The Ministry of Time is a science fiction romance (with distinct thriller tropes on top of that), focusing on an unnamed civil servant working for the titular government agency in a near-future version of London. She is serving as a ‘bridge’ to one of an initial batch of time travellers, who have been ‘rescued’ from various significant points in history at the moment of their historical deaths. Her ‘expat’ (the name the government gives to the travelers, politically chosen in favour of ‘refugees’) is Graham Gore, a ship commander on board Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition to the Arctic in the 1840s.

Question 7 is a very difficult book to sum up. In simple terms, it’s a memoir, allowing Flanagan to dig deeper into themes he has explored in some of his novels, such as his relationship with his father (whose experiences on the Burmese Death Railway in WW2 were fictionalised as part of The Narrow Road…) and a near-death experience while kayaking as a young man (which informed his debut). But it’s also much broader than that.

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.)

The Power is a science fiction novel based around the premise of almost all women on Earth suddenly developing an extra organ (a ‘skein’) that allows them to shoot powerful bursts of electricity from their hands. Over a very short period, the balance of power in genders shifts and the novel sets out to explore the impact of this shift on society generally and a specific cast of characters from different backgrounds and locations.

The Blind Assassin contains three layers of narrative (all, it seems, titled The Blind Assassin.) The main story is realist novel with a grand historical sweep across major events of Canadian and world history, narrated by Iris Chase-Griffen, from the vantage point of the present day and addressed to her one surviving granddaughter. In this narrative, she reflects on her life and especially her relationship with her sister Laura, who died in a (presumably deliberate) car crash 10 days after the end of the Second World War. We also learn that her husband, the businessman and aspiring politician Richard Griffen, drowned shortly afterwards.