Pearl tells the story of Marianne, a young mother who is reflecting on the loss of her own mother, who disappeared (presumed dead) when she was eight years old. Left with her father Edward and baby brother Joe, she has spent her life struggling to understand her mother’s motives, grieving both for her mother and for the family home which they had to abandon in the wake of her loss.

This Other Eden is a fictionalised version of the story of Malaga Island, off the coast near Portland, Maine. The small island was historically home to a mixed interracial community from the Civil War until 1911, when all of its residents were forcibly evicted by the state. Relatively little is conclusively known about the origins of the settlement on the island, with much of its history until recently only having been told by prejudiced accounts which treated the islanders as outcasts and 'degenerates'. Harding creates a version of the island's history, renaming it Apple Island after the dreams of his version of the first settlers, an escaped slave and his Irish wife.

In Ascension is a novel is five parts, a languid yet grandiose journey that takes us from the deepest depths of our oceans to the farthest reaches of the solar system, set around a decade from now. Its protagonist is Dr Leigh Hasenboch, who we first meet in Rotterdam, in a section that focuses on her childhood. Her father, Geert, worked on flood defenses in the Netherlands, a centuries old challenge that is becoming ever more impossible as the climate breaks down, causing a similar deterioration in Geert's mental health, which in Leigh's telling we understand to be a motivator behind his outbursts of severe violence towards his daughters (her younger sister, Helena, is crucial later on.)