We Pretty Pieces of Flesh follows three childhood friends (Rach, Kel and Shaz) from their first days at secondary school in Doncaster, through their teenage years together and later years apart, culminating in a reunion night out when potentially explosive secrets simmer under the surface. It’s written in impressively well-rendered local dialect, and is at heart a coming of age story, depicting the ups and downs of the teenage trio, and reflecting on where those years have led them - examining the bonds of friendship and as well as the forces that can tear them apart.

In the novel, both Khaled and Mustafa are shot at the protest and hospitalised. From this point, they are unable to return to their home country. The book explores the subsequent relationship, and eventual diverging paths, of the two friends, along with a third, the enigmatic author Hosam. The latter is introduced early in the novel as an inspirational figure in Khaled's life, after hearing his poem read out - unusually in lieu of a news broadcast - on the BBC Arabic World Service, by a presenter who would soon after be murdered in London (another event based closely on real events). Khaled later meets Hosam by chance in Paris, before the writer (no longer writing) joins him in London and becomes a lasting friend.

Orbital is conceptually simple yet unique. It follows a single day aboard an international space station, where six astronauts and cosmonauts go about their work, maintaining their craft, conducting scientific experiments, exercising, and observing and recording activity on Earth as they hurtle around it at incomprehensible speed. In the twenty-four hours covered by this slim novel, its protagonists will observe sixteen sunrises and sunsets on the planet below. In between the details of the day, we get sketches of the lives the six crewmembers have left behind.

Oiur Evenings has a lot about it that will be familiar to Hollinghurst fans. Its protagonist, David Win, is a mixed-race child of a single parent, from the lower middle classes (his mother runs a small dressmaking business) in rural Southern England. He is a scholar at a prestigious fee-paying boys’ school, the recipient of an exhibition awarded by the arts benefactor Mark Harlow. The novel’s early chapters detail events during David’s time at that school, including a weekend at the Harlows’ country home, and an adventurous school ‘challenge’ in which he is paired with the Harlows’ son Giles (who we know from the book’s flash-forward introduction is to become a notorious right-wing politician and Brexit architect). David makes his way in life, developing an interest in acting and generally doing reasonably (if unspectacularly) well, all the while contending with his points of difference.

You Are Here begins by introducing us to Marnie, a 38-year-old copy-editor living in London, a natural introvert who has become more and more reclusive over time, exacerbated by the Covid-induced move to remote work and a breakup with her ill-matched husband. Her friend Cleo, a teacher, has been trying to get her to re-emerge into the world, and against expectations, it’s a big trip to the north of England that finally works. Cleo’s colleague and friend Michael, a 42-year-old Geography teacher and general loveable nerd (also recently separated), is planning to walk the Coast-to-Coast path - crossing England from the Irish Sea in Cumbria to the North Sea in North Yorkshire. Cleo arranges a group of fellow adventurers - including Marnie - to join him for the first part of the trip in the Lake District.

In Defence of the Act is told from the perspective of Jessica Miller, who is fascinated by the subject of suicide. She works in a lab which investigates suicide in animals, among colleagues she is sure have taken on that particular role with the view that their research will help understand and therefore prevent suicide in humans. Secretly, though, Jessica believes suicide may be - in some cases - a justified ‘act’ and even one which could be considered altruistic, or at least to the benefit of those who surround them. The roots of her unusual perspective are clearly in an incident in her childhood, in which she alerted her family to her father’s suicide attempt, therefore preventing it. He then went on to be consistently abusive, primarily to Jessica and her mother.

Enter Ghost follows Sonia, a 38-year-old British/Dutch actor, with Palestinian heritage, who has recently broken off an affair with a London theatre director. She decides to take some time out from her career to visit her sister, Haneen, in Haifa. The two sisters spent summers in their youth visiting family in Haifa, and the latter returned there to forge a career as an academic. Haneen introduces Sonia to her friend Mariam, a theatre director, who is in the early stages of putting on an Arabic-language production of Hamlet in the West Bank. While Sonia is initially reluctant to get involved, she is pulled in by Mariam’s bluntness and idealistic spirit and agrees to help out with rehearsals, before eventually getting swept up by the energy of the production and taking on the role of Gertrude.

