Flesh is set over most of the life of one man, István, with its main action taking place in his home country of Hungary, and London. We first meet István as a fifteen-year-old, living with his single mother in a new town. In an unsettling first chapter, István is (initially reluctantly) drawn into a sexual relationship by a much older woman, a friend of his mother’s. This relationship ends in tragedy, with István implicated in the death of her husband and subsequently serving time in a juvenile prison. The rest of the novel jumps forward in time for each chapter, often skipping significant moments in his life and focusing instead on their impact on him. Following a stint in the army during the 2003 war in Iraq, he moves to London where several chance developments lead him to a life of luxury. Up to a point, the novel seems like a classic ‘Rags to Riches’ narrative, but in its later chapters, we see István’s life gradually collapsing around him, and his eventual return to a relatively humble life in Hungary.

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.

The Land in Winter takes place in a remote community in the West Country of England during the famously harsh winter of 1962-63 (known as the ‘Big Freeze’). It focuses on two couples, neighbours separated by a field. Eric Parry is a local doctor, well-established in the community and married to Irene. They’re ostensibly a picture-perfect upper middle class couple, hosting dinner parties and very much conscious of their elevated status in their small community. The farm nearby has recently been bought by Bill Simmons, on something of a whim. He lives there with his relatively modern young wife Rita, who is adapting from her previous party life in the bars and clubs of Bristol. While Bill is also not exactly poor, he’s from an immigrant family (though not obviously) and the status of ‘farmer’ in the 1960s still very much carried an implication of lower social status than the Parrys. While Eric and Bill struggle to connect (or even really contemplate that they would), their wives are both pregnant and begin to form an unlikely bond.

One Boat is told from the perspective of Teresa, a contract lawyer and aspiring author from the UK. She has recently lost her father and is making a return visit to the same Greek coastal town she visited after the death of her mother nine years before. The novel jumps back and forth between Teresa’s encounters with the same characters nine years apart: notably Xanthe, the owner of a cafe she frequents; Niko, a younger diving instructor with whom she had an affair on her first visit but is now married with a daughter; and Petros, a long-time resident also originally from the UK with whom she has lengthy philosophical conversations. There’s also a focus on another Englishman, John, who she met on her first visit and who told her of his anger and desire for revenge for the violent death of his nephew.

Universality begins with a long first section written in the style of a journalistic ‘long read’. It recounts the tale of a crime which took place at an illegal rave on a Yorkshire farm, in which the leader of a radical anarchist movement is bludgeoned with a gold bar by a young man called Jake. In the article, presented as a kind of moral parable about class and wealth based divisions in our society, we are introduced to Jake’s mother, a populist ‘anti-Woke’ columnist who goes by the name of Lenny. We additionally meet Richard Spencer, the owner of the farm whose gold bar was used in the crime. He’s a wealthy banker who is presented as symptomatic of the ills of capitalism.

Seascraper begins by introducing us to Thomas Flett, a young man in a Northern English coastal town in the 1960s who works in the seemingly already slightly anachronistic profession of a “shanker”, using a horse and cart to collect shrimp in often hazardous conditions from a beach littered with “sinkpits”. He lives with his mother, who had him as a teenager and has been shunned by the local community. She relies on him to earn money, which he does through his unsociable, repetitive and physically exhausting work.

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.

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.

Fundamentally is the story of Nadia, an academic of Middle Eastern origin based in the UK, who has recently been poached from her cushy job in academia to go to Iraq to lead a UN taskforce focused on deradicalising women associated with ISIS. While her new role has some honourable intent behind it, she’s also escaping dissatisfaction with her life back home, where she has been disowned by her mother for straying too far from Islam and (in related news) dumped by her English girlfriend Rosy.

The Ministry of Time is a science fiction romance (with distinct thriller tropes on top of that), focusing on an unnamed civil servant working for the titular government agency in a near-future version of London. She is serving as a ‘bridge’ to one of an initial batch of time travellers, who have been ‘rescued’ from various significant points in history at the moment of their historical deaths. Her ‘expat’ (the name the government gives to the travelers, politically chosen in favour of ‘refugees’) is Graham Gore, a ship commander on board Sir John Franklin’s lost expedition to the Arctic in the 1840s.

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.

The Lesser Bohemians is told from the perspective of Eily, and 18-year-old Irish woman, newly registered at a London drama school. As she settles in to her new life in 1990s Camden Town, she attracts the attention of Stephen, an actor of some renown in his late thirties. They begin an intense, passionate and often destructively turbulent relationship. Initially, it seems like the focus may be on the imbalance of power in their age difference, and their are certainly aspects of that, but ultimately the story develops in much more complex ways as each reveals details of their traumatic past, which in sharing binds them ever closer together.

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.

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.

Nobody’s Empire is openly autobiographical, with its central character Stephen acting as almost entirely un-veiled substitute for Murdoch himself. Following a teenhood filled with relative popularity (as a DJ and promoter on the vibrant Glasgow music scene of the 1980s) and activity, we find Stephen in the early 90s, having recently split from a girlfriend and given up on a degree, both having proved incompatible with his recent diagnosis with ME / Chronic Fatigue Syndrome. He spends his days alternating between rest and limited social interactions, largely with his housemate Richard and friend Carrie, both of whom also suffer from the same condition.

We Pretty Pieces of Flesh follows three childhood friends (Rach, Kel and Shaz) from their first days at secondary school in Doncaster, through their teenage years together and later years apart, culminating in a reunion night out when potentially explosive secrets simmer under the surface. It’s written in impressively well-rendered local dialect, and is at heart a coming of age story, depicting the ups and downs of the teenage trio, and reflecting on where those years have led them - examining the bonds of friendship and as well as the forces that can tear them apart.