The Mars Room has as its protagonist Romy Hall, a San Francisco single mother and erstwhile stripper who is serving two life sentences in Stanville Correctional Facility for murder. She has killed a man, that much is true, but a man who was going to great lengths to stalk her, having struck up what he saw as a ‘relationship’ in the Mars Room, the strip club Romy performed in. That she has committed a crime is not disputed, but the fragments we see of her trial expose the fact that the criminal justice system leaves no room for nuance. Her primary concern in prison is initially survival, but shifts to the wellbeing of her young son Jackson once she hears that her mother, his guardian, has died.

Creation Lake is told from the perspective of a spy for hire (and former federal agent) known for the purposes of her current assignment as "Sadie Smith". She is in the process of infiltrating an agrarian commune of eco-leftists in France, known as the Moulinards. In order to do so, she has entered into a serious ‘relationship’ with a filmmaker called Lucien, who is close to the Moulinards' day-to-day leader, Pascal.

Headshot is a short novel, tightly structured around a female youth boxing tournament, which takes place over a single weekend in Reno, Nevada. It follow’s the tournament’s eight participants through the tournament’s order of play, from the initial knockout matches, to the semi-finals and the final. Through each bout, we are transported back and forth in the boxers’ lives, in snippets that illuminate both their backgrounds and, more surprisingly perhaps, their future lives.

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.

James is, in its simplest sense, a retelling of Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from the perspective of the slave Jim. The original is loved and criticised (particularly around its complex handling of race relations) in equal parts, and Everett engages with it with a similar mix of obvious love for the source material and a clear sense of purpose in its interrogation of some of its more problematic aspects.

Help Wanted takes place in a large chain "big-box" store in upstate New York, and shifts focus between the employees of its "Movement" (aka Logistics) team as they race to complete their repetitive tasks in the early hours of the morning, snark about their awful middle-manager Meredith, and eventually plot to attempt to have her replaced.

The Poisonwood Bible follows the Price family, led by the missionary preacher Nathan, as they move from their home in Georgia in the US to the small village of Kilanga in what was then the Belgian Congo. While it is Nathan’s vocation that takes the family to Africa, the novel is told from the perspective of the five women of the family: the mother Oreleanna, who narrates from a retrospective position, later in life, and the four daughters of the family.

If I Survive You is a mostly linked short story collection, based on the immigrant experience of a Jamaican family who moved to Miami following the turbulence in their home country in the 1970s. For much of the book, our focus is the somewhat autobiographical-seeming life of Trelawny, the family’s younger son, though we do also get stories told from the perspective of his father, his older brother Delano, and in the biggest departure of the collection, his cousin Cukie. The book deals with the struggle of survival in the face of everyday racism in the US, exacerbated by crises both personal and national - the latter including the major (and disproportionately racialised) impact of Hurricane Andrew and the 2008 Financial Crisis.

An American Marriage is focused on the marriage of a middle-class Black American couple from Atlanta, Georgia. Roy, a sales representative who has worked his way up from a relatively poor background, and Celestial, an artist who makes dolls from a more wealthy family, are introduced as newlyweds. The novel begins with a fairly domestic focus, with the pair arguing over their respective relationships with their parents and suchlike. Their lives are turned upside down when Roy is arrested and imprisoned for raping a woman in a motel, a crime he plainly did not commit, after only 18 months of marriage.

Demon Copperhead is an epic retelling of Charles Dickens’ David Copperfield, transplanted to the recent history of the USA, and specifically Appalachia. It’s told through the eyes of its title character (real name Damon Fields) who we first meet as a child born into poverty, looked after by his addict mother in :Lee County, Virginia. Its plot closely follows that of its source material, particularly in the early stages where Demon first struggles with an abusive stepfather and is then orphaned, becoming thrown into a cycle of disastrous foster homes that wear him down to the point where it seems he can go no lower.

