Children of Paradise (named after Marcel Carné’s 1945 French film) tells the story of Holly, a young woman just arrived in an unnamed city, who takes a job at its oldest cinema, The Paradise. The cinema is clearly a relic of a bygone age, staffed by a memorable motley crew of misfit cinephiles, barely existing on pitiful wages and whatever their customers leave behind underneath their seats (money, valuables, unidentifiable narcotics) in its one screen. Holly is a relative novice to the world of the cinema, and initially an outsider. She soon becomes accepted by her fellow employees, and begins to live their life of seemingly 24/7 film viewings, subsisting on pilfered booze, popcorn, dubious nachos and those even more dubious abandoned drugs. She begins to have regular encounters with a fellow employee, Paolo, though later discovers that this was merely par for the course - everyone is sleeping with everyone else at the Paradise.

I’m a Fan is told through the eyes of an unnamed female narrator, aged around thirty and living in South East London. It’s a thoroughly contemporary novel, with its central protagonist living much of her life mediated via the lens of social media. It mainly details her relationships with two further unnamed characters: “The Man I Want To Be With”, a powerful older male celebrity with whom she falls into an occasional sexual relationship, very much on his terms and fitting around his marriage, career and multiple other infidelities, notably with “The Woman I Am Obsessed With”, a wealthy British social media influencer now living in the States.

The Marriage Portrait is a heavily fictionalised version of the short life of Lucrezia de' Medici, a sixteenth century member of the renowned aristocratic House of Medici in Italy. As the novel's introductory note explains, she was betrothed to Alfonso II, Duke of Ferrara at very young age, and died fairly soon after their marriage, with persistant (though unproven) rumours alleging that she was poisoned. O'Farrell's interest in the subject was spurred on by seeing a surviving portrait of Lucrezia, attributed to Bronzino, and Robert Browning's poem My Last Duchess, which covers the same subject matter.

Homesick is a childhood memoir / coming of age story of a girl called Amy, who is seemingly a reasonably direct proxy for Croft herself. Central to the story is her relationship with her younger sister Zoe The two are initially inseparable, with a unique bond that they supplement with the creation of their own unique symbol-based language. When Zoe develops a life-changing illness, Amy becomes wracked with guilt, which only seems to expand when she moves away to college at just fifteen, accepted on the basis of her prodigious grasp of Russian. Along the way, there are also explorations of young love, as both girls become obsessed by their language tutor; grief, as they deal with an unexpected suicide; and of course language itself.

Fire Rush is focused on Yamaye, a young woman of Jamaican heritage, living on the Tombstone Estate in suburban London in the late 1970s. Her mother is long gone, though remains a spectral presence in her life, and her father, while physically present, is cold and distant. She escapes into an underground culture of Caribbean music, centring on a local club called the Crypt, which is of course quite literally underground. She parties with her friends Asase and Rumer (the latter an Irish immigrant) and takes on the male-dominated club culture by developing her own knowledge of music and fierce line in lyrics which she begins to unleash at the Crypt. She meets a sensitive and romantic man, Moose, at the club, and the two fall in love and dream of escape to the Jamaican countryside

A Girl is a Half-Formed Thing is a stream-of-consciousness novel, told from the perspective of an unnamed Irish girl in highly distinctive, fractured prose.  It’s largely addressed to her brother, also unnamed and referred to as ‘you’ throughout. His life is limited by the impact of brain damage from the removal of a childhood trauma, but the love between the two siblings is evident throughout, in a novel that doesn’t offer much else in the way of solace. 

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.

The Blue Flower is set in the Germany of the late Eighteenth century, as Romantic sensibilities ferment in the great universities and clash with the traditional ways found in the small towns where much of its action takes place. At the centre of the novel is Friedrich von Hardenberg, a student of philosophy, rubbing shoulders with the likes of Goethe and developing his own ideas and poetry with which he will later find fame as Novalis. The novel’s short chapters provide insights into his unusual and contradictory life (alongside his poetry, he’s also taking on the running of a salt mine…) as well as those of his family members and contemporaries. Most strikingly, it details his captivation by the twelve-year old Sophie von Kuhn, a ‘normal’ girl offering little in terms of the usual expectations of the time (she’s neither financially nor intellectually his equal).

The Road Home focuses on Lev, a middle-aged widower from an unspecified Eastern European country (possibly Poland), as he travels to London with the goal of making money to support his young daughter who stays back home with his mother. The novel begins as one of survival, as Lev acclimatises to the harsh realities of living in London with no money and no job. He initially sleeps rough and makes small change delivering leaflets for a kebab shop, before landing a job as a dish-washer (or “nurse”) in the high pressure kitchen of GK Ashe, a fine-dining, Gordon Ramsey style establishment. He eventually finds himself a (child size) room with recent Irish divorcee Christy, with whom he forms an endearing friendship.

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.

Half of a Yellow Sun takes place in Nigeria in the years before, during and immediately after the Nigerian-Biafran (Civil) War (1967-70) in the decade following Nigeria’s independence from the UK in 1960. It focuses on three central characters: Olanna, the Igbo daughter of a wealthy businessman and eventually wife of Odenigbo, a Maths professor at the University of Nigeria in Nsukka; Ugwu, an Igbo village boy from Opi, who joins Odenigbo’s household as a servant (aged just 13) at the start of the novel; and Richard, the English expat and eventual partner of Olanna’s twin sister Kainene. 

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.

On Beauty, unlike many of Smith’s other novels, is set predominantly in the US - though still has a healthy focus on Britain (or at least Britain as represented by - once again - North-West London).  It focuses on the intertwined lives of two families - the Belseys and the Kipps. Both have university professors at the helm, in the shape of Howard Belsey, a white English Rembrandt scholar (living with his African-American wife Kiki and three children in a fictional affluent university town near Boston, MA), and his nemesis Monty Kipps, a conservative Trinidadian initially living in London with his wife Carlene and two children. 

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.