Orbital is conceptually simple yet unique. It follows a single day aboard an international space station, where six astronauts and cosmonauts go about their work, maintaining their craft, conducting scientific experiments, exercising, and observing and recording activity on Earth as they hurtle around it at incomprehensible speed. In the twenty-four hours covered by this slim novel, its protagonists will observe sixteen sunrises and sunsets on the planet below. In between the details of the day, we get sketches of the lives the six crewmembers have left behind.

This Strange Eventful History covers the lives of three generations of a Franco-Algerian family, the Cassars, from 1940 to 2010. It begins with a couple of maps that highlight key locations in the novel, alerting us early on to a recurrent theme of the novel, that of dislocation and a lack of a discernable 'home', for a community (of which Messud herself is a direct descendant) represented by the novel's central family.

Playground focuses primarily on four characters, who we know will come to share a connection. In Montreal, Evie Beaulieu is introduced in dramatic fashion, as a 12-year-old plunging to the bottom of a swimming pool, strapped to one of the first aqualungs by her father, and grows to love the ocean and everything connected to it. In Chicago, two super-smart kids with vastly differing backgrounds bond at an elite high school over their love of sophisticated board games. And finally there’s Ina Aroita, who has to my memory a far less memorable introduction, but is apparently considered to be one of the four main players also.

Oiur Evenings has a lot about it that will be familiar to Hollinghurst fans. Its protagonist, David Win, is a mixed-race child of a single parent, from the lower middle classes (his mother runs a small dressmaking business) in rural Southern England. He is a scholar at a prestigious fee-paying boys’ school, the recipient of an exhibition awarded by the arts benefactor Mark Harlow. The novel’s early chapters detail events during David’s time at that school, including a weekend at the Harlows’ country home, and an adventurous school ‘challenge’ in which he is paired with the Harlows’ son Giles (who we know from the book’s flash-forward introduction is to become a notorious right-wing politician and Brexit architect). David makes his way in life, developing an interest in acting and generally doing reasonably (if unspectacularly) well, all the while contending with his points of difference.

Our London Lives is told from the alternating viewpoints of two Irish immigrants who meet in a central London pub in the 1970s. Milly is a bartender at a traditional city pub, catering for a diverse clientele covering locals, city workers, and most importantly, boxers from a neighbouring club. One of those is Pip, who we first encounter as an ex-convict who has just come out of rehab, in 2017 (the novel’s ‘present day’). Pip’s story is told entirely from the vantage point of that present day, with all the retrospective mix of nostalgia and regret that comes with that sort of angle. By contrast, Milly’s narrative unfolds chronologically, in the moment, through the years from the late 1970s through to, eventually, 2017. In her story there are large leaps and gaps that aren’t immediately filled in, but the two perspectives collide in a richly satisfying (though far from conclusive) ending.

Instructions for a Heatwave is set during the UK’s record-breaking 1976 heatwave and drought. It focuses on an Irish family, led by Gretta and Robert Riordan, who moved to London and raised three children, who have all now left home.. Robert goes out one morning for a newspaper and mysteriously disappears, which is the impetus for a re-grouping of the remaining family members, all of whom are dealing with their own issues and harbouring secrets.

The Second Coming is set primarily around 2011, but with leaps in time that take it 2022, 2001 and occasionally elsewhere.  It focuses on two primary characters - Jolie Aspern, a precocious and troubled 13-year-old living in New York with her mother Sarah, and her estranged father Ethan, an ex-convict and recovering addict.  It begins compellingly, with Jolie finding herself hospitalised following a narrow escape on Subway tracks, and Ethan receiving a call from Sarah that convinces him that he has something to offer her, and returns to New York to seek her out.

Brotherless Night begins in Jaffna, in the Tamil-dominated north of Sri Lanka, in the early 1980s.  Sixteen-year-old Sashi is studying hard, dreaming of going to medical school with her brothers and friend K.  Her life is slowly torn apart with the onset of the Sri Lankan Civil War. While staying with her Grandmother in Colombo in 1983, she finds herself caught up anti-Tamil riots. Her eldest brother is killed and her grandmother’s house burnt down. Subsequently two of her brothers join the Tamil Tigers, and her fourth brother briefly detained by authorities before departing for England.

The Wren, The Wren is told from the perspective of three members of the same family. We begin from the perspective of Nell, a student and latterly author of clickbait-y online journalism, who is keen to break away from her claustrophobic relationship with her mother. This perspective alternates through most of the book with that of her mother Carmel, who has raised Nell alone after a brief affair. Looming over them both is the long shadow of Carmel’s poet father Phil., a womaniser who channels most of hs useful energy into poetry and otherwise appears as something of a moral and emotional vaccum. His nature-focused poems are dotted through the book, and we also get one chapter from his perspective towards the end.

Restless Dolly Maunder is the fictionalised story of Grenville’s grandmother, with the author trying to make sense of her mother’s distant and cold impression of the former by imagining the motivations and emotions that drove her ‘restless’ life. It begins with Dolly’s childhood, on a farm in New South Wales in the late nineteenth century. Dolly is a bright and promising pupil at the local one-room school, but grows up in an era when it’s practically unheard of for women to progress in education and take on a job of their own. Her ambition to become a teacher is futile, as teachers must relinquish their role upon marriage, an inevitability for a young woman of her time. Besides, her father couldn’t bear the shame of having a working daughter! ‘Over my dead body’ is his response to her request, and a phrase that haunts Dolly for the rest of her life.

River East, River West takes the form of two parallel narratives, as two characters experience contrasting moments in the recent history of China. The more autobiographical section, set initially in 2007 (shortly before the Financial Crisis), introduces us to 14-year-old Alva, the daughter of American expat and failed actress Sloan, as she navigates being a ‘laowai’ in a Chinese high school and looks on enviously at those attending American expat schools nearby.

