On her deathbed, popular historian and journalist Claudia Hampton decides to write “a history of the world,” which turns out to be a kaleidoscopic reflection on her own life, going back and forth in time anchored around the loss of the great love of her life, a soldier called Tom who she meets in 1942 Egypt. The titular “moon tiger” is a mosquito repellant device, “a green coil that slowly burns all night… dropping away into lengths of grey ash” - present at a pivotal (and ultimately, final) moment in her relationship with Tom, and its “glowing red eye” is a light that she’s unable to look away from, returning to it time and again throughout the novel.

The Old Devils is about the lives and relationships of a bunch of old men (and their wives, to a lesser extent) in Wales. Central among these are Peter - mainly notable for being larger than before; Malcolm - likes jazz and talking about his bowels; and Charlie - I honestly can’t remember but not especially pleasant either. Their routine of going to the pub, getting slowly larger, and seemingly not a whole lot else, is interrupted by the arrival of their former friend Alun, back from “that London” a minor TV celebrity and writer, largely peddling a quaint and simplistic touristified version of “Wales” that his erstwhile buddies don’t recognise, and in thrall to a thinly veiled Dylan Thomas proxy.

Kerewin Holmes, sometime painter and amateur musician, is getting on with her somewhat solitary life in her self-built Tower home on the coast of New Zealand’s South Island, when she is visited by a troubled yet precocious mute child going by the name of Simon. Simon, the victim of the shipwreck of a European vessel in which his parents were presumed killed, is in the care of Joe, a local man of mostly Maori heritage, who strikes up an unlikely friendship with Kerewin based (largely) on his willingness to keep her company playing chess, cooking various largely fish-based meals and drinking alarming quantities of alcohol.

Edith Hope, a moderately successful romance novelist, arrives at the Hotel du Lac, on the shores of Lake Geneva, where she has been “banished” by friends for a misdemeanor which is for large parts of the novel unclear. She begins her stay refusing to change, intending to keep a distance from the small number of fellow guests and work on her latest novel. As the novel progresses, however, she begins to engage with the other guests and reflect on her life.

Michael K, a poor man with a cleft lip, quits his job as a gardener in Cape Town to honour his sick mother’s wishes to return her to the countryside of her childhood, in Prince Albert. In a fictionalized South Africa which is descending into civil war, Michael is unable to leave freely by ordinary means due to a (shall we say, kafkaesque?) bureaucracy that is purposefully paradoxical and impossible to defeat, so sets off on an impossibly long journey, carrying his mother through heavily guarded streets and freezing nights on a shoddily improvised rickshaw.

Keneally’s Holocaust novel, the basis of Spielberg’s Schindler’s List, zooms in on the story of Oskar Schindler, a Sudeten-German industrialist who takes it upon himself to “save” thousands of Jews, initially by employing them in his enamelworks factory, Emalia, in Krakow (Poland), rather than having them sent to the horrors of Amon Goeth’s nearby Plaszow internment camp or - far worse - to almost certain extermination at Auschwitz. The later part of the novel documents the (even more incredible and shocking) transit of the Schindlerjuden away from the doomed Emalia camp and to a new factory near Schindler’s Sudeten/Czech hometown.

Midnight’s Children is a novel of many parts, meanings and interpretations. It tells the story not just of the complex and fantastic life of a man, Saleem Sinai, but of a young nation for whom Saleem is a mirror / proxy. It covers a large time period (from 30 years prior to the birth of Saleem / India to the present day), movements across the whole Indian subcontinent, wars, rises and falls of families and political dynasties, and people (including real people, proxies for real people, fictional inventions and fantastical creations.) There are, as they say, many worlds contained within these pages.

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.

Offshore is a brief novel focusing on the lives of a small group of inhabitants of barges moored at Battersea Reach on the Thames. It focuses primarily on Nenna, a Canadian living on a small barge with her two daughters, obsessed with the idea of her husband returning to her.

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.

Staying On is a kind of coda to Scott’s Raj Quartet, set in the same small town of Pankot, but some decades later. It focuses primarily on two minor characters from that series, Tusker and Lucy Smalley. They are among the few colonial Brits who “stayed on” after Independence, and the novel covers a sort of twilight period - of their lives, of Empire - and touches significantly on themes of nostalgia and regret, particularly through the character of Lucy.

An epic novel focusing on the childhood and youth of Colin Saville, who grows up in a mining village in Yorkshire in the 1940s, passes the entrance exam to a grammar school and subsequently finds himself adrift from both worlds - and increasingly alienated from family and friends. Along the way he has a series of ultimately unsuccessful relationships, plays a bit of rugby, and dabbles in poetry.

Two intertwining stories of women in India. The framing narrative is an unnamed woman who travels to India in the present day (1970s) to learn more about the experiences of her step-grandmother, Olivia, during the days of the British Raj in the 1920s.

A dense, occasionally impressionistic and highly symbolic look at the life of a wealthy industrialist, Mehring, who buys a farm in Apartheid-era South Africa as a tax write-off. He's the "Conservationist" of the title, telling himself that he's conserving nature via his lifestyle choice while actually conserving the foundations of Apartheid.

An academic, Edwin Fisher, spends a week at the seaside while coming to terms with the breakdown of his marriage soon after the death of their son. While Fisher deals with the unexpected intervention of his in-laws on his holiday and hangs out in pubs with his fellow boarding house guests, his backstory unfolds via flashback.

J.G. Farrell's first "standard" Booker winner is the second part in his "Empire" trilogy, this time jumping back to the Indian Rebellion of 1857 for a by turns hilarious and meditative look at a pivotal (if not decisive) moment in British Colonial history, told via a graphic evocation of a four month siege of a British garrison by the uprising sepoys.

The eponymous "G" shags his way around early 20th century Europe, while largely ignoring various major events happening around him.

A road trip through "Africa" featuring two fairly awful Brits, a colonial official and his colleague's wife. The backdrop is a violent coup by the president to unseat the King, the latter the preference of the colonists.

It's 1919 and Major Brendan Archer, soon after returning from the Trenches, heads over to Ireland to meet a woman he seems to be engaged to, despite not being entirely sure whether he is or not.