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.

Soldier Sailor is a brief but intense novel told by a mother (the titular ‘Soldier’) and addressed to her son (who she calls ‘Sailor’). Its not entirely clear from what remove it’s being written - the narrative jumps around so much that it’s hard to be certain - but it focuses on Sailor’s first two or three years of life, during which the narrator is practically fighting for survival as she struggles with the everyday demands of motherhood. She is left, like so many mothers, bearing virtually all of the work of bringing up her son, while her husband goes to work, watches football, and - most egregiously of all - sleeps. Through a series of traumatic vignettes (none more so than the novel’s opening section - in which she briefly abandons her child, having written a suicide note to him) we learn of Soldier’s despairing sense of alienation from the previous version of herself, who she sees as lost to the all-consuming mother who has replaced her. Throughout, though, there is also a near-unbearable sense of the desperate love of mother for child, culminating in a lyrical, beautiful final section in which Soldier contemplates their inevitable future separation: in spite of all the trauma of the present moment, the real source of fear in her life.

The Poisonwood Bible follows the Price family, led by the missionary preacher Nathan, as they move from their home in Georgia in the US to the small village of Kilanga in what was then the Belgian Congo. While it is Nathan’s vocation that takes the family to Africa, the novel is told from the perspective of the five women of the family: the mother Oreleanna, who narrates from a retrospective position, later in life, and the four daughters of the family.

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.

The Bee Sting is something of an epic at 600+ pages, focusing on a fairly affluent family in small-town Ireland, in the aftermath of the 2008 Financial Crash. It's a novel of perspectives, with its lengthy first four sections each seen through the eyes of a different family member.

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.

Treacle Walker is a short and highly distinctive novel. In it, a young boy call Joseph Coppock, in recovery from illness and suffering from a lazy eye, has an encounter with the titular rag-and-bone man, with whom he makes a trade of his dirty pyjamas and an old lamb bone, receiving in return an empty jar of medicine and a donkey stone. In its few pages, Joseph encounters a naked ‘bog man’ named Thin Amren, sees characters from his Knockout comic leap off the page and join him in a reality-bending adventure involving mirrors and marbles, communes with cuckoos and learns via a visit to an optician that he sees different realities through his good and bad eyes.

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. 

The Gathering is told from the perspective of a 39-year-old Irish mother, Veronica Hegarty, who is one of a family of twelve siblings. It focuses on the funeral and wake of her closest brother, Liam, who has recently taken his own life in the sea at Brighton.

Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha is a short novel told entirely in the voice of a 10-year old child in late 1960s Barrytown. Patrick is, to all intents and purposes, an ordinary child, and through his words (all dialogue and stream of consciousness interior monologue) we’re introduced to his friends, teachers, parents and close sibling, Sinbad / Francis. There’s relatively little structure to the novel, instead it’s a series of vignettes - almost short stories in themselves, typically showing a small insight into Patrick’s life as he learns more about himself and the world around him.