You Are Here begins by introducing us to Marnie, a 38-year-old copy-editor living in London, a natural introvert who has become more and more reclusive over time, exacerbated by the Covid-induced move to remote work and a breakup with her ill-matched husband. Her friend Cleo, a teacher, has been trying to get her to re-emerge into the world, and against expectations, it’s a big trip to the north of England that finally works. Cleo’s colleague and friend Michael, a 42-year-old Geography teacher and general loveable nerd (also recently separated), is planning to walk the Coast-to-Coast path - crossing England from the Irish Sea in Cumbria to the North Sea in North Yorkshire. Cleo arranges a group of fellow adventurers - including Marnie - to join him for the first part of the trip in the Lake District.

Mrs Gulliver is set in the 1950s, on the fictional Verona Island, which seems to be off the coast of the US, in the Carribbean. Here, prostitution is legal, and Lila Gulliver (not her real name) runs one of the island’s more reputable establishments. She cares for her ‘girls’, and they live an ostensibly convivial and communal life in her ‘house’ in the centre of town, albeit one in the shadow of both local criminal gang warfare and the ever-present threat to its girls’ safety from its male clientele. The novel begins with Mrs Gulliver being introduced to the Bercy sisters, destitute following the death of their formerly prosperous (but latterly penniless) uncle. The younger sister, Carità, is both beautiful and, intriguingly to Gulliver and her ‘majordomo’ Brutus, blind. She is taken on board, with Mrs Gulliver evidently feeling a special responsibility for her welfare.

The Song of Achilles is a retelling of the events of Homer’s Iliad, as told from the perspective of Patroclus. In Homer, Patroclus was a childhood friend and close wartime companion of Achilles. Later Greek authors, including Aeschylus and Plato, as well as Shakespeare (in Troilus and Cressida) brought out the implicit romantic relationship between the two characters, and it’s this aspect that Miller focuses on for her adaptation of the story.  

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).

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.

Possession: A Romance (to give it’s full original title) is all sorts of things at once. It’s a detective story, it’s at least two love stories, it’s an incredibly literary and self-referential piece of metafiction, it’s a compendium of (masterful) imitations of various forms of Victorian writing, the list goes on… Ultimately, the heart of the story centres around the discovery of some letters by a modern-day academic, Roland Michell. These letters are the first “clue” in a trail that uncovers a previously undocumented romance between two fictional Victorian poets.