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.

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.

Question 7 is a very difficult book to sum up. In simple terms, it’s a memoir, allowing Flanagan to dig deeper into themes he has explored in some of his novels, such as his relationship with his father (whose experiences on the Burmese Death Railway in WW2 were fictionalised as part of The Narrow Road…) and a near-death experience while kayaking as a young man (which informed his debut). But it’s also much broader than that.

Creation Lake is told from the perspective of a spy for hire (and former federal agent) known for the purposes of her current assignment as "Sadie Smith". She is in the process of infiltrating an agrarian commune of eco-leftists in France, known as the Moulinards. In order to do so, she has entered into a serious ‘relationship’ with a filmmaker called Lucien, who is close to the Moulinards' day-to-day leader, Pascal.