Vigil takes us back to what many have dubbed the ‘Bardoverse’, that being a kind of purgatorial netherworld inhabited by the dead that formed the primary focus of Lincoln in the Bardo. Here, though, the setting is the present day (or thereabouts) and instead of a graveyard we largely find ourselves at the bedside of a dying man, the powerful oil executive K. J. Boone. We are introduced to him through the eyes of Jill “Doll” Blaine, a young woman who died (in a rather unfortunate case of mistaken identity) in the 1970s, and has been sent to ‘comfort’ Boone through his dying moments. While she has been through this process more than 300 times in her afterlife, Boone represents an entirely new experience for her. He is an unrepentant architect of climate change, and even aside from that, a man with precious few redeeming qualities.

The Palm House focuses on the friendship between Laura Miller (the narrator) and Edmund Putnam (known mainly as ‘Putnam’) two characters working in the London media landscape, set close to the present day. Over the course of a long weekend, they meet several times for drinks and crisps, and discuss the state of their lives, and share stories from their past. Putnam is coming to the terms with the death of his father and dealing with the arrival of a terrible new boss at Sequence, the cultural publication he has spent decades working for, and Laura is still somewhat in the shadow of her performative and over-the-top mother, and is somewhat listless in her current life and looking for ways to improve her circumstance.

Dark is the Morning takes place in Abruzzo, Italy, predominantly in the early 2000s. At its centre is a relationship between Gino, who after a mis-spent youth is trying to get his life back on track, and Franca, who told him when they were children that they would one day marry. The novel is set up as a romance, in which two outsiders look set to make amends for their failure to get it together during some initial adventures as teenagers. However, we know from the start that things are unlikely to be as simple as that, via means of words that conclude its introductory chapter, narrated by the Englishman Harry who (from the present day) refers ominously to ‘those events’ that took place in the early 2000s.

Belgrave Road is ostensibly a love story, between two immigrants to the UK who meet in the Midlands city of Leicester. Mira has arrived in Leicester, like many others, from India, following an arranged marriage to the British-raised Rajiv. She is at once far away from home, and amongst many of her compatriots in a long-established Indian community in the city. She meets Tahliil, a recent arrival from Somalia, who endured a traumatic journey with his sister to escape war and find sanctuary in the UK.

I Could Be Famous is a book of semi-connected short stories set in California and largely around the LA/Hollywood celebrity ecosystem. Ten of the stories have young women as their focus, mostly in some way connected to or on the periphery of this celebrity culture (from aspirational actors to minor reality TV stars). One more story (Trick) focuses on the established actor Arlo Banks, who has recently found his career somewhat derailed by allegations of cannibalism. He also crops up again in several of the other stories, and it is implied that he is somehow a connecting thread between all of the women in the book.

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.

Jesus Christ Kinski’s premise initially seems to be the recreation of a single performance by the prolific and legendarily volatile actor Klaus Kinski. After many years acting in movies (of wildly varying quality) in 1971 Kinski returned to the theatrical stage for a one-man show at Berlin’s Deutschlandhalle, a monologue entitled Jesus Christus Erlöser ("Jesus Christ the Saviour / Redeemer”). His intense performance rapidly devolved into a kind of battle between Kinski and the audience. The occasion was captured on film and released as a documentary in 2008. In the book’s first part, we are thrown directly into the performance, told in Kinski’s own voice, and moving wildly between reportage of the event itself and Myers’ invention (using words from Kinski’s autobiographies) of what may have been going through his mind.

TonyInterruptor begins with a simple enough set-piece: at a provincial jazz night, the quintessential British jazzer Sasha Keyes and “his Ensemble” are playing when their set is interrupted, not by your average heckler but by a character who seems to want to start a serious philosophical conversation, asking “Is this honest? Are we all being honest here?”. His interruption is filmed by a Gen Z attendee, India Shore, and this video (along with another detailing a backstage interraction between the band in which the character is mockingly referred to as “TonyInterruptor”) goes viral on social media. The book explores the impact of this moment in time, and its online aftermath, on a small group of characters including Keyes’ bandmates, India Shore’s parents, and the eponymous character himself.

The Accidental Immigrants is set on the Mediterranean island of St. Mira. It’s an independent country with historic ties to Greece but also a sizeable post-colonial British presence. In the wake of financial crises and an ineffective centrist government, it has also recently seen the rise of a nativist political party, the ‘Firsters’. When a bomb goes off at a British military base on the island just weeks before a general election, everything falls into place for a whitewash for the Firsters. Our focal points on the island are Tess, a translator with both St. Miran and British roots, and her partner Arlo, a Brit teaching the ‘Life in the UK’ course to St. Miran residents who want to emigrate to his home country. As the Firsters sweep to power, and immediately introduce new laws targeting foreigners on the island, Tess and Arlo find themselves strangers in the land they have made their home for years.

The Fathers introduces us to its titular characters in a Glasgow hospital where both have just given birth to a baby boy. For Dan, a fortysomething TV writer living in the affluent West End of Glasgow, this is his first child with Grace, after a lengthy period of IVF and therefore seen as somewhat miraculous and awe-inspiring. Jada, a small-time criminal, by contrast, is welcoming his fifth (or is it sixth?) child Jayden (or is it Cayden?) with his young girlfriend Nicola. A chance meeting in the hospital corridor seems initially comic and inconsequential, but a tragic sequence of events will draw the two families together in unexpected ways.

