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.

Erasure focuses on the author Thelonius “Monk” Ellison. In the mid-1990s, we find him in a rut with his writing, tired of being told by those around him in the publishing industry that he’s “not black enough". He’s an academic and his work reflects his own interests, such as modern retellings of Greek satires, and pissing off those around him with provocations that are of deeply niche interest - such at his lecture which parodies Barthes’ S/Z in the style of Barthes’ S/Z (a provocation to the average reader of Erasure, too, when this lecture is reproduced in exhaustive detail early in the book!) Outside of his writing, he’s dealing with everyday realities of life: a mother succumbing to Alzheimers, a brother who comes out of the closet - destroying his marriage, and a sister who pays the ultimate price for her work at an abortion clinic.

Blonde Roots has a concept that’s hugely appealing in its simplicity: it imagines a world in which the history of the slave trade is inverted, where “blak Aphrikans” are the masters and “whyte Europanes” the enslaved. Its central character is Doris Scagglethorpe, a white Englishwoman who is kidnapped as a child and taken on a slave ship to the New World (in the "West Japanese" islands) where she is acquired by the plantation owner Bwana, also known as Chief Kaga Konata Katamba I. She is ultimately moved to the imperial capital of Londolo, in the island of Great Ambossa where she becomes a "house slave" until her attempt to escape. As punishment, she is returned to the plantation and ends up labouring in the fields, suffering incredible hardship and dreaming of a final escape.