The Book of Form of Emptiness centres on Benny Oh, a young Canadian adolescent who has recently lost his father, the Korean-Japanese jazz musician Kenji, and now lives with his mother Annabelle. It is told by turns from the persepectives of a book (“the book”) and Benny himself, who debates with the seemingly autonomous book as it develops. Following the loss of his father (who was killed by a truck carrying live chickens as he lay passed out following a night smoking marijuana with his jazz band) Benny begins to hear voices in everyday objects. While initially harmless enough, following an incident with a pair of scissors who want him to stab his teacher, Benny is sent to a youth mental health facility. Meanwhile, Annabelle is struggling with the decline of her profession as a media monitoring researcher, and demonstrating (to Benny’s dismay) increasing tendencies towards hoarding.

Piranesi is a fantasy novel set largely in an imaginary ‘House’, composed of seemingly infinite halls filled with unique statues. Its basement level contains an ocean, teeming with sealife, and its upper level clouds, giving it its own weather system as well as an array of birds. Other than this, its only inhabitants seem to be the titular character ‘Piranesi’ (though he knows this not to be his real name) and a mysterious ‘Other’ who Piranesi meets a few times a week. Piranesi believes himself to have always lived in the House, has no awareness of a world outside of its existence, and believes the only humans ever to have existed to have been himself, The Other, and fifteen sets of skeletal remains he has cataloged in his extensive travels through the halls.

Hamnet is a creative imagining of the story of the death of Shakespeare’s only son. Despite its title, it focuses predominantly on the bard’s wife, here called Agnes (pronounced Ann-yis, and as named in her father’s will) though typically better known as Anne Hathaway. It’s a non-linear narrative with its substantial first section moving back and forth in time between the events leading up to Hamnet’s death from the bubonic plague, and the early days of William and Agnes’ relationship, covering the birth of their three children, first Susanna, whose conception leads to their marriage, and later the twins Judith and Hamnet.

An American Marriage is focused on the marriage of a middle-class Black American couple from Atlanta, Georgia. Roy, a sales representative who has worked his way up from a relatively poor background, and Celestial, an artist who makes dolls from a more wealthy family, are introduced as newlyweds. The novel begins with a fairly domestic focus, with the pair arguing over their respective relationships with their parents and suchlike. Their lives are turned upside down when Roy is arrested and imprisoned for raping a woman in a motel, a crime he plainly did not commit, after only 18 months of marriage.

Home Fire is based on Sophocles' Antigone, in which two sisters respond differently to the repercussions of their brother's act of treason. Shamsie transplants the play's themes to the modern day, focusing on the Pasha family of Muslims based in suburban London, with the two sisters - Isma and Aneeka - responding to their brother Parvaiz moving to Syria to join ISIS (following in his late father's jihadist footsteps).

The Power is a science fiction novel based around the premise of almost all women on Earth suddenly developing an extra organ (a ‘skein’) that allows them to shoot powerful bursts of electricity from their hands. Over a very short period, the balance of power in genders shifts and the novel sets out to explore the impact of this shift on society generally and a specific cast of characters from different backgrounds and locations.

The Glorious Heresies is a darkly humorous yet moving tale set in the criminal underworld of Cork, in post-crash Ireland. It shifts perspective between five central characters, most centrally Ryan Cusack, the eldest of six siblings who has lost his mother and despite high intelligence and a talent for music has fallen into a life of low-level drug dealing, only really gaining satisfaction from his relationship with Karine.

How to Be Both tells two stories, one from the perspective of George, an intelligent 16-year-old girl living in modern-day Cambridge, and another from the perspective of a relatively minor Italian renaissance artist, Francesco del Cossa.

Demon Copperhead is an epic retelling of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, transplanted to the recent history of the USA, and specifically Appalachia. It’s told through the eyes of its title character (real name Damon Fields) who we first meet as a child born into poverty, looked after by his addict mother in :Lee County, Virginia. Its plot closely follows that of its source material, particularly in the early stages where Demon first struggles with an abusive stepfather and is then orphaned, becoming thrown into a cycle of disastrous foster homes that wear him down to the point where it seems he can go no lower.

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is a stream-of-consciousness novel, told from the perspective of an unnamed Irish girl in highly distinctive, fractured prose.  It’s largely addressed to her brother, also unnamed and referred to as ‘you’ throughout. His life is limited by the impact of brain damage from the removal of a childhood trauma, but the love between the two siblings is evident throughout, in a novel that doesn’t offer much else in the way of solace. 

