Ripeness is told from the perspective of the 70-year-old Edith, brought up in England’s Midlands but here living a comfortable life in rural Ireland, somewhere around the present day. It consists of two strands: one focuses on her pleasant but mundane life in the here and now, her casual relationship (post-divorce) with Gunter, and her friendship with Maebh, who receives a message from a man in America claiming to be her half-brother. The second intertwining strand takes the form of a missive from Edith to her nephew, to be open upon her death, which describes the circumstances leading up to his birth in 1960s Italy to her young ballet-dancer sister Lydia. There are subtle plot details which slowly reveal themselves over the course of both parts of the narrative, which while not earth-shatteringly shocking are still integral to the reading experience, so I’ll keep my summary brief here.

This Strange Eventful History covers the lives of three generations of a Franco-Algerian family, the Cassars, from 1940 to 2010. It begins with a couple of maps that highlight key locations in the novel, alerting us early on to a recurrent theme of the novel, that of dislocation and a lack of a discernable 'home', for a community (of which Messud herself is a direct descendant) represented by the novel's central family.

Playground focuses primarily on four characters, who we know will come to share a connection. In Montreal, Evie Beaulieu is introduced in dramatic fashion, as a 12-year-old plunging to the bottom of a swimming pool, strapped to one of the first aqualungs by her father, and grows to love the ocean and everything connected to it. In Chicago, two super-smart kids with vastly differing backgrounds bond at an elite high school over their love of sophisticated board games. And finally there’s Ina Aroita, who has to my memory a far less memorable introduction, but is apparently considered to be one of the four main players also.

Rare Singles is a slim novel focusing on Earlon ‘Bucky’ Bronco, a seventy-something Black man living in Illinois, who cut a few soul records as a teenager but has spent much of the recent of his life working dead-end jobs and devoting his life to his wife Maybellene, who has recently died. Out of the blue, he receives a request to travel to Scarborough, a fading seaside resort in Northern England, to play a comeback show at a Northern Soul Weekender. Unbeknownst to Bucky, who was paid a derisory flat fee for his initial recordings so has no way of tracking their afterlives, his two ‘rare singles’ have become loved and treasured in the Northern Soul scene, which gave another life to many obscure releases from US soul singers on the Northern-English dancefloors (and to some extent, the UK charts) of the 70s and beyond.

Last Orders follows a motley crew of friends and near-relatives of the recently passed-away Jack Dodds, a Bermondsey butcher’s shop owner. They’re tasked by Jack’s widow Amy with scattering his ashes in Margate. Amy herself isn’t attending, for reasons that are explored in flashback as the novel unfolds, alongside the crew’s somewhat ramshackle journey out of London and through Kent, filled with arguments, detours, pubs, and reflections on life, death and relationships.