Possession: A Romance (to give it’s full original title) is all sorts of things at once. It’s a detective story, it’s at least two love stories, it’s an incredibly literary and self-referential piece of metafiction, it’s a compendium of (masterful) imitations of various forms of Victorian writing, the list goes on… Ultimately, the heart of the story centres around the discovery of some letters by a modern-day academic, Roland Michell. These letters are the first “clue” in a trail that uncovers a previously undocumented romance between two fictional Victorian poets.

On her deathbed, popular historian and journalist Claudia Hampton decides to write “a history of the world,” which turns out to be a kaleidoscopic reflection on her own life, going back and forth in time anchored around the loss of the great love of her life, a soldier called Tom who she meets in 1942 Egypt. The titular “moon tiger” is a mosquito repellant device, “a green coil that slowly burns all night… dropping away into lengths of grey ash” - present at a pivotal (and ultimately, final) moment in her relationship with Tom, and its “glowing red eye” is a light that she’s unable to look away from, returning to it time and again throughout the novel.

Kerewin Holmes, sometime painter and amateur musician, is getting on with her somewhat solitary life in her self-built Tower home on the coast of New Zealand’s South Island, when she is visited by a troubled yet precocious mute child going by the name of Simon. Simon, the victim of the shipwreck of a European vessel in which his parents were presumed killed, is in the care of Joe, a local man of mostly Maori heritage, who strikes up an unlikely friendship with Kerewin based (largely) on his willingness to keep her company playing chess, cooking various largely fish-based meals and drinking alarming quantities of alcohol.

Edith Hope, a moderately successful romance novelist, arrives at the Hotel du Lac, on the shores of Lake Geneva, where she has been “banished” by friends for a misdemeanor which is for large parts of the novel unclear. She begins her stay refusing to change, intending to keep a distance from the small number of fellow guests and work on her latest novel. As the novel progresses, however, she begins to engage with the other guests and reflect on her life.

Offshore is a brief novel focusing on the lives of a small group of inhabitants of barges moored at Battersea Reach on the Thames. It focuses primarily on Nenna, a Canadian living on a small barge with her two daughters, obsessed with the idea of her husband returning to her.

Two intertwining stories of women in India. The framing narrative is an unnamed woman who travels to India in the present day (1970s) to learn more about the experiences of her step-grandmother, Olivia, during the days of the British Raj in the 1920s.

A dense, occasionally impressionistic and highly symbolic look at the life of a wealthy industrialist, Mehring, who buys a farm in Apartheid-era South Africa as a tax write-off. He's the "Conservationist" of the title, telling himself that he's conserving nature via his lifestyle choice while actually conserving the foundations of Apartheid.

A previously successful fortysomething Jewish barrister is committed after an amphetamine addiction causes him to see silverfish everywhere.