Booth is the story of the eponymous Booth family, across much of the nineteenth century. Ostensibly, it’s about the build-up to the assassination of Abraham Lincoln by the family’s most infamous son, John Wilkes Booth. But it’s really about much more than that. Its extensive scope touches on family dynamics, generational shifts, the Civil War and abolition of slavery in the US, the world of the Theatre in which the Booth family are embedded, and a whole lot more. Fowler began writing the novel while considering one of many recent mass shootings in the States: how might the perpetrator’s family be impacted? Her informative author’s note at the novel’s conclusion also highlights that she stopped writing for some time around the election of Trump, before realising that in writing Booth she was engaging with issues that were still very much present in the modern world.

Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is a unique read, flitting back and forth between its protagonist Lia (a mother, wife and creative who has just received a terminal cancer diagnosis) and an unnamed second narrator who may or may not be the cancer itself. It plays with the novel form both in this sense and in its heavy borrowings from the world of poetry, with the text often deviating wildly from novelistic convention and into visual / concrete poetry modes. It’s drawn from personal experience of losing a mother to cancer, and amongst the formal experimentation is a relatively familiar and yet deeply emotive story of coming to terms with (or failing to come to terms with) death and reflecting on life - both the good and the bad.

Small Island is mainly set in 1948, in a London still rebuilding after the war. Its main focus is on four characters who end up living in the same house. They are the house’s owner Bernard Bligh, his wife Victoria “Queenie” Bligh and two of their lodgers, both recently arrived from Jamaica, Gilbert Joseph and Hortense, his wife.  The novel jumps back and forward in time, with the “Before” sections covering the early life of all of the characters, including their wartime experiences. 

Property is told from the perspective of Manon Gaudet, the wife of a slave-owning sugar plantation owner in the Louisiana countryside in the 1820s. We initially have some sympathy for Manon, as we are introduced to her cruel and abusive unnamed husband through her eyes. Unhappy in her arranged marriage, her hatred for her husband is compounded by his frequently consummated obsession with the young slave Sarah, with whom he has two children (including a child revealed to be deaf), while Manon remains childless.

Alias Grace is based on the true story, well known in Atwood’s Canada, of the murders of Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery in 1843. Atwood focuses mainly on one of the accused murderers, Grace Marks, a servant in Kinnear’s household along with James Montgomery, who was hanged for the murders while Grace was sentenced to life.  

Bel Canto takes place in the initially plush surroundings of a party held at the residence of the Vice President of an unnamed South American country, in honour of the head of a Japanese corporation, Mr. Hosokawa. The powerful businessman is there to be wooed into a potential investment in the country, and has been tempted to attend a birthday party in his honour by the presence of world-famous opera singer Roxanne Coss, with whom he is (artistically) obsessed.

The Bottle Factory Outing focuses on two young women who live together in a bedsit in North London, while both also working as labellers in a wine-bottling factory. The factory is owned by the Italian Mr Paganotti, who filled most of the factory’s roles with Italians from his hometown who feel indebted to him as a result. In this space, the two English women are relative outsiders, treated with a mixture of suspicion and reverence by the Italian men.  

The Idea of Perfection takes place in Karakarook, a tiny New South Wales town in the middle of nowhere. At around the same time, two outsiders arrive in town for work-related purposes. Harley Savage is a part-time museum curator and textile artist, who has departed "the city" to help Karakarook with its "heritage"; Douglas Cheeseman is a vertigo-afflicted bridge engineer with a fascination for concrete, in town to assess (and likely demolish) the town's "Bent Bridge". Both are supremely awkward, throwing themselves into their work to try to escape the baggage of unsatisfactory lives and failed relationships.

When I Lived in Modern Times is the story of Evelyn Sert, a 20-year old hairdresser from Soho, of Latvian-Jewish heritage. After the war, she sets sail for Palestine, aiming to be part of the creation of a "new Jewish world" along with the refugees and idealists gathering there.

This is a Palestine still under the last throes of British colonial rule, and Evelyn is uncertain of her place in the embroyonic years of the creation of the Jewish nation. Unable to speak Hebrew (or in fact any languages other than English) she is initially at the whims of those around her, spending her first confusing months in a kibbutz before hitching a ride to the idealistic White City of Tel Aviv with the mysterious Johnny.

