The Blue Flower is set in the Germany of the late Eighteenth century, as Romantic sensibilities ferment in the great universities and clash with the traditional ways found in the small towns where much of its action takes place. At the centre of the novel is Friedrich von Hardenberg, a student of philosophy, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Goethe and developing his own ideas and poetry with which he will later find fame as Novalis. The novel’s short chapters provide insights into his unusual and contradictory life (alongside his poetry, he’s also taking on the running of a salt mine…) as well as those of his family members and contemporaries. Most strikingly, it details his captivation by the twelve-year old Sophie von Kuhn, a ‘normal’ girl offering little in terms of the usual expectations of the time (she’s neither financially nor intellectually his equal).

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.