Pity is a short novel that trains its eyes on the former mining town of Barnsley, near to Sheffield in northern England. It focuses on three generations of the same family, covering the late twentieth century up to the present day (or thereabouts), and almost exclusively focusing on the men of the family.

The Fraud is a historical novel set across the nineteenth century and focusing on two apparently disconnected real-world storylines. One is the story of the Tichbourne Claimant, one of the longest trials in British legal history in which a butcher in Wagga Wagga, Australia comes forward claiming to be the presumed-dead minor British aristocrat Sir Roger Tichbourne. The other is the story of forgotten British novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, who mixes with a literary milieu including the likes of Dickens and Thackeray, has early-career success with ‘scandalous’ novels, one of which outsells Oliver Twist, but by the bulk of the novel’s story has fallen on tougher times and is something of a critical laughing stock.

The Story of the Forest is a multi-generational tale of the Mendel family and its offshoots, over the course of much of the twentieth century. It begins with the young girl Mina, one of five children of a Latvian grain merchant, who wanders into the forest near their home in Riga, ostensibly to pick mushrooms. While she’s there she meets a group of young Bolshevik men and something undefined happens. Whatever it is, it takes on an almost mythological significance as a foundational story in the life of Mina and subsequent generations of Mendels.

Biography of X is an elaborately constructed fictional biography a female artist, author and musician known only as X. It is written in the persona of C.M. Lucca, X's widow, and supposedly published in 2005 as the conclusion of a decade's research following X's death and initially in response to another, inaccurate, biography.

Shy is a short novel, with experimental and poetic flourishes, focusing on the inner life of the titular adolescent Shy. We find him, in 1995, in the appropriately named ‘Last Chance’ school, an institution offering an unconventional home for troubled teenagers with a history of delinquent behaviour. At the start of the book he’s setting off with a bag weighed down with rocks, heading for the school’s pond in the middle of the night, with an obvious intention in mind. We explore his mindset through both present tense interior monologue, flashback, and snippets of commentary from other sources - a therapist’s words, the narration of a documentary being made about Last Chance, the taunts of his classmates, and the lyrics of contemporary Drum’n’Bass tracks - his one true passion.

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.

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.

Young Mungo is a book that very much continues where Shuggie Bain left off. It’s not a sequel, but if you squinted a bit, it certainly could be. The world is the same - the grinding poverty of the Glasgow tenements in the late twentienth century, Shuggie’s Sighthill looming over the background of various scenes. The central character is again a boy coming to terms with his sexuality in unforgiving circumstances, while simultaneously devoting much of his love and energy to an alcoholic mother, with the same complement of older siblings as Shuggie. In short, if you loved his debut, you’re not going to find yourself wildly thrown off by the contents of this one. There are, of course, differences. Mungo is a fair bit older than Shuggie, already somewhat adapted to the reality he needs to at least try to fit into; similarly devoted to his disastrous mother, but less reliant on her and therefore slightly more open to possibilities beyond her world; and with at least sense of the possibility of escape.