Oh William! returns to life of author Lucy Barton, heroine of Strout’s 2016 novel.  We find her a little later in life, having recently been widowed following the death of her second husband David.  Much of this novel focuses on her relationship with her first husband William, who also remarried but is left alone again part-way through the book.  Lucy herself is now a successful novelist, comfortable in New York and far away from her troubled childhood in Amgash, Illinois. 

The Trees is a vicious, riotous satire that deals with the subject of lynching in the US through the twentieth century. In Money, Mississippi, a white man is found brutally murdered - garrotted by barbed wire and castrated - next to another body, that of a mutilated Black man who looks curiously like Emmet Till, who was the real-world victim of a lynching in Mississippi in 1955, aged just 14. Several more deaths occur, with the same body appearing next to them. Soon, similar incidents are occurring across the whole of the US. The set up is one of a murder mystery, albeit one that initially seems to have potentially supernatural connotations.

Treacle Walker is a short and highly distinctive novel. In it, a young boy call Joseph Coppock, in recovery from illness and suffering from a lazy eye, has an encounter with the titular rag-and-bone man, with whom he makes a trade of his dirty pyjamas and an old lamb bone, receiving in return an empty jar of medicine and a donkey stone. In its few pages, Joseph encounters a naked ‘bog man’ named Thin Amren, sees characters from his Knockout comic leap off the page and join him in a reality-bending adventure involving mirrors and marbles, communes with cuckoos and learns via a visit to an optician that he sees different realities through his good and bad eyes.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is structurally a murder mystery, albeit one with significant twist.  In 1989, war photographer Maali Almeida finds himself in a highly bureaucratic version of the afterlife, in a kind of hinterland between life and passage to “The Light” in which he must solve the mystery of his own death in ‘seven moons’ (otherwise known as a week). It’s set against the backdrop of a particularly turbulent period is Sri Lanka’s troubled recent history, in which various factions including the Tamil Tigers, the marxist JVP, and the government’s own death squads are unleashing relatively indiscrimate violence on each other at a shocking rate.  

Glory is a satirical allegory of the circumstances surrounding the end of Robert Mugabe’s decades of rule in Zimbabwe in 2017, and his replacement by his former Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa. It uses a cast of animals in place of humans, enabling it to blend direct retelling of history with fantastical satire that becomes a broader commentary on dictatorships, tyrannical rulers, and the state of the modern world in general

Small Things Like These is simply a beautiful read. Its slim page-count contains a surprising amount of depth, both in terms of plot and emotional punch. The present-day narrative is set in mid-1980s Ireland, where coal and timber merchant Bill Furlong is preparing for Christmas with his wife and four daughters, as well as going about his work as usual, at a busy time of year. This work takes him to the local nunnery, which is a Magdalene Laundry site. His reaction to what he finds there, coupled with his reflections on his own upbringing as the child of a poor single mother, form the core of the novel and the impetus for its unifying theme.