Homesick is a childhood memoir / coming of age story of a girl called Amy, who is seemingly a reasonably direct proxy for Croft herself. Central to the story is her relationship with her younger sister Zoe The two are initially inseparable, with a unique bond that they supplement with the creation of their own unique symbol-based language. When Zoe develops a life-changing illness, Amy becomes wracked with guilt, which only seems to expand when she moves away to college at just fifteen, accepted on the basis of her prodigious grasp of Russian. Along the way, there are also explorations of young love, as both girls become obsessed by their language tutor; grief, as they deal with an unexpected suicide; and of course language itself.

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.

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is a unique read, flitting back and forth between its protagonist Lia (a mother, wife and creative who has just received a terminal cancer diagnosis) and an unnamed second narrator who may or may not be the cancer itself. It plays with the novel form both in this sense and in its heavy borrowings from the world of poetry, with the text often deviating wildly from novelistic convention and into visual / concrete poetry modes. It’s drawn from personal experience of losing a mother to cancer, and amongst the formal experimentation is a relatively familiar and yet deeply emotive story of coming to terms with (or failing to come to terms with) death and reflecting on life - both the good and the bad.