May We Be Forgiven is told from the perspective of Harry Silver, a professor with a specialism in (and obsession with) Richard Nixon. In the novel’s horrific first chapter, his brother George causes a car accident in which two people die, orphaning their child, and is committed to a mental institution.  While George is committed, Harold commences an affair with his wife Jane. George walks out of hospital and finds the pair in bed together, and murders his wife with a bedside lamp. 

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.  

For the first time on here I’m tackling a collection of short stories. Liberation Day contains nine of them, with no immediately obvious uniting theme. They move between realist character studies, packed with humour and insight, and much darker mini-dystopias.

The Tiger’s Wife is set in a semi-fictionalised version of the Balkans, on the border between two unnamed countries, and takes place through a sweep of the twentieth century, in a period notably covering the Second World War and the Balkan conflicts of the 1990s.  Its central character is Natalia, a young doctor who is on a mission of mercy to an orphanage. In the present day, she finds herself facing the double mysteries of her suspicious hosts, who spend their time digging for something in the surrounding land, and of the recent death of her grandfather, who took himself to a remote village to die.  

The Lacuna focuses on the life of the fictional author Harrison Shepherd, beginning with his childhood in Mexico in the 1930s and taking us through to the 1950s., interacting with significant moments and characters of historical significance along the way. We learn early on that he has kept diaries for much of his life, albeit with some important gaps (one of the lacunae that the title alludes to) and while the narrative is largely told through his diaries, it is mediated by a curatorial presence, the initially mysterious “VB”, and also punctuated by press clippings both real and invented.

Home is not a straightforward sequel to Robinson’s much-feted Gilead, but more of a companion piece, looking at a similar time period from different perspectives. In it, she shifts the focus to John Ames’ lifelong friend and friendly adversary in religious discussion, the Rev. Robert Boughton. It focuses primarily on three characters: the Rev. Boughton himself, who is aging and sick, and reflecting on his life and that of his family; his daughter Glory (probably the primary focus of this one) who has returned home in her late 30s, ostensibly to help him; and his ‘prodigal son’ Jack who arrives a little way into the novel following an absence of around twenty years.

Erasure focuses on the author Thelonius “Monk” Ellison. In the mid-1990s, we find him in a rut with his writing, tired of being told by those around him in the publishing industry that he’s “not black enough". He’s an academic and his work reflects his own interests, such as modern retellings of Greek satires, and pissing off those around him with provocations that are of deeply niche interest - such at his lecture which parodies Barthes’ S/Z in the style of Barthes’ S/Z (a provocation to the average reader of Erasure, too, when this lecture is reproduced in exhaustive detail early in the book!) Outside of his writing, he’s dealing with everyday realities of life: a mother succumbing to Alzheimers, a brother who comes out of the closet - destroying his marriage, and a sister who pays the ultimate price for her work at an abortion clinic.

My Name is Lucy Barton introduces the New York-based author of its title. We find her recovering from an infection in hospital, where she is visited by her mother. Through their awkward but often moving interactions, and Lucy’s interior reflections, we learn - slowly, through drips of information - about Lucy’s troubled upbringing in the isolated rural town of Amgash, Illinois.

Oh William! returns to life of author Lucy Barton, heroine of Strout’s 2016 novel.  We find her a little later in life, having recently been widowed following the death of her second husband David.  Much of this novel focuses on her relationship with her first husband William, who also remarried but is left alone again part-way through the book.  Lucy herself is now a successful novelist, comfortable in New York and far away from her troubled childhood in Amgash, Illinois. 

The Trees is a vicious, riotous satire that deals with the subject of lynching in the US through the twentieth century. In Money, Mississippi, a white man is found brutally murdered - garrotted by barbed wire and castrated - next to another body, that of a mutilated Black man who looks curiously like Emmet Till, who was the real-world victim of a lynching in Mississippi in 1955, aged just 14. Several more deaths occur, with the same body appearing next to them. Soon, similar incidents are occurring across the whole of the US. The set up is one of a murder mystery, albeit one that initially seems to have potentially supernatural connotations.