Kingfisher tells the story of an unnamed queer man, a writer and university employee whose relationship with his partner Michael (a successful gym entrepreneur) is falling apart at the same time as he becomes obsessed with a female colleague (and far more successful writer) known as ‘the poet’, with whom he begins a complex relationship. His mother, Hetty, treated him badly in childhood in ways that are not fully explained and persists in expressing her homophobia. She is in a nursing home and he occasionally makes grudging visits to her with Michael. As the book develops, he ends his relationship with Michael and spends more and more time with the poet. Hetty becomes critically ill and the narrator decides against seeing her before her death, but as the poet suffers a re-emergence of her prior breast cancer, he effectively becomes a carer to her. Their complex relationship becomes the inspiration for him to restart his writing and leads to him securing a significant book deal.

The Mercy Step is a coming-of-age novel focusing on Mercy Hanson, the daughter of Windrush generation immigrants, from her premature birth in 1962 in Bradford through to her early teens. The book is narrated from Mercy’s perspective, starting in the womb and then in early months in hospital with ‘New Monya’. From an early age, she’s evidently a gifted and perceptive child and feels disconnected from the rest of her siblings, instead finding solace in chats on her ‘mercy step’ with her Dolly. She nonetheless feels closely tethered to her mother, a bond which is tested throughout the book by her inability to fight back against her abusive and generally unpleasant husband, Mercy’s Daddy, by her blind devotion to her religion, and by the general strains of being a struggling mother of many children. By the end of the book we find out whether she’s able to cut the cord from her mother and make her own way in life.

Heart the Lover begins in the 1980s, when a female college student meets two witty and intelligent fellow students, Sam and Yash, who come to play a very significant role in her life. Nicknamed ‘Jordan’ by the two men, she initially falls in love with Sam but his religious nature, stuffy family and his own tempestuousness (and generally dickishness if we’re being honest) soon put paid to that. She relatively quickly falls into a seemingly healthier relationship with Yash, but when she moves to Paris to become an au pair, he is distant in more senses than just the physical and seems less willing than Jordan to commit to their future together. When she returns to the US, he fails to meet her at the airport and she decides, heartbroken (and - unknown to Yash- pregnant) that their relationship is over.

Dominion is set in the fictional small town of Dominion, Mississippi in the year 2000. The novel focuses on the Winfrey family, with the family’s patriarch Sabre Winfrey Jr. the reverend of the Seven Seals Baptist Church, as well as a locally successful entrepreneur. The Winfreys outwardly represent the pinnacle of Southern Black success and religious devotion. Behind this facade, though, is a more unflattering reality, with Sabre’s relationship with his wife Priscilla somewhat broken by his relentless infidelities and hypocrisy.

The Correspondent is an epistolary novel told via the letters from and to the 73-year-old retired lawyer Sybil Van Antwerp, mostly covering a span of her later life in the 2010s. Living in Annapolis, Maryland, she is generally an ‘ordinary woman’ who is notable primarily for her commitment to the art of letter-writing (though she does also dabble in emails where absolutely necessary). The book covers her letters to friends and relatives, and the authors of books that she loves (including a notable correspondence with Joan Didion), as well as a few more interesting interchanges that form the basis of significant plot developments.

The Others is based in a ‘small coastal city’ (modelled on Rostock) in the north of East Germany, and begins early in 1989, prior to the seismic geopolitical changes that took place over the course of that year. It focuses on a love triangle between three very different characters: at the heart of it is Lolita, a medical student from India; with Armando (a factory worker on a labour exchange from Mozambique) and Theo (an East German mechanic and aspiring writer) vying for her attention. At the start of the novel, Armando and Lolita are on an early date, accompanied by Armando’s daughter Clara (with ex-lover Petra, an East German journalist), when they come across the body of a drowned man, who apparently lost his life while attempting an escape to Denmark. Their involvement in his discovery attracts the attention of the Stasi, leading to increased tensions over their already precarious position as ‘others’ in the tightly controlled regime.

Wild Dark Shore is set on the fictional Shearwater Island (inspired by the real-world Macquarie Island) between Australia and Antarctica. Its sole inhabitants (aside from thousands of penguins and seals) are Dominic Salt and his three children. Following the departure of a group of research scientists as sea levels rise to dangerous levels, the Salt family are the sole caretakers of the world’s largest remaining seed vault. Their isolation is shattered by the arrival of the battered and barely alive body of Rowan. While the family nurse her back to health, there are evidently secrets on both sides. Rowan is both drawn to Dominic and his children and repelled by a succession of discoveries that raise suspicions.

The Benefactors is a novel told in a polyphony of voices, centring on the aftermath of a sexual assault that takes place at teenage party. Much of the novel’s focus is on the families of both the victim, Misty, and the three male protagonists. The young men’s mothers, while all very different, are part of a middle-class milieu that is utterly different from that inhabited by Misty, who lives in another part of town and is part of a family used to scraping money together to make ends meet. For her own part, Misty spends some of her time camming on an OnlyFans-style site called Benefactors (or ‘Bennyz’), which is used alongside her social status as ammunition by the mothers to discredit her. The book deals with this social divide, and the way in which the odds are stacked against the likes of Misty and her family, while those with money come together to protect their own, supported by a system that can’t be beaten.

Flashlight begins with the disappearance of Serk, a Korean émigré and academic, during a walk on along the coast in a small Japanese town with his young daughter, Louisa. While Serk is presumed drowned, Louisa washes ashore hours later, traumatized and unable to recall what has happened. The books subsequently spans decades and continents, as Louisa and her American mother, Anne, struggle to cope with their grief and the mystery of his vanishing. This sits against the complex geopolitical backdrop of the late 20th century, particularly focusing on the lives of Korean immigrants in Japan and the unsettling history of North Korea.

A Guardian and a Thief introduces us to two families in a near-future version of Kolkata. This is a world ravaged by the effects of the climate crisis, with unbearable heat and extreme food shortages a daily (and worsening) fact of life, with Kolkata clearly very much at the frontline of a global crisis. We first meet Ma, her toddler daughter Mishti and elderly father Dadu. The three are a week away from a move to Michigan in the US, where they will join Ma’s husband where he has a job as a scientist. Early in the novel, however, their house is broken into and (amongst more trivial items) their passports and travel documents are stolen. The remainder of the novel is structured around the next seven days, in which they frantically attempt to ensure that they are able to proceed with their planned journey.

Audition is very much a novel of two halves. A cliche, and one which has come up more than once in my recent reading, but never more true than here. In its first part, we are introduced to an unnamed female narrator, preparing for a role in an upcoming play, in which she is notably struggling to nail a key scene. A young man, Xavier, meets her for lunch in an upmarket restaurant, having previously explained that he believes she may be his mother (a seeming impossibility as the narrator has never given birth). They are observed briefly by her husband, Tomas, an art critic, who seems somewhat weary of her affairs and is behaving a little shiftily himself.