Top Indie Press Picks You Shouldn't Miss

The prize-winning Irish author of Where They Were Missed whisks readers to war-ravaged Belfast in 1941, where two sisters try to carry on amid the bombing and the rubble. SJP hailed this “intimate celebration of sisterhood and a moving tribute to childhoods cut short by war. Rich in voice and beautifully rooted in place, Lucy Caldwell's characters leap from the page in all their joy and devastation. The result is a novel of stunning ambition."

After a dejected obituary writer drunkenly publishes his own obituary, his life takes an unexpected and uplifting turn. Mistakenly listed as "dead" in the company system and unable to be fired, he begins attending strangers' funerals to discover what makes a life worth living. A touching comedy about finding purpose when you've been given a second chance.

In this "unusually colorful and intelligent" debut novel set in Nazi-occupied Brussels, a tight-knit community in an elegant Beaux Arts building becomes entangled in a dangerous web of secrets when a Jewish family disappears and a Nazi official moves in. "A poignant and rich World War II novel," raves Kirkus Reviews. "A special treat for fans of the genre."

In these five short stories from the We Don't Know What We're Doing author, a boy's first football match is complicated by family and magic; a young man's vacation comes under threat from a dark visitor, and a family of seahorses struggles to understand their place in the world. "Across the collection, the clarity and feeling with which Morris writes about south Wales, and his broader commitment to using short fiction to examine a place and its people, put me in mind of James Joyce's landmark 1914 collection Dubliners," hailed the Financial Times.