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.

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.

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.

James is, in its simplest sense, a retelling of Mark Twain's classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, from the perspective of the slave Jim. The original is loved and criticised (particularly around its complex handling of race relations) in equal parts, and Everett engages with it with a similar mix of obvious love for the source material and a clear sense of purpose in its interrogation of some of its more problematic aspects.

Help Wanted takes place in a large chain "big-box" store in upstate New York, and shifts focus between the employees of its "Movement" (aka Logistics) team as they race to complete their repetitive tasks in the early hours of the morning, snark about their awful middle-manager Meredith, and eventually plot to attempt to have her replaced.

How to Make a Bomb was initially published last year in the US under the somewhat less provocative title Dartmouth Park. It’s a short novel, written in a sparse poetic style, eschewing paragraphs in favour of short sentences with line breaks and limited punctuation. Its focus is the fifty-year-old London-based historian Philip Notman, who is thrown into a deep personal crisis following a trip to a conference in Bergen. On his return he begins to struggle to pick up with his everyday life, and abandons his wife and (adult) son to head off in search of… something. Initially it seems that that something may be an affair, with the captivating Ines, who he met at the Bergen conference and initially seeks out in Cadiz. Yet relatively soon he is on the move again, this time to Crete to spend time in the dilapidated house of an older couple he helped out in Spain. He arrives seeking fulfillment of a different kind, away from the noise of modern life, and is further tempted by the allure of religion on a visit to a monastery. When all of this ultimately fails to resolve his issues, he heads back to London with a new sense of purpose, and a rather disturbing mission.

Caledonian Road is set largely on and around the titular thoroughfare, which heads northwards from near London’s King’s Cross station. Its action takes place in the very recent past, in a year’s period between early 2021 (and the ending of major Covid restrictions) and early 2022 (with Russian’s invasion of Ukraine on the imminent horizon). It’s introduced (at least in this pre-release version) by an extensive list of characters, setting the tone for the sprawling, somewhat Dickensian nature of the 600-ish pages to follow. At its undoubted centre, though, is the aging white liberal academic Campbell Flynn, clearly something of a proxy for the author. Having worked his way up in society from humble Glaswegian roots, through a combination of academic achievement and marriage into minor aristocracy, Campbell is a lecturer at UCL, a published art historian (most recently of an acclaimed life of Vermeer), sometime glossy magazine columnist and podcaster. Yet he senses shifting sands in society, and mostly the ones that uphold everything that he holds dears. Campbell, like the liberal intelligentsia he represents, is in crisis. And so, it seems, are his city and his country.

Fast By The Horns is set in the Bristol neighbourhood of St. Pauls in 1980. It focuses on Jabari, the 14-year-old only son of the Rasafarian community leader Ras Levi. He exists in a clearly very close-knit community, but one that is constantly beaten down by corrupt policing and lack of council investment. Ras Levi and his fellow Rastafarians in the community, including of course Jabari, dream of repatriation to the Ethiopian motherland, though others in the community mock their ambitions and urge them to engage with the political realities of life in the UK. Amidst the violence and daily struggles with police brutality, Jabari's encounter with a young girl formerly from St. Pauls, who we find has been placed in the care of a white family in a neighbouring affluent area, provides a tender and emotional thread at the centre of the novel.

Martyr! introduces us to Cyrus Shams, a recently sober son of Iranian immigrants (and evidently an autobiographical proxy for the author). As a child he moved to the US following the loss of his mother when her plane (Iran Air Flight 655; based on a real incident) was shot down over the Persian Gulf by US forces. His father, who made his way in the States as a factory farm worker, has also died, leaving Cyrus seeking meaning initially in narcotics but subsequently in poetry.

Pity is a short novel that trains its eyes on the former mining town of Barnsley, near to Sheffield in northern England. It focuses on three generations of the same family, covering the late twentieth century up to the present day (or thereabouts), and almost exclusively focusing on the men of the family.