Colm Toibin’s novella, A Long Winter, was first published in 2005 by a small press, then included in a collection, and has now been re-published in hardcover by Picador. Such maneuvers usually make me skeptical. A large publisher, waiting for new work from their famous author, fills the gap by putting out overpriced hardcovers of early or minor work. It is hardly a new ploy, but I need not have worried in this instance. Diehard fans of Toibin’s work, like me, will enjoy A Long Winter, though it never quite reaches the heights of his later novels.

The story is set in a small, isolated village high in the Spanish Pyrenees. This is a place of smallholdings and land owned and worked for generations by poor farmers. A place where everyone knows everyone else’s business and where both friendships and enmities run deep. Miquel lives here with his mother and father. His much loved brother, Jordi, has just left for military service. On a cold, snowy day, Miquel’s mother, after a bitter confrontation with her husband and son, leaves the small farmhouse and never returns.

A Long Winter is a poignant story about loss, loneliness, and love. What is best? To have known love and to endure the pain of losing someone, or to be alone and never experience such loss? Toibin is a brilliantly subtle observer of human behavior and conveys so much feeling with so few words. If he occasionally falls into the trap, as he does here, of trying to do a little too much, it hardly matters because the results are still so powerful and affecting.

Flesh, which won the Booker Prize in 2025, tells the story of Istvan. Born in a small town in Hungary, Istvan moves, after a spell in a juvenile prison and some time serving in the Hungarian army, to London where he takes a dead end job as a security guard at a strip club. A moment of selflessness and courage changes the course of his life, taking him into the world of a wealthy businessman. That’s probably enough about the plot because I don’t want to spoil anyone’s enjoyment of an unusual and powerful novel.

The story is a simple enough one. What distinguishes Flesh is its remarkably spare and pared back prose. There is scarcely a wasted word and there is a cool precision to the writing that complements perfectly Istvan’s emotional detachment and the difficulty he has connecting with people and with difficult experiences. Istvan encounters tragedy, success, wealth, and intimacy, yet finds himself towards the end of his life close to the place it all started and without the transformations that he might have expected for all his experience. Flesh is a brilliant accomplishment and well deserves all the accolades it has received.

Most books are published in a relatively small number of standard sizes. While there are good reasons for that, titles published in unusual formats or with distinctive designs have a good chance of standing out among the thousands of similar looking books stocked by the average bookstore. Imaginative publishers know that. Browsing one evening recently in a fairly undistinguished chain bookshop in a Massachusetts mall, my eye was caught by a small, almost square paperback called Eastbound by Maylis de Kerangal. No doubt it was the unusual format and pared down, minimalist design that made me pick it off the shelf.

Eastbound features Aliocha, a young Russian conscript on his way to report for compulsory military service in Siberia. Traveling on the Trans-Siberian Express, Aliocha is so frightened of what lies at the end of the long journey that he is determined to abscond. On the train he meets Helene, a French tourist traveling in first class, and sees an opportunity to escape.

It may seem an implausible tale, but the author (Maylis de Kerangal) creates such an intense and dreamlike atmosphere on board the cramped and claustrophobic train moving relentlessly towards the frozen wastelands of Siberia that it hardly seems to matter. This is a novella about shared humanity, people’s destinies and fates and how they intertwine in the least likely of circumstances. Fevered and almost surreal, Eastbound may be short but it sticks in the memory.