lives. Unemployment, violence, and corruption are common concerns. Dimitar becomes wealthy by running Staro Selo in terror.
But old Elena, a witch-like character with a gift for healing will not shy away from the injustices her neighbors are forced to endure. A decision that will have consequences for her family.
Published by Heloise Press
Small Boat
by Vincent Delecroix
Translated by Helen Stevenson
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize and Dua Lipa's monthly read for Service95 Book Club
In November 2021, an inflatable dinghy carrying migrants from France to the United Kingdom capsized in the Channel causing the death of 27 people on board. Despite receiving numerous calls for help, the French authorities wrongly told the migrants they were in British waters and had to call the British authorities for help. By the time rescue vessels arrived on the scene, all but two of the migrants had died.
The narrator of Delecroix’s fictional account of the events is the woman who took the calls. Accused of failing in her duty, she refuses to be held more responsible than others for this disaster. Why should she be more responsible than the sea, than the war, than the crises behind these tragedies?A shocking, moral tale of our times, Small Boat reminds us of the power of fiction to illuminate our darkest crimes.
Published by HopeRoad
The Punk Rock Birdwatching Club
by Richard Foster
Where have all the ravers gone? Following his debut, Flower Factory, Richard Foster presents a new batch of psychedelicized, autofictive fairy tales from the Netherlands. The Punk Rock Birdwatching Club introduces a diverse cast of voices - from addicts to grandmothers - who narrate eight stories dealing with the major social changes that country underwent during the mid-noughties. We learn of the upheavals brought on by the Euro and the influx of Polish workers alongside the slow disappearance of the British and Irish worker-raver tribes post-Schengen, all set against a backdrop of rising costs, political murders and foreign wars.
We also learn of the shock of new party snacks, like asparagus sticks wrapped in ham. Like Flower Factory, The Punk Rock Birdwatching Club is set in the southern part of the Dutch Bollenstreek: an agro-industrial district that is always changing, but somehow manages to stay exactly the same.
Published by Ortac Press
