Pew introduces us to a fairly unique character: nameless, of indeterminate age, gender and race, seemingly mute and amnesiac. They are named Pew by a family who find them sleeping on a church pew (as others have commented: in the manner of naming a pet). Pew's origins and identity are shrouded in mystery, and the Christian Bible Belt community they find themself taken in by is determined to solve that mystery. Alongside this, there is something strange going on in a nearby town, with its own community engaging in protests in the face of a spate of 'disappearances' of young people. In Pew's own town, it's the week of an annual 'festival' which sounds more and more sinister as we learn more about it.

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.

This Other Eden is a fictionalised version of the story of Malaga Island, off the coast near Portland, Maine. The small island was historically home to a mixed interracial community from the Civil War until 1911, when all of its residents were forcibly evicted by the state. Relatively little is conclusively known about the origins of the settlement on the island, with much of its history until recently only having been told by prejudiced accounts which treated the islanders as outcasts and 'degenerates'. Harding creates a version of the island's history, renaming it Apple Island after the dreams of his version of the first settlers, an escaped slave and his Irish wife.