My day started with a colleague, The Nod’s visuals editor, Ria Rawat, asking me if I had read Small Boat. Vincent Delecroix’s novel, translated from the French by Helen Stevenson, takes off from the death of 21 migrants trying to cross into the UK from France in a dinghy. (The novel was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize 2025, where it eventually lost to Banu Mushtaq’s Heart Lamp.) I haven’t read Small Boat (though I now want to), but it sparked a musing on translated fiction in general—from the wry humour of Dorthe Nors’s Mirror, Shoulder, Signal to the layered storytelling of Olga Tokarczuk’s Flights, the leaden, disturbing grief of Lucas Rigneveld’s The Discomfort of Evening, and the oppressive love of Jenny Erpenbeck’s Kairos—and the worlds it lays out for you. The most impressive novel of the past few months has been German-language writer Daniel Kehlmann’s The Director, inspired by the life of Austrian filmmaker GW Pabst, who was forced to make films for the Nazis during World War II—a rip-roaring, sad, funny story that’s now on this year’s International Booker Prize longlist. If you have to read one book this year, make it this one.Â
In other literary news, the Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist comes out later today and is sure to make some notable additions to our TBR pile. This month, at The Nod Book Club, we’re spotlighting Virigina Evans’s buzzy epistolary novel The Correspondent. Join our Instagram channel to read along.Â