May We Be Forgiven is told from the perspective of Harry Silver, a professor with a specialism in (and obsession with) Richard Nixon. In the novel’s horrific first chapter, his brother George causes a car accident in which two people die, orphaning their child, and is committed to a mental institution.  While George is committed, Harold commences an affair with his wife Jane. George walks out of hospital and finds the pair in bed together, and murders his wife with a bedside lamp. 

The Song of Achilles is a retelling of the events of Homer’s Iliad, as told from the perspective of Patroclus. In Homer, Patroclus was a childhood friend and close wartime companion of Achilles. Later Greek authors, including Aeschylus and Plato, as well as Shakespeare (in Troilus and Cressida) brought out the implicit romantic relationship between the two characters, and it’s this aspect that Miller focuses on for her adaptation of the story.  

The Tiger’s Wife is set in a semi-fictionalised version of the Balkans, on the border between two unnamed countries, and takes place through a sweep of the twentieth century, in a period notably covering the Second World War and the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s.  Its central character is Natalia, a young doctor who is on a mission of mercy to an orphanage. In the present day, she finds herself facing the double mysteries of her suspicious hosts, who spend their time digging for something in the surrounding land, and of the recent death of her grandfather, who took himself to a remote village to die.  

The Lacuna focuses on the life of the fictional author Harrison Shepherd, beginning with his childhood in Mexico in the 1930s and taking us through to the 1950s., interacting with significant moments and characters of historical significance along the way. We learn early on that he has kept diaries for much of his life, albeit with some important gaps (one of the lacunae that the title alludes to) and while the narrative is largely told through his diaries, it is mediated by a curatorial presence, the initially mysterious “VB”, and also punctuated by press clippings both real and invented.

Home is not a straightforward sequel to Robinson’s much-feted Gilead, but more of a companion piece, looking at a similar time period from different perspectives. In it, she shifts the focus to John Ames’ lifelong friend and friendly adversary in religious discussion, the Rev. Robert Boughton. It focuses primarily on three characters: the Rev. Boughton himself, who is aging and sick, and reflecting on his life and that of his family; his daughter Glory (probably the primary focus of this one) who has returned home in her late 30s, ostensibly to help him; and his ‘prodigal son’ Jack who arrives a little way into the novel following an absence of around twenty years.

The Road Home focuses on Lev, a middle-aged widower from an unspecified Eastern European country (possibly Poland), as he travels to London with the goal of making money to support his young daughter who stays back home with his mother. The novel begins as one of survival, as Lev acclimatises to the harsh realities of living in London with no money and no job. He initially sleeps rough and makes small change delivering leaflets for a kebab shop, before landing a job as a dish-washer (or “nurse”) in the high pressure kitchen of GK Ashe, a fine-dining, Gordon Ramsey style establishment. He eventually finds himself a (child size) room with recent Irish divorcee Christy, with whom he forms an endearing friendship.

Half of a Yellow Sun takes place in Nigeria in the years before, during and immediately after the Nigerian-Biafran (Civil) War (1967-70) in the decade following Nigeria’s independence from the UK in 1960. It focuses on three central characters: Olanna, the Igbo daughter of a wealthy businessman and eventually wife of Odenigbo, a Maths professor at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka; Ugwu, an Igbo village boy from Opi, who joins Odenigbo’s household as a servant (aged just 13) at the start of the novel; and Richard, the English expat and eventual partner of Olanna’s twin sister Kainene. 

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. 

We Need To Talk About Kevin is told from the perspective of Eva Khatchadourian, a comfortably well-off former author and publisher of a series of travel guides.  It’s structured around a series of letters she writes to her partner, Franklin, in the years after their troubled son Kevin killed nine people in a high-school massacre, and was subsequently incarcerated for his crime. 

Small Island is mainly set in 1948, in a London still rebuilding after the war. Its main focus is on four characters who end up living in the same house. They are the house’s owner Bernard Bligh, his wife Victoria “Queenie” Bligh and two of their lodgers, both recently arrived from Jamaica, Gilbert Joseph and Hortense, his wife.  The novel jumps back and forward in time, with the “Before” sections covering the early life of all of the characters, including their wartime experiences.