Brotherless Night begins in Jaffna, in the Tamil-dominated north of Sri Lanka, in the early 1980s.  Sixteen-year-old Sashi is studying hard, dreaming of going to medical school with her brothers and friend K.  Her life is slowly torn apart with the onset of the Sri Lankan Civil War. While staying with her Grandmother in Colombo in 1983, she finds herself caught up anti-Tamil riots. Her eldest brother is killed and her grandmother’s house burnt down. Subsequently two of her brothers join the Tamil Tigers, and her fourth brother briefly detained by authorities before departing for England.

Cuddy begins with the death of its eponymous hero, St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, in 687, and thereafter takes us on a wild and eclectic ride through the centuries, giving us an alternative history of the North-East of England , over which the venerated saint’s influence looms large. Casting an equally grand shadow over the novel is Durham Cathedral, Cuddy’s burial place. The novel is split into four sections and an interlude, the first of which (‘Saint Cuddy’, taking place in 995) follows a band of monks as they carry the saint’s corpse around the North for decades (his body having been evacuated from the island of Lindisfarne in order to protect it from desecration by invading Danes).

The Fraud is a historical novel set across the nineteenth century and focusing on two apparently disconnected real-world storylines. One is the story of the Tichbourne Claimant, one of the longest trials in British legal history in which a butcher in Wagga Wagga, Australia comes forward claiming to be the presumed-dead minor British aristocrat Sir Roger Tichbourne. The other is the story of forgotten British novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, who mixes with a literary milieu including the likes of Dickens and Thackeray, has early-career success with ‘scandalous’ novels, one of which outsells Oliver Twist, but by the bulk of the novel’s story has fallen on tougher times and is something of a critical laughing stock.

Hamnet is a creative imagining of the story of the death of Shakespeare’s only son. Despite its title, it focuses predominantly on the bard’s wife, here called Agnes (pronounced Ann-yis, and as named in her father’s will) though typically better known as Anne Hathaway. It’s a non-linear narrative with its substantial first section moving back and forth in time between the events leading up to Hamnet’s death from the bubonic plague, and the early days of William and Agnes’ relationship, covering the birth of their three children, first Susanna, whose conception leads to their marriage, and later the twins Judith and Hamnet.

How to Be Both tells two stories, one from the perspective of George, an intelligent 16-year-old girl living in modern-day Cambridge, and another from the perspective of a relatively minor Italian renaissance artist, Francesco del Cossa.

The Marriage Portrait is a heavily fictionalised version of the short life of Lucrezia de' Medici, a sixteenth century member of the renowned aristocratic House of Medici in Italy. As the novel's introductory note explains, she was betrothed to Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara at very young age, and died fairly soon after their marriage, with persistant (though unproven) rumours alleging that she was poisoned. O'Farrell's interest in the subject was spurred on by seeing a surviving portrait of Lucrezia, attributed to Bronzino, and Robert Browning's poem My Last Duchess, which covers the same subject matter.

Milkman is told in the distinctive voice of an unnamed 18-year-old "middle sister" trying to go about her life in an unnamed city in peak-Troubles Northern Ireland. She is stalked and harrassed by a 41-year-old paramilitary officer known only as "Milkman". False rumours spread that she is in a relationship with this character, affecting her relationship with her mother, the wider community, and her "maybe-boyfriend".

Lincoln in the Bardo focuses on the death of Abraham Lincoln's son Willie. It focuses (not sequentially) on the build-up to his death (in which the Lincoln's host a party while Willie lies bed-ridden), his death itself, and the aftermath, in which the grieving president visits his son's crypt and holds his body, all apparently based in historical fact. So far, so simple? Well… the above summary does absolutely no justice to what this novel actually is, which is a joyously unusual thing that mixes historical accounts (real and invented) of those events with a wild supernatural narrative set in the "bardo", a Buddhist term for the "intermediate state" between death and resurrection.

