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 Tiger’s Wife is set in a semi-fictionalised version of the Balkans, on the border between two unnamed countries, and takes place through a sweep of the twentieth century, in a period notably covering the Second World War and the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s.  Its central character is Natalia, a young doctor who is on a mission of mercy to an orphanage. In the present day, she finds herself facing the double mysteries of her suspicious hosts, who spend their time digging for something in the surrounding land, and of the recent death of her grandfather, who took himself to a remote village to die.  

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.

Blonde Roots has a concept that’s hugely appealing in its simplicity: it imagines a world in which the history of the slave trade is inverted, where “blak Aphrikans” are the masters and “whyte Europanes” the enslaved. Its central character is Doris Scagglethorpe, a white Englishwoman who is kidnapped as a child and taken on a slave ship to the New World (in the "West Japanese" islands) where she is acquired by the plantation owner Bwana, also known as Chief Kaga Konata Katamba I. She is ultimately moved to the imperial capital of Londolo, in the island of Great Ambossa where she becomes a "house slave" until her attempt to escape. As punishment, she is returned to the plantation and ends up labouring in the fields, suffering incredible hardship and dreaming of a final escape.

Life of Pi is the story of Piscine Molitor “Pi” Patel, an Indian Tamil boy who grows up in Pondicherry as the son of a zookeeper. The novel is divided into three sections, framed by an author’s note which unusually is also a fiction. The longest middle section sees Pi cast adrift in the Pacific Ocean as his Canada-bound ship sinks without explanation. He recounts his tale of survival, adrift on a lifeboat in the company of Bengal tiger called Richard Parker, for 227 days.