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.

Treacle Walker is a short and highly distinctive novel. In it, a young boy call Joseph Coppock, in recovery from illness and suffering from a lazy eye, has an encounter with the titular rag-and-bone man, with whom he makes a trade of his dirty pyjamas and an old lamb bone, receiving in return an empty jar of medicine and a donkey stone. In its few pages, Joseph encounters a naked ‘bog man’ named Thin Amren, sees characters from his Knockout comic leap off the page and join him in a reality-bending adventure involving mirrors and marbles, communes with cuckoos and learns via a visit to an optician that he sees different realities through his good and bad eyes.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is structurally a murder mystery, albeit one with significant twist.  In 1989, war photographer Maali Almeida finds himself in a highly bureaucratic version of the afterlife, in a kind of hinterland between life and passage to “The Light” in which he must solve the mystery of his own death in ‘seven moons’ (otherwise known as a week). It’s set against the backdrop of a particularly turbulent period is Sri Lanka’s troubled recent history, in which various factions including the Tamil Tigers, the marxist JVP, and the government’s own death squads are unleashing relatively indiscrimate violence on each other at a shocking rate.  

Glory is a satirical allegory of the circumstances surrounding the end of Robert Mugabe’s decades of rule in Zimbabwe in 2017, and his replacement by his former Vice President Emmerson Mnangagwa. It uses a cast of animals in place of humans, enabling it to blend direct retelling of history with fantastical satire that becomes a broader commentary on dictatorships, tyrannical rulers, and the state of the modern world in general

Small Things Like These is simply a beautiful read. Its slim page-count contains a surprising amount of depth, both in terms of plot and emotional punch. The present-day narrative is set in mid-1980s Ireland, where coal and timber merchant Bill Furlong is preparing for Christmas with his wife and four daughters, as well as going about his work as usual, at a busy time of year. This work takes him to the local nunnery, which is a Magdalene Laundry site. His reaction to what he finds there, coupled with his reflections on his own upbringing as the child of a poor single mother, form the core of the novel and the impetus for its unifying theme.

We Need To Talk About Kevin is told from the perspective of Eva Khatchadourian, a comfortably well-off former author and publisher of a series of travel guides.  It’s structured around a series of letters she writes to her partner, Franklin, in the years after their troubled son Kevin killed nine people in a high-school massacre, and was subsequently incarcerated for his crime. 

Nightcrawling tells the story of 17-year-old Kiara, a black girl living in poverty in Oakland, California.  Her situation is unenviable: her father dead, her mother imprisoned for a fairly horrifying reason, and taking responsibility for both her feckless aspiring-rapper brother and her virtually abandoned young neighbour Trevor. In desperation, she takes to the streets, where she is eventually picked up and abused by a gang of truly repulsive police officers and eventually finds herself at the centre of a court case against the police force. 

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.