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.