And Other Stories, the not-for-profit press now based in Sheffield, published The Port House by Yacine Halilou on 2026-06-04 in an edition of 3,200 copies. The novel was first published in French as La maison du port by Éditions Verdier in 2023 and was short-listed for the Prix Médicis the same year. The English translation is by Jennifer Higgins.
Halilou is sixty-one. He was born in Marseille to an Algerian father and a French mother and has lived in the city for all but four years of his life. He has published two previous novels in French and a book of essays. The Port House is his first to appear in English.
The book is set in a single building: a five-storey, twelve-apartment block on the Rue de la Loubière, in the third arrondissement of Marseille, a few hundred metres from the Place Notre-Dame-du-Mont. The building, fictional but typical, has its courtyard and its concierge's loge and its broken lift and its 1962 wiring.
Halilou follows the building from 1972, when the first Algerian family moves in, to 2019, when the building is sold by its long-time landlord to a Lyon-based investment company. The novel is built in nine sections, each set in a different year, each told from inside a different apartment.
This is not a new structure. Georges Perec's Life A User's Manual is the obvious antecedent, and Halilou acknowledges the debt in a brief epigraph. The novel is also indebted to the Marseille novels of Jean-Claude Izzo, although Halilou's politics are quieter than Izzo's were.
The first section, 1972, is told from apartment 3B, where the Boumediene family — a docker, a seamstress, and three children — have just arrived from Oran. The chapter is fifty-one pages, and most of those pages are about the slow process of furnishing the apartment. Halilou is patient with the chairs, the curtain rods, the small kitchen table that the father builds from a door he found in the courtyard.
Jennifer Higgins's English is exact. She has translated, in the last decade, two Maryline Desbiolles novels and a Marie NDiaye essay collection, and she brings to Halilou a confident hand with the French Mediterranean register. The translation reads as English without being neutralized as English.
There is a particular question, in a Marseille novel, about how to render the city's speech. Marseille French has its own vocabulary, its own slowed cadence, its own borrowings from Arabic and Italian and Provençal. Higgins has chosen to keep some of this — the word pichounet for a small child, the word cagole for a particular kind of young Marseille woman — and to translate the rest into a plain English that lets the Marseille items stand out.
The afterword, three pages, discusses the choice. Higgins says she rejected an earlier instinct to translate the Marseille items into the equivalent registers of Liverpool or Newcastle English, because the substitution would have moved the book geographically without serving it linguistically. She is right.
The strongest section of the novel is the third, set in 1987 in apartment 5A, the top-floor flat occupied by an elderly pied-noir widow named Mme Bertrand who has lived in the building since 1958. She is seventy-six in 1987 and is losing her sight.
Halilou spends sixty-two pages on Mme Bertrand. The section is the longest in the book and the slowest. The reader follows her, through a single April week, as she navigates the apartment she has known for nearly three decades and the building she can no longer see clearly.
The other tenants of the building appear in this section as voices on the stairs, footsteps on the floor below, smells from the kitchens of the second-floor flats. Halilou has done something difficult here. He has rendered the building as a sensory environment for someone who cannot see it, and the rendering is more vivid than any of the visual descriptions in the other sections.
The book's weakest section is the seventh, set in 2002 in apartment 2C, the flat then occupied by a young French-Algerian rapper named Karim Atia. The section is forty pages and reads like a draft of a different novel.
Halilou is on uncertain ground with Karim. The character is plausible enough as a sketch but never quite becomes a person, and the section's attempts at the rhythms of 2002 Marseille hip-hop are uneasy. Higgins has done her best with the translated lyrics, but the underlying French is not Halilou's strongest writing.
The book recovers in its eighth section, set in 2014 in the concierge's loge. The concierge, an elderly Comorian woman named Adila Said, has held the post since 1998. The section is thirty-eight pages and is, in its quieter way, as fine as the Mme Bertrand chapter.
And Other Stories has produced the book with the care its subscribers expect. The cover, designed by the London illustrator Tom Etherington, is a small ink drawing of a courtyard washing line in three colors. The type, Janson at 10.5 on 14, is set comfortably. The book is sewn.
The price is fourteen pounds ninety-nine. And Other Stories sells primarily through its subscriber model — readers who subscribe for two, four, or six books a year — and through independent shops. The press will not appear on the supermarket front tables, and this is fine.
There are real flaws in the novel beyond the Karim section. The final section, set in 2019, is too brief at twenty-one pages and feels like a coda that needed another twenty. The sale of the building to the Lyon investment company is the book's most consequential event, and Halilou has handled it with the kind of restraint that, in this case, reads as evasion.
The reader wants to know more about what happens to the tenants after the sale. Halilou has chosen not to say. The choice is defensible — the novel is about the building, not about the future of its tenants — but it leaves a hollow at the book's end.
Even so, The Port House is a substantial book. It belongs to the durable tradition of the apartment-building novel and earns its place in that tradition. It will be read, in French, for many years. The English translation will, with luck, find a smaller but durable audience.
Halilou's other two French novels have not yet been translated into English. The 2018 novel Le quai d'Arenc, also set in Marseille, is the more obvious next book. It is shorter and angrier than The Port House, and Higgins, asked after the Marseille launch of the English edition on 2026-06-06, said she would be willing to translate it if a publisher commissioned the work.
And Other Stories should commission the work. The press has built, over its fifteen years, one of the most coherent translation lists in the English language. A Halilou trilogy in Higgins's English would be a small but significant addition to that list.
The Port House is recommended to readers who already know the apartment-building novel and want a new entry in the form. It is also recommended to readers who want a Marseille that is neither the tourist Marseille nor the crime-novel Marseille. It is, instead, the ordinary Marseille of the third arrondissement, where people live for forty years in apartments they do not own, and where the building outlasts everyone who passes through it.