The Stone Diaries is an epic covering the life of one woman, Daisy Goodwill Flett, over the course of almost the entire twentieth century. Beginning with her birth in 1905, during which her mother dies, it catches up with Daisy at regular(ish) intervals through the century, covering her early life raised by her aunt Clarentine, her early marriage to the alcoholic Harold Hoad, a second marriage to a much older man (previously her ward, Barker Flett), parenthood and gradual decline through to her death in Florida in her nineties.

widow and resident of the town for around ten years, decides to open a bookshop in an abandoned seafront property known as The Old House, which is damp, decaying and apparently haunted by a "rapper" (poltergeist). She faces opposition from influential (and rich) local resident Mrs Gamart, who despite having shown negligible interest in the Old House previously, declares that she wants to use the location to set up an arts centre.

A Crime in the Neighbourhood is set in the suburbs of Washington, D.C. Its events are narrated from retrospective distance by Marsha, who as a ten year old saw her life impacted by a trio of events in the early part of 1972: the departure of her father (who elopes with her aunt), the unfolding Watergate scandal (which preoccupies her mother) and most importantly, the rape and murder of a young boy in her local area.

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.

Larry's Party covers just over twenty years in the life of Laurence "Larry" Weller, an initially "ordinary man" in Winnipeg, Manitoba. It begins in the mid-70s with him as a 26 year old assistant florist, and ends with him hosting the titular dinner party in 1997, his life having changed beyond recognition, but in some ways coming back to where the book began...

Blonde Roots has a concept that’s hugely appealing in its simplicity: it imagines a world in which the history of the slave trade is inverted, where “blak Aphrikans” are the masters and “whyte Europanes” the enslaved. Its central character is Doris Scagglethorpe, a white Englishwoman who is kidnapped as a child and taken on a slave ship to the New World (in the "West Japanese" islands) where she is acquired by the plantation owner Bwana, also known as Chief Kaga Konata Katamba I. She is ultimately moved to the imperial capital of Londolo, in the island of Great Ambossa where she becomes a "house slave" until her attempt to escape. As punishment, she is returned to the plantation and ends up labouring in the fields, suffering incredible hardship and dreaming of a final escape.

Fugitive Pieces is a novel in two sections, each focusing on a character's attempts to deal with trauma and loss relating to the Holocaust. Its first and longer section focuses on Jakob Beer, who as a 7-year old is the only person in his town to survive a round-up of Jews by invading Nazis. He is found by a Greek archaeologist, Athos Roussos, who take him into his care, moving him secretly to Zakynthos in Greece.

A Little Life begins in a familiar enough mode, detailing the lives of four clearly exceptionally talented young men, brought together as roommates at university in New York: JB, a painter; Malcolm, an architect; Willem, an aspiring actor; and finally Jude, a mathematical genius and eventual lawyer. It’s clear from early on that much of the novel’s intrigue is going to revolve around Jude, who despite his many talents is clearly suffering - with both serious physical and mental health issues resulting from initially undisclosed past events.

As it develops, it comes to focus more directly on Jude, and all of the other characters largely come to be defined more in terms of their relationship to him. We learn relatively early on that he has suffered severe abuse as a child, the nature of which is slowly expanded upon in increasingly horrific detail. Crucially, he is unable to reveal the truth of his life to anyone - instead taking refuge in long hours of work as a lawyer and in persistent self harm. While he enjoys the love of many friends, and ultimately adoptive parents in the form of mentor Harold and his wife Julia, he is unable to overcome his trauma. Throughout we’re given hope that through a series of positive developments Jude may be able to begin to face his past and at least begin to enjoy his life, but this - ultimately - isn’t that kind of novel.

A Spell of Winter is a gothic novel set in wealthy rural England in the years before World War I. It focuses on two siblings, Cathy and Rob, who live with their grandfather after their parents have departed in initially mysterious circumstances. They are brought up mainly by a servant, Kate, and taught by their hated governess Miss Gallagher, who appears to have an unhealthy fascination with Cathy.

Klara and the Sun is Ishiguro’s eighth novel, released to much anticipation last year at the height of the Covid Pandemic. It’s told from the perspective of an AF (Artificial Friend), a robotic life-form created to help provide company for children in a world in which they are no longer able to (for reasons not initially stated) socialise in school-like settings. As in Never Let Me Go, many key details are withheld. We come to understand via Klara’s limited but perceptive observations that this world is different to our own in ways we don’t quite understand (beyond just the existence of sentient AI-based lifeforms, of course.)

The Promise charts the decline of the white South African Swart family, at their farm outside Pretoria, over four decades. The novel covers the funerals of four out of five of the core family, against a backdrop of a changing South Africa, from the later years of Apartheid through the optimism of the Mandela years, Zuma-era corruption and into almost the present day.