Our London Lives is told from the alternating viewpoints of two Irish immigrants who meet in a central London pub in the 1970s. Milly is a bartender at a traditional city pub, catering for a diverse clientele covering locals, city workers, and most importantly, boxers from a neighbouring club. One of those is Pip, who we first encounter as an ex-convict who has just come out of rehab, in 2017 (the novel’s ‘present day’). Pip’s story is told entirely from the vantage point of that present day, with all the retrospective mix of nostalgia and regret that comes with that sort of angle. By contrast, Milly’s narrative unfolds chronologically, in the moment, through the years from the late 1970s through to, eventually, 2017. In her story there are large leaps and gaps that aren’t immediately filled in, but the two perspectives collide in a richly satisfying (though far from conclusive) ending.

Ordinary Human Failings is set in London in 1990, as a housing estate community is rocked by the death of a toddler, with suspicion quickly falling on Lucy, the 10-year old daughter of an Irish family, the Greens. A tabloid journalist, Tom, is dispatched to investigate, with a strong focus on digging up dirt on the Green family, whose outsider, reclusive status means they are the inevitable target of attention for the crime. It’s pitched as a thriller, with a mystery to be solved, and Tom is convinced he’s going to be the one to solve it. He moves the family into a small hotel, plies them with drink and looks for the inevitable trauma that has led them here, and a motive for the crime.

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.

Trespasses tells the story of Cushla Lavery, a 24-year-old primary school teacher living on the outskirts of Belfast in 1975. She works occasional shifts in her family’s pub, managed by her brother and often stepping in for her alcoholic mother Gina. The violence and terror of Troubles-era Northern Ireland is a constant backdrop, and forms the basis of her young pupils’ life experience and their everyday vocabulary. Cushla’s town is relatively mixed compared to some more religiously segregated areas, and while her family are Catholic, their bar is frequently by a friendly mix of Catholic and Protestant drinkers, who by and large rub along well together. It’s at the bar that she meets the much older Protestant barrister Michael Agnew, with whom she begins a secret affair. In parallel, she begins to provide additional care to one of her young pupils, Davy McKeown, whose father has been maimed in an attack. Those two dominant strands of her life eventually intertwine with catastrophic consequences.

Booth is the story of the eponymous Booth family, across much of the nineteenth century. Ostensibly, it’s about the build-up to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by the family’s most infamous son, John Wilkes Booth. But it’s really about much more than that. Its extensive scope touches on family dynamics, generational shifts, the Civil War and abolition of slavery in the US, the world of the Theatre in which the Booth family are embedded, and a whole lot more. Fowler began writing the novel while considering one of many recent mass shootings in the States: how might the perpetrator’s family be impacted? Her informative author’s note at the novel’s conclusion also highlights that she stopped writing for some time around the election of Trump, before realising that in writing Booth she was engaging with issues that were still very much present in the modern world.