Playground focuses primarily on four characters, who we know will come to share a connection. In Montreal, Evie Beaulieu is introduced in dramatic fashion, as a 12-year-old plunging to the bottom of a swimming pool, strapped to one of the first aqualungs by her father, and grows to love the ocean and everything connected to it. In Chicago, two super-smart kids with vastly differing backgrounds bond at an elite high school over their love of sophisticated board games. And finally there’s Ina Aroita, who has to my memory a far less memorable introduction, but is apparently considered to be one of the four main players also.

Pod is a distinctive novel in that it takes as its focus the lives of a series of marine creatures, notably dolphins. Its primary focus is on Ea, a spinner / ‘Longi’ dolphin who becomes detached from her peaceful and ‘civilised’ pod and finds herself among a boorish, violent pod of bottlenose dolphins, known in the book as Tersiops. Along the way we meet an array of other creatures, all with their own characteristics, including a wise old whale, a gender-switching Wrasse, giant clams and a fugu or two. Memorably, there’s also the captive bottlenose dolphin Google, who has been enslaved by humans (or ‘Anthrops’ in the novel’s parlance) for horrifying military purposes.

Sacred Hunger is a 620-page epic centred around the a slave ship, the Liverpool Merchant, in the 1750 and 60s. The ship is owned by the Kemp family, with the younger Erasmus Kemp one of its principle players. His cousin, against whom Erasmus bears a childhood grudge, Matthew Paris, has recently been released from a prison sentence for spreading proto-Darwinist propaganda, a crime which also inadvertently led to the death of his wife Ruth. He elects to join the crew of the Merchant as ship’s doctor, as a form of penitence and attempt to escape from his former life, much to the chagrin of the vessels’ terrifying commander, Captain Thurso.

Oscar and Lucinda describes the lives of two very different characters whose lives become intertwined when they meet on a long sea journey to Australia in the mid nineteenth century and discover a shared passion for the (then illicit) world of gambling. Oscar Hopkins is a devout Christian, from an evangelical background with a memorably fanatical father, who converts to Anglicanism, which while relatively moderate, still is very much unable to tolerate his increasing addiction to the card table and racecourse. Lucinda Laplastrier is an Australian orphan and heiress who ploughs her fortune into a glass factory. When their paths cross, a mutual love develops between the unlikely pair, but despite them ending up cohabiting, it remains tragically unspoken.

Rites of Passage kicks off the 1980s by taking us back in time to the start of the nineteenth century. The aristocratic Edmund Talbot embarks upon a long voyage to Australia, and keeps a journal to amuse his godfather back home in England. In cramped quarters on a dilapidated warship, he recounts tales of the ship’s varied inhabitants from all classes of society, in a witty and extremely lively narrative that prods and interrogates the structures and conflicts of the English class system in microcosm.

Charles Arrowby, a successful and somewhat famous theatre director and playwright, abandons his career and London life and social circle for a solitary life by the sea, in a strange and somewhat dilapidated house.