The Offing takes place one summer in the years after the Second World War, in North-East England. Robert Appleyard, a sixteen year old from a Durham mining town, has finished his compulsory education and before he begins his expected path in life, following his lineage of male relatives into a mining career, he sets off on a journey south along the North Sea coast, aiming only to see more of the world outside of his small town. After a period sleeping under the stars, completing manual labour for those he meets along the way to pay for food, he stumbles upon a dilapidated cottage in the vicinity of Robin Hood’s Bay inhabited only by the bohemian Dulcie Piper and her dog Butler.

Olive Kitteridge is a short story cycle covering several decades in the lives of the inhabitants of a rural Maine community. One character is common throughout the collection’s stories, the indomitable Olive, a retired schoolteacher, matriarch, and pillar (of sorts) of the local community. She is central to many of the stories, an important piece of the plot in others, and entirely peripheral to a few others. It’s superficially an odd kind of assemblage, betraying in some senses its roots as a collection of short stories published by Strout over the course of the whole of the 90s and 2000s. But it does contain narrative progression, its throughline being in the development of its lead character, who in the course of the book sees her son twice married, her husband incapacitated and later passing away, and the beginnings of an unlikely later-life relationship.

The Möbius Book is a neither straightforwardly Lacey’s fifth novel, nor entirely not. It is a work in two parts, one ostensibly fiction and the other memoir, in its printed form designed to be read in whichever order the reader chooses, with neither presented as the ‘correct’ choice. In the the digital ARC I read, the first part is the fictional narrative, which concerns two friends - Marie and Edie - who meet at the former’s flat in the wake of their respective painful breakups (Marie with her ex-wife K, with whom she co-parented two children; Edie from an abusive partner), both choosing to ignore the blood seeping through Marie’s neighbour’s door.

Parallel Lines has at its centre two characters: Olivia, a documentarian making a radio series about possible world-ending catastrophes, and Sebastian, a man in his fifth year of therapy with Olivia’s father, Dr. Martin Carr. It’s not giving too much away to reveal that the two lead characters, up to this point in their lives living ‘parallel’ but (almost) entirely separate existences, share a much deeper connection, which is revealed through the novel’s events.

The City Changes Its Face is both a sequel to and a kind of retelling of McBride’s brilliant 2017 work The Lesser Bohemians. It joins that book’s protagonists, Eily and Stephen, just a few years after its events, with the setting roughly the same - we’re still in grimy mid-90s London, although the lovers’ new house is somewhat less poky and grim than their Camden dwelling in the first book. It hops around in time between the ‘present day’ setting of late 1996, and various periods in between the action of The Lesser Bohemians and that time. The broad concept is that the ‘now’ sections detail an argument between the two over the course of a day, with the hops back in time providing some context. In the middle of all of this is the book’s centrepiece, a description by Eily of a screening of a rough cut of Stephen’s autobiographical film, which expands on his traumatic backstory, this time artistically mediated and then interpreted by Eily, rather than in his first-person confessional voice as in the first book.

Nova Scotia House is told in the unique interior voice of Johnny Grant, who as a 19-year-old in the 1980s met and fell in love with Jerry Field, a 45-year-old who was HIV positive at a time when that meant a guaranteed and imminent death sentence. It’s narrated from some 30 years hence, as Johnny struggles to negotiate the modern world without Jerry (now long dead) and without much of the exuberance and idealism that characterised their time together.

The Book of Records has as its central thread the story of Lina, a young girl who has been forced to emigrate from her homeland (seemingly part of China), and with her father has arrived at a mysterious enclave called 'the Sea', a shapeshifting and timeshifting fantasy of a refugee camp. In the process they have been separated from Lina's mother and brother, with their present whereabouts and status unknown. Among their minimal possessions are three volumes taken from The Great Voyagers encyclopedia series, which Lina obsessively reads and memorises.

We Do Not Part is told from the perspective of a woman named Kyungha, an investigative journalist and writer based in Seoul. She lives alone and suffers from recurring nightmares that seem to symbolically intertwine natural elements and mass human suffering. She receives a message from her long-time friend and collaborator, a photographer, artist and filmmaker called Inseon. Inseon has been hospitalised following a woodworking accident, in which the tips of her fingers were sliced off (notably while working on a project suggested by Kyungha and inspired by her dreams, which she had asked her to stop).

Gliff is set in a near-future dystopian version of what seems to be somewhere in England. In it we meet two children, the slightly older Briar/Brice/Bri and their younger sister Rose. Their mother has been taken away for dissent and we initially find them in the care of her boyfriend Leif. They come home to find their house with a red line painted around it, which they take as a cue to flee. When the same happens to their camper van, Leif takes the children to a 'safe house' and sets off alone to look for their mother. From there on in, Bri and Rose are left to fend for themselves.

Ripeness is told from the perspective of the 70-year-old Edith, brought up in England’s Midlands but here living a comfortable life in rural Ireland, somewhere around the present day. It consists of two strands: one focuses on her pleasant but mundane life in the here and now, her casual relationship (post-divorce) with Gunter, and her friendship with Maebh, who receives a message from a man in America claiming to be her half-brother. The second intertwining strand takes the form of a missive from Edith to her nephew, to be open upon her death, which describes the circumstances leading up to his birth in 1960s Italy to her young ballet-dancer sister Lydia. There are subtle plot details which slowly reveal themselves over the course of both parts of the narrative, which while not earth-shatteringly shocking are still integral to the reading experience, so I’ll keep my summary brief here.