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.

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.

Cuddy begins with the death of its eponymous hero, St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, in 687, and thereafter takes us on a wild and eclectic ride through the centuries, giving us an alternative history of the North-East of England , over which the venerated saint’s influence looms large. Casting an equally grand shadow over the novel is Durham Cathedral, Cuddy’s burial place. The novel is split into four sections and an interlude, the first of which (‘Saint Cuddy’, taking place in 995) follows a band of monks as they carry the saint’s corpse around the North for decades (his body having been evacuated from the island of Lindisfarne in order to protect it from desecration by invading Danes).

How to Make a Bomb was initially published last year in the US under the somewhat less provocative title Dartmouth Park. It’s a short novel, written in a sparse poetic style, eschewing paragraphs in favour of short sentences with line breaks and limited punctuation. Its focus is the fifty-year-old London-based historian Philip Notman, who is thrown into a deep personal crisis following a trip to a conference in Bergen. On his return he begins to struggle to pick up with his everyday life, and abandons his wife and (adult) son to head off in search of… something. Initially it seems that that something may be an affair, with the captivating Ines, who he met at the Bergen conference and initially seeks out in Cadiz. Yet relatively soon he is on the move again, this time to Crete to spend time in the dilapidated house of an older couple he helped out in Spain. He arrives seeking fulfillment of a different kind, away from the noise of modern life, and is further tempted by the allure of religion on a visit to a monastery. When all of this ultimately fails to resolve his issues, he heads back to London with a new sense of purpose, and a rather disturbing mission.

Caledonian Road is set largely on and around the titular thoroughfare, which heads northwards from near London’s King’s Cross station. Its action takes place in the very recent past, in a year’s period between early 2021 (and the ending of major Covid restrictions) and early 2022 (with Russian’s invasion of Ukraine on the imminent horizon). It’s introduced (at least in this pre-release version) by an extensive list of characters, setting the tone for the sprawling, somewhat Dickensian nature of the 600-ish pages to follow. At its undoubted centre, though, is the aging white liberal academic Campbell Flynn, clearly something of a proxy for the author. Having worked his way up in society from humble Glaswegian roots, through a combination of academic achievement and marriage into minor aristocracy, Campbell is a lecturer at UCL, a published art historian (most recently of an acclaimed life of Vermeer), sometime glossy magazine columnist and podcaster. Yet he senses shifting sands in society, and mostly the ones that uphold everything that he holds dears. Campbell, like the liberal intelligentsia he represents, is in crisis. And so, it seems, are his city and his country.

Fast By The Horns is set in the Bristol neighbourhood of St. Pauls in 1980. It focuses on Jabari, the 14-year-old only son of the Rasafarian community leader Ras Levi. He exists in a clearly very close-knit community, but one that is constantly beaten down by corrupt policing and lack of council investment. Ras Levi and his fellow Rastafarians in the community, including of course Jabari, dream of repatriation to the Ethiopian motherland, though others in the community mock their ambitions and urge them to engage with the political realities of life in the UK. Amidst the violence and daily struggles with police brutality, Jabari's encounter with a young girl formerly from St. Pauls, who we find has been placed in the care of a white family in a neighbouring affluent area, provides a tender and emotional thread at the centre of the novel.

Pity is a short novel that trains its eyes on the former mining town of Barnsley, near to Sheffield in northern England. It focuses on three generations of the same family, covering the late twentieth century up to the present day (or thereabouts), and almost exclusively focusing on the men of the family.

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.

The Fraud is a historical novel set across the nineteenth century and focusing on two apparently disconnected real-world storylines. One is the story of the Tichbourne Claimant, one of the longest trials in British legal history in which a butcher in Wagga Wagga, Australia comes forward claiming to be the presumed-dead minor British aristocrat Sir Roger Tichbourne. The other is the story of forgotten British novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, who mixes with a literary milieu including the likes of Dickens and Thackeray, has early-career success with ‘scandalous’ novels, one of which outsells Oliver Twist, but by the bulk of the novel’s story has fallen on tougher times and is something of a critical laughing stock.

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.

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.

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.