A humorous and deeply human short story collection that celebrates outsiders, dreamers, and the queer.

The award-winning Slovak writer Barbora Hrínová’s short stories paint an intimate portrait of people searching for happiness in a world that feels increasingly unstable and uncertain. Across the eight stories in this volume, we meet a rich cast of ordinary yet unconventional people trying to find their place in a society that often prefers conformity over authenticity. Taking us to such settings as a bustling cafe, a small village shack, a rental flat, or a psychiatric ward, Hrínová captures the texture of everyday life with piercing accuracy and a fresh, original voice.

Unicorns is a remarkable debut that resonates across generations. With compassion, wit, and an eye for detail, it shows us that weirdness isn’t rare—it’s a universal human experience.

The story Chemistry follows the (mis)adventures of Bonifác, known as Boni, as he looks for a partner. He is frequently rejected – but the women who are interested in him all have something to hide.

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Isabel Stainsby is a translator (literary/commercial) from Czech, Slovak, German and occasionally French into English. She studied languages and linguistics at Cambridge and Bristol, with a year in the Czech city of Olomouc, then tried out various careers before becoming a freelance translator. She has translated twelve books so far, plus a number of chapters, short stories and articles. Languages are her passion; she also speaks reasonable Russian, a bit of Scottish Gaelic, and is currently learning Hungarian. Translation is her vocation. She lives in Glasgow, Scotland, with her husband.

Barbora Hrínová studied at the Film and TV Faculty of the Academy of Performing Arts in Bratislava, where she now teaches in the Screenwriting Department. She has conducted postdoctoral research on contemporary film at Ilia State University in Tbilisi and spent time at a university in California. A three-time finalist for the Poviedka short-story award, Hrínová also produces radio documentaries for Slovak and Czech national broadcasting. Unicorns is her debut short-story collection, marking a powerful entrance for a fresh and original voice in European literature. Unicorns won the Anasoft Litera, Slovakia's most prestigious literary prize, in 2021, and her novel Plachý dom (The Shy House), published to great acclaim in 2025, has been nominated for the Anasoft Litera 2026.

Three generations of women: Téta, the grandmother, Fadwa, the mother, and Emné, the daughter who captures the tenderness of her fore-bearers. The poems in this collection recall and restore a family lineage broken by war, death and exile.

BUY THE BOOK: https://www.the87press.co.uk/shop/p/the-dance-of-the-fig-tree-emne-nasereddine

Stuart Bell is a writer, editor, and translator of French literature. His publications include the edited volumes ‘French Cinema: Stardom, Gender and Popular Film’ (2026), ‘On Feminist Films’ (2024) and ‘Moving Impressions: Essays on Art and Experience’ (2021), as well as translations of several contemporary novels and poetry collections. He has twice been Translator in Residence at Corpus Christi College, Cambridge and in 2022 was shortlisted for the Oxford Weidenfeld Translation Prize for his rendition of Édith Azam’s ‘Bird me’.

Emné Nasereddine was born in France in 1990 and grew up in Lebanon where she studied French literature at the Saint Joseph University in Beirut. Her poetry explores her experiences of immigration, loss and mourning, the lives of Lebanese women, and the customs and traditions of southern Lebanon. The Dance of the Fig Tree is her first book and won the 2021 Émile Nelligan Prize. She lives in Montreal.

Published on 4 June 2026 by Moth Books, this is the second of Iris Wolff’s books to appear in English, and was shortlisted for the 2024 German Book Prize. It tells of the deep, almost lifelong friendship between Lev and Kato, who are in their late thirties when we first meet them. Their story is told in reverse, as Wolff takes us back through their lives to their childhood in a village in the north of Romania, gradually revealing what has made them the people they are today.

BUY THE BOOK: https://www.waterstones.com/book/clearing/iris-wolff/ruth-martin/9781917593045

‘A wonderful novel’ Die Zeit Book of the Month

‘A magnificently contemporary book’ Frankfurter Allgemeine Zeitung

‘Iris Wolff proves to be a superlative storyteller.’ The Times Literary Supplement

Ruth Martin has been translating fiction and nonfiction books since 2010, by authors ranging from Joseph Roth to Angela Merkel. Together with Charlotte Collins and Nino Haratischwili, she won the 2020 Warwick Prize for Women in Translation, for Nino’s epic novel The Eighth Life. Her translation of Shida Bazyar’s The Nights are Quiet in Tehran was shortlisted for the 2026 International Booker Prize.

Iris Wolff, born behind the iron curtain in the medieval town of Sibiu, Transylvania in 1977, is a writer whose work carries the reader deep into her former homeland. The fate of those who stay and those who choose to migrate is the constant and powerful theme weaving through her novels. She has won numerous awards for her writing, including the 2025 Uwe-Johnson Prize for outstanding literary works, last awarded to Jenny Erpenbeck in 2022 for her novel, Kairos.