Held is a very difficult book to summarize in a short paragraph. In some sort of roundabout fashion, it’s a ‘grand historical sweep’ and a family saga, two things I usually very much enjoy. It begins in the trenches of the First World War, before we follow fairly logically into its aftermath, with the return of a soldier to something approaching ‘normal’ life in an early photography studio. In that same section, it takes a leap towards the supernatural, as the faces of his subjects’ loved ones begin appearing in his images. From here, things begin (deliberately) to fall apart, as the ‘novel’ (in as much as it is one) becomes progressively more fragmentary as it travels though the twentieth century and beyond, encountering along the way several generations of descendants of the original characters and the occasional famous figure like Ernest Rutherford or Marie Curie.

Stone Yard Devotional begins with its nameless female narrator attending a retreat at a nunnery close to her rural New South Wales childhood hometown. We learn that after several visits, she has decided to live at the nunnery permanently. Ostensibly a reaction to the grief caused by the early death of her mother, her decision to retreat from society seems to be based more broadly on her ‘giving up’ on the modern world and the passions and causes she followed in her previous life( in which she was clearly passionately committed to charity and a degree of activism) in favour of a simpler, quieter life. We learn that in this process she has ended a long-term relationship.

Creation Lake is told from the perspective of a spy for hire (and former federal agent) known for the purposes of her current assignment as "Sadie Smith". She is in the process of infiltrating an agrarian commune of eco-leftists in France, known as the Moulinards. In order to do so, she has entered into a serious ‘relationship’ with a filmmaker called Lucien, who is close to the Moulinards' day-to-day leader, Pascal.

The Safekeep begins in the early 1960s in the rural Dutch province of Overijssel. We meet the book’s central character, Isabel, who lives alone in her family home, following her mother’s death. She obsessively tends to the house, while knowing she is only a temporary occupant. The house will eventually pass to her elder brother Louis, who like her other brother Hendrick has no interest in living in the house, having left and embraced city life. The three siblings meet for a dinner early in the book, at which Louis introduces his latest girlfriend Eva, to whom Isabel is openly and viciously rude. When Louis is later called away for work, he insists that Eva stay in the family home with Isabel, much to the latter’s dismay.

Orbital is conceptually simple yet unique. It follows a single day aboard an international space station, where six astronauts and cosmonauts go about their work, maintaining their craft, conducting scientific experiments, exercising, and observing and recording activity on Earth as they hurtle around it at incomprehensible speed. In the twenty-four hours covered by this slim novel, its protagonists will observe sixteen sunrises and sunsets on the planet below. In between the details of the day, we get sketches of the lives the six crewmembers have left behind.

James is, in its simplest sense, a retelling of Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from the perspective of the slave Jim. The original is loved and criticised (particularly around its complex handling of race relations) in equal parts, and Everett engages with it with a similar mix of obvious love for the source material and a clear sense of purpose in its interrogation of some of its more problematic aspects.