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.

If I Survive You is a mostly linked short story collection, based on the immigrant experience of a Jamaican family who moved to Miami following the turbulence in their home country in the 1970s. For much of the book, our focus is the somewhat autobiographical-seeming life of Trelawny, the family’s younger son, though we do also get stories told from the perspective of his father, his older brother Delano, and in the biggest departure of the collection, his cousin Cukie. The book deals with the struggle of survival in the face of everyday racism in the US, exacerbated by crises both personal and national - the latter including the major (and disproportionately racialised) impact of Hurricane Andrew and the 2008 Financial Crisis.

Fire Rush is focused on Yamaye, a young woman of Jamaican heritage, living on the Tombstone Estate in suburban London in the late 1970s. Her mother is long gone, though remains a spectral presence in her life, and her father, while physically present, is cold and distant. She escapes into an underground culture of Caribbean music, centring on a local club called the Crypt, which is of course quite literally underground. She parties with her friends Asase and Rumer (the latter an Irish immigrant) and takes on the male-dominated club culture by developing her own knowledge of music and fierce line in lyrics which she begins to unleash at the Crypt. She meets a sensitive and romantic man, Moose, at the club, and the two fall in love and dream of escape to the Jamaican countryside

Small Island is mainly set in 1948, in a London still rebuilding after the war. Its main focus is on four characters who end up living in the same house. They are the house’s owner Bernard Bligh, his wife Victoria “Queenie” Bligh and two of their lodgers, both recently arrived from Jamaica, Gilbert Joseph and Hortense, his wife.  The novel jumps back and forward in time, with the “Before” sections covering the early life of all of the characters, including their wartime experiences. 

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.