Glyph focuses primarily on two sisters: Petra, the elder, and Patricia (or ‘Patch’). The novel is set in (roughly) the present day, but flashes back to look at the sisters’ childhood in the 1990s. At a family party, an elderly relative tells the story of seeing a man utterly flattened by tanks in France in the Second World War. The sisters create an imaginary friend from the unknown man, and name him ‘Glyph’. This story, and another war tale of a man in the First World War who was executed for desertion (following his unwillingness to put down a blind horse), continue to the haunt the sisters in the present day. Petra is still searching for details of the flattened man, and calls Patricia for help following years of estrangement after she believes she sees the ‘ghost’ of the blind horse in her bedroom, which (by whatever means) has been trashed.

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.

The Accidental takes place mainly in a sleepy village in Norfolk, where a middle class family from Islington, London are spending their summer.  Eve Smart is the family’s mother, and a novelist who draws on real-life stories for her fiction, and is currently suffering from writer’s block.  Her partner is Michael, also a writer and a university professor in London, who is prone to infidelity with his students.  Eve’s daughters from a previous marriage (to an Adam, no less) are Astrid, a 12 year old girl with a love for photography and a delightful way with words, and Magnus, an older teenager with a scientific mind and a serious (and justified) sense of guilt hanging over him over an incident that happened before the holidays.

How to Be Both tells two stories, one from the perspective of George, an intelligent 16-year-old girl living in modern-day Cambridge, and another from the perspective of a relatively minor Italian renaissance artist, Francesco del Cossa.