Fundamentally is the story of Nadia, an academic of Middle Eastern origin based in the UK, who has recently been poached from her cushy job in academia to go to Iraq to lead a UN taskforce focused on deradicalising women associated with ISIS. While her new role has some honourable intent behind it, she’s also escaping dissatisfaction with her life back home, where she has been disowned by her mother for straying too far from Islam and (in related news) dumped by her English girlfriend Rosy.

All Fours focuses on a 45-year-old woman who discovers she is going through the perimenopause. The unnamed protagonist in many ways resembles July herself, having a portfolio career of artistic ‘projects’ (not a ‘household name’ but clearly admired by many) and in a comfortable marriage, from which she has a nonbinary child. At the novel’s start she is in something of a creative lull and decides that to mix things up a bit (and against her normal character) she’s going to drive to a meeting across the country in New York, rather than flying. The journey doesn’t go entirely to plan.

Good Girl centres on Nila, a 19-year-old student of Afghan refugees living in Berlin in what seems to be around the late 2000s/early 2010s. She has lost her mother and is keen to distance herself from her father, and throws herself into the Berlin clubbing scene, spending long nights and days partying, notably at ‘the Bunker’ (transparently Berghain) where she meets the much older American writer Marlowe, with whom she begins a tempestuous sort-of-relationship based around a mutual affection for art and the consumption of illicit substances.

The Ministry of Time is a science fiction romance (with distinct thriller tropes on top of that), focusing on an unnamed civil servant working for the titular government agency in a near-future version of London. She is serving as a ‘bridge’ to one of an initial batch of time travellers, who have been ‘rescued’ from various significant points in history at the moment of their historical deaths. Her ‘expat’ (the name the government gives to the travelers, politically chosen in favour of ‘refugees’) is Graham Gore, a ship commander on board Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition to the Arctic in the 1840s.

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.