You Are Here begins by introducing us to Marnie, a 38-year-old copy-editor living in London, a natural introvert who has become more and more reclusive over time, exacerbated by the Covid-induced move to remote work and a breakup with her ill-matched husband. Her friend Cleo, a teacher, has been trying to get her to re-emerge into the world, and against expectations, it’s a big trip to the north of England that finally works. Cleo’s colleague and friend Michael, a 42-year-old Geography teacher and general loveable nerd (also recently separated), is planning to walk the Coast-to-Coast path - crossing England from the Irish Sea in Cumbria to the North Sea in North Yorkshire. Cleo arranges a group of fellow adventurers - including Marnie - to join him for the first part of the trip in the Lake District.

In Defence of the Act is told from the perspective of Jessica Miller, who is fascinated by the subject of suicide. She works in a lab which investigates suicide in animals, among colleagues she is sure have taken on that particular role with the view that their research will help understand and therefore prevent suicide in humans. Secretly, though, Jessica believes suicide may be - in some cases - a justified ‘act’ and even one which could be considered altruistic, or at least to the benefit of those who surround them. The roots of her unusual perspective are clearly in an incident in her childhood, in which she alerted her family to her father’s suicide attempt, therefore preventing it. He then went on to be consistently abusive, primarily to Jessica and her mother.

Enter Ghost follows Sonia, a 38-year-old British/Dutch actor, with Palestinian heritage, who has recently broken off an affair with a London theatre director. She decides to take some time out from her career to visit her sister, Haneen, in Haifa. The two sisters spent summers in their youth visiting family in Haifa, and the latter returned there to forge a career as an academic. Haneen introduces Sonia to her friend Mariam, a theatre director, who is in the early stages of putting on an Arabic-language production of Hamlet in the West Bank. While Sonia is initially reluctant to get involved, she is pulled in by Mariam’s bluntness and idealistic spirit and agrees to help out with rehearsals, before eventually getting swept up by the energy of the production and taking on the role of Gertrude.

Ordinary Human Failings is set in London in 1990, as a housing estate community is rocked by the death of a toddler, with suspicion quickly falling on Lucy, the 10-year old daughter of an Irish family, the Greens. A tabloid journalist, Tom, is dispatched to investigate, with a strong focus on digging up dirt on the Green family, whose outsider, reclusive status means they are the inevitable target of attention for the crime. It’s pitched as a thriller, with a mystery to be solved, and Tom is convinced he’s going to be the one to solve it. He moves the family into a small hotel, plies them with drink and looks for the inevitable trauma that has led them here, and a motive for the crime.

Soldier Sailor is a brief but intense novel told by a mother (the titular ‘Soldier’) and addressed to her son (who she calls ‘Sailor’). Its not entirely clear from what remove it’s being written - the narrative jumps around so much that it’s hard to be certain - but it focuses on Sailor’s first two or three years of life, during which the narrator is practically fighting for survival as she struggles with the everyday demands of motherhood. She is left, like so many mothers, bearing virtually all of the work of bringing up her son, while her husband goes to work, watches football, and - most egregiously of all - sleeps. Through a series of traumatic vignettes (none more so than the novel’s opening section - in which she briefly abandons her child, having written a suicide note to him) we learn of Soldier’s despairing sense of alienation from the previous version of herself, who she sees as lost to the all-consuming mother who has replaced her. Throughout, though, there is also a near-unbearable sense of the desperate love of mother for child, culminating in a lyrical, beautiful final section in which Soldier contemplates their inevitable future separation: in spite of all the trauma of the present moment, the real source of fear in her life.

Rare Singles is a slim novel focusing on Earlon ‘Bucky’ Bronco, a seventy-something Black man living in Illinois, who cut a few soul records as a teenager but has spent much of the recent of his life working dead-end jobs and devoting his life to his wife Maybellene, who has recently died. Out of the blue, he receives a request to travel to Scarborough, a fading seaside resort in Northern England, to play a comeback show at a Northern Soul Weekender. Unbeknownst to Bucky, who was paid a derisory flat fee for his initial recordings so has no way of tracking their afterlives, his two ‘rare singles’ have become loved and treasured in the Northern Soul scene, which gave another life to many obscure releases from US soul singers on the Northern-English dancefloors (and to some extent, the UK charts) of the 70s and beyond.

The Accidental takes place mainly in a sleepy village in Norfolk, where a middle class family from Islington, London are spending their summer.  Eve Smart is the family’s mother, and a novelist who draws on real-life stories for her fiction, and is currently suffering from writer’s block.  Her partner is Michael, also a writer and a university professor in London, who is prone to infidelity with his students.  Eve’s daughters from a previous marriage (to an Adam, no less) are Astrid, a 12 year old girl with a love for photography and a delightful way with words, and Magnus, an older teenager with a scientific mind and a serious (and justified) sense of guilt hanging over him over an incident that happened before the holidays.

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.

Cuddy begins with the death of its eponymous hero, St. Cuthbert of Lindisfarne, in 687, and thereafter takes us on a wild and eclectic ride through the centuries, giving us an alternative history of the North-East of England , over which the venerated saint’s influence looms large. Casting an equally grand shadow over the novel is Durham Cathedral, Cuddy’s burial place. The novel is split into four sections and an interlude, the first of which (‘Saint Cuddy’, taking place in 995) follows a band of monks as they carry the saint’s corpse around the North for decades (his body having been evacuated from the island of Lindisfarne in order to protect it from desecration by invading Danes).