The Mars Room has as its protagonist Romy Hall, a San Francisco single mother and erstwhile stripper who is serving two life sentences in Stanville Correctional Facility for murder. She has killed a man, that much is true, but a man who was going to great lengths to stalk her, having struck up what he saw as a ‘relationship’ in the Mars Room, the strip club Romy performed in. That she has committed a crime is not disputed, but the fragments we see of her trial expose the fact that the criminal justice system leaves no room for nuance. Her primary concern in prison is initially survival, but shifts to the wellbeing of her young son Jackson once she hears that her mother, his guardian, has died.

The Accidental takes place mainly in a sleepy village in Norfolk, where a middle class family from Islington, London are spending their summer.  Eve Smart is the family’s mother, and a novelist who draws on real-life stories for her fiction, and is currently suffering from writer’s block.  Her partner is Michael, also a writer and a university professor in London, who is prone to infidelity with his students.  Eve’s daughters from a previous marriage (to an Adam, no less) are Astrid, a 12 year old girl with a love for photography and a delightful way with words, and Magnus, an older teenager with a scientific mind and a serious (and justified) sense of guilt hanging over him over an incident that happened before the holidays.

Western Lane follows Gopi, an 11-year old British-Indian Jain girl living in suburban London in the 1980s, who has recently lost her mother. Alongside her two older sisters, she is left in the care of her Pa, who is clearly also struggling with grief despite a seeming lack of emotional empathy and uncommunicative nature. Both Gopi and her Pa channel their grief into an obsession with squash, training at the titular Western Lane centre where Gopi meets Ged, a white boy with whom she becomes quietly infatuated, and his mother, with whom Pa finds a connection.

Study for Obedience is something of a difficult one to summarize. It’s a short book but in no senses a simple one. The unnamed female narrator arrives in an unnamed Northern European country (seemingly Scandinavian or Baltic), to tend to the needs of her successful oldest brother. Her own background seems fairly obviously Jewish, a fact that inspires hatred in the local residents, seemingly in part down to their past as collaborators (at least) in major atrocities (most probably the Holocaust, though it isn’t specifically named) against her people. Various troubles in the town, largely involving death of or disruption to local pets and farm animals, are attributed by the locals to her, and she is avoided, feared, and seemingly plotted against by the residents. With her brother frequently away on business, and she unable to speak the language, the whole thing has a fairly dense layer of mystery about it.

If I Survive You is a mostly linked short story collection, based on the immigrant experience of a Jamaican family who moved to Miami following the turbulence in their home country in the 1970s. For much of the book, our focus is the somewhat autobiographical-seeming life of Trelawny, the family’s younger son, though we do also get stories told from the perspective of his father, his older brother Delano, and in the biggest departure of the collection, his cousin Cukie. The book deals with the struggle of survival in the face of everyday racism in the US, exacerbated by crises both personal and national - the latter including the major (and disproportionately racialised) impact of Hurricane Andrew and the 2008 Financial Crisis.

Pearl tells the story of Marianne, a young mother who is reflecting on the loss of her own mother, who disappeared (presumed dead) when she was eight years old. Left with her father Edward and baby brother Joe, she has spent her life struggling to understand her mother’s motives, grieving both for her mother and for the family home which they had to abandon in the wake of her loss.

Prophet Song focuses on Eilish, a microbiologist and mother of four (ranging in age from a baby to a seventeen year old) living in Dublin. In the background is the looming threat posed by a new authoritarian government in Ireland. Her husband Larry is an official in the Teachers’ Union, at the start of the novel still absorbed in his work and organising protests against the new government, believing the protections he has been used to in a democratic society still apply. Relatively rapidly, though, we learn that this is a new and significantly darker world, in which protests are violently suppressed and Larry himself is taken in for questioning by the stasi-esque Garda National Services Bureau (GNSB). Within days, he has disappeared, along with many other men in Eilish’s immediate circle.

The Bee Sting is something of an epic at 600+ pages, focusing on a fairly affluent family in small-town Ireland, in the aftermath of the 2008 Financial Crash. It's a novel of perspectives, with its lengthy first four sections each seen through the eyes of a different family member.

This Other Eden is a fictionalised version of the story of Malaga Island, off the coast near Portland, Maine. The small island was historically home to a mixed interracial community from the Civil War until 1911, when all of its residents were forcibly evicted by the state. Relatively little is conclusively known about the origins of the settlement on the island, with much of its history until recently only having been told by prejudiced accounts which treated the islanders as outcasts and 'degenerates'. Harding creates a version of the island's history, renaming it Apple Island after the dreams of his version of the first settlers, an escaped slave and his Irish wife.

In Ascension is a novel is five parts, a languid yet grandiose journey that takes us from the deepest depths of our oceans to the farthest reaches of the solar system, set around a decade from now. Its protagonist is Dr Leigh Hasenboch, who we first meet in Rotterdam, in a section that focuses on her childhood. Her father, Geert, worked on flood defenses in the Netherlands, a centuries old challenge that is becoming ever more impossible as the climate breaks down, causing a similar deterioration in Geert's mental health, which in Leigh's telling we understand to be a motivator behind his outbursts of severe violence towards his daughters (her younger sister, Helena, is crucial later on.)

The Blue Flower is set in the Germany of the late Eighteenth century, as Romantic sensibilities ferment in the great universities and clash with the traditional ways found in the small towns where much of its action takes place. At the centre of the novel is Friedrich von Hardenberg, a student of philosophy, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Goethe and developing his own ideas and poetry with which he will later find fame as Novalis. The novel’s short chapters provide insights into his unusual and contradictory life (alongside his poetry, he’s also taking on the running of a salt mine…) as well as those of his family members and contemporaries. Most strikingly, it details his captivation by the twelve-year old Sophie von Kuhn, a ‘normal’ girl offering little in terms of the usual expectations of the time (she’s neither financially nor intellectually his equal).

My Name is Lucy Barton introduces the New York-based author of its title. We find her recovering from an infection in hospital, where she is visited by her mother. Through their awkward but often moving interactions, and Lucy’s interior reflections, we learn - slowly, through drips of information - about Lucy’s troubled upbringing in the isolated rural town of Amgash, Illinois.

On Beauty, unlike many of Smith’s other novels, is set predominantly in the US - though still has a healthy focus on Britain (or at least Britain as represented by - once again - North-West London).  It focuses on the intertwined lives of two families - the Belseys and the Kipps. Both have university professors at the helm, in the shape of Howard Belsey, a white English Rembrandt scholar (living with his African-American wife Kiki and three children in a fictional affluent university town near Boston, MA), and his nemesis Monty Kipps, a conservative Trinidadian initially living in London with his wife Carlene and two children. 

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.

Nightcrawling tells the story of 17-year-old Kiara, a black girl living in poverty in Oakland, California.  Her situation is unenviable: her father dead, her mother imprisoned for a fairly horrifying reason, and taking responsibility for both her feckless aspiring-rapper brother and her virtually abandoned young neighbour Trevor. In desperation, she takes to the streets, where she is eventually picked up and abused by a gang of truly repulsive police officers and eventually finds herself at the centre of a court case against the police force.