A Brief History of Seven Killings is about an attempt on the life of Bob Marley in 1976. Except, of course, it’s about far more than that. It’s also far from brief at almost 700 dense pages, and covers considerably more than seven killings, typically in graphic and visceral detail. It’s actually about several decades of complex and violent Jamaican history, told through a multiplicity of voices from gang leaders to politicians, journalists and seemingly peripheral “ordinary” people. Oh, and a ghost. Because of course.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North tells the story of Dorrigo Evans, a famed war veteran and public figure in his later years, who considers his accolades to be unjustly earned. The novel reflects on major moments in his life, most centrally his role in the Australian Imperial Force during World War II and his regiment's internment as hard labourers on the notorious Burma Death Railway. In this period he is reluctantly installed as the commander of his regiment in the camp, and is forced into making numerous impossible choices that will inevitably lead to the death of his comrades. Against this is a constant thread focusing on his obsession with his brief affair with his uncle's wife, Amy, prior to the war, and his ongoing post-war infidelities to his wife and mother of his children, Ella.

The Luminaries takes us to New Zealand, during the Gold Rush years in the mid Nineteenth Century. In straightforward plot terms, it’s a mystery novel centering on the aftermath of a series of seemingly disconnected events in the town of Hokitika. Central is the death of a little-known hermit, Crosbie Wells, alongside the disappearance of a rich young prospector, Emery Staines, and the arrest of opiate-addicted prostitute Anna Wetherell.

Bring Up the Bodies is the sequel to Mantel's 2009 Booker winner, Wolf Hall. It continues to follow the life of Thomas Cromwell, blacksmith's son now risen to Master Secretary to the King's Privy Council. King Henry VIII is tiring of his second wife Anne Boleyn, who has yet to bear him a male heir, and beginning to fall in love with Jane Seymour, a former attendant to the Queen and inhabitant of Wolf Hall.

Wolf Hall is the first part of Mantel's trilogy telling a fictionalised version of the life of Thomas Cromwell, chief minister of Henry VIII from 1534 to 1540. This first novel covers the years 1500 to 1537, beginning with an account of Cromwell's youthful abuse at the hands of his blacksmith father, and ending with the execution of Thomas More, with Cromwell overseeing as one of the most powerful men in the country.

True History of the Kelly Gang is a heavily fictionalized account of the Australian legend of Ned Kelly, a national icon to many, a “horse-thief and murderer” to others. Set in late nineteenth century Victoria, in a rural landscape north-east of Melbourne, it covers Kelly’s life from childhood through through his apprenticeship with notorious bushranger Harry Power, to infamy with his brother and two friends as the “Kelly Gang”, culminating in a dramatic shootout with the gang clad in “ironman” costumes.

The Blind Assassin contains three layers of narrative (all, it seems, titled The Blind Assassin.) The main story is realist novel with a grand historical sweep across major events of Canadian and world history, narrated by Iris Chase-Griffen, from the vantage point of the present day and addressed to her one surviving granddaughter. In this narrative, she reflects on her life and especially her relationship with her sister Laura, who died in a (presumably deliberate) car crash 10 days after the end of the Second World War. We also learn that her husband, the businessman and aspiring politician Richard Griffen, drowned shortly afterwards.

Keneally’s Holocaust novel, the basis of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, zooms in on the story of Oskar Schindler, a Sudeten-German industrialist who takes it upon himself to “save” thousands of Jews, initially by employing them in his enamelworks factory, Emalia, in Krakow (Poland), rather than having them sent to the horrors of Amon Goeth’s nearby Plaszow internment camp or - far worse - to almost certain extermination at Auschwitz. The later part of the novel documents the (even more incredible and shocking) transit of the Schindlerjuden away from the doomed Emalia camp and to a new factory near Schindler’s Sudeten/Czech hometown.

Rites of Passage kicks off the 1980s by taking us back in time to the start of the nineteenth century. The aristocratic Edmund Talbot embarks upon a long voyage to Australia, and keeps a journal to amuse his godfather back home in England. In cramped quarters on a dilapidated warship, he recounts tales of the ship’s varied inhabitants from all classes of society, in a witty and extremely lively narrative that prods and interrogates the structures and conflicts of the English class system in microcosm.

J.G. Farrell's first "standard" Booker winner is the second part in his "Empire" trilogy, this time jumping back to the Indian Rebellion of 1857 for a by turns hilarious and meditative look at a pivotal (if not decisive) moment in British Colonial history, told via a graphic evocation of a four month siege of a British garrison by the uprising sepoys.