Stone Yard Devotional begins with its nameless female narrator attending a retreat at a nunnery close to her rural New South Wales childhood hometown. We learn that after several visits, she has decided to live at the nunnery permanently. Ostensibly a reaction to the grief caused by the early death of her mother, her decision to retreat from society seems to be based more broadly on her ‘giving up’ on the modern world and the passions and causes she followed in her previous life( in which she was clearly passionately committed to charity and a degree of activism) in favour of a simpler, quieter life. We learn that in this process she has ended a long-term relationship.

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.

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.

Fire Weather: A True Story from a Hotter World (to give it its full title) centres on the 2016 Fort McMurray wildfire. The fire ravaged the hub of Canada’s oil industry, in remote Alberta, destroying thousands of homes and buildings and driving 90,000 people to evacuate in a single afternoon. This story is told in depth, using extensive testimonies and analysis of contemporary sources from residents, journalists, oil workers and journalists to piece together an almost minute-by-minute narrative of the development of a fire of never-before-seen magnitude. Around this story, though, Vaillant includes lengthy digressions - some necessary and illuminating, others more tangential but always interesting

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.

In Ascension is a novel is five parts, a languid yet grandiose journey that takes us from the deepest depths of our oceans to the farthest reaches of the solar system, set around a decade from now. Its protagonist is Dr Leigh Hasenboch, who we first meet in Rotterdam, in a section that focuses on her childhood. Her father, Geert, worked on flood defenses in the Netherlands, a centuries old challenge that is becoming ever more impossible as the climate breaks down, causing a similar deterioration in Geert's mental health, which in Leigh's telling we understand to be a motivator behind his outbursts of severe violence towards his daughters (her younger sister, Helena, is crucial later on.)

Pod is a distinctive novel in that it takes as its focus the lives of a series of marine creatures, notably dolphins. Its primary focus is on Ea, a spinner / ‘Longi’ dolphin who becomes detached from her peaceful and ‘civilised’ pod and finds herself among a boorish, violent pod of bottlenose dolphins, known in the book as Tersiops. Along the way we meet an array of other creatures, all with their own characteristics, including a wise old whale, a gender-switching Wrasse, giant clams and a fugu or two. Memorably, there’s also the captive bottlenose dolphin Google, who has been enslaved by humans (or ‘Anthrops’ in the novel’s parlance) for horrifying military purposes.