Tell Me Everything brings together characters from across Strout’s writing career. In rural Maine, Bob Burgess (from 2013’s The Burgess Boys) finds himself taking on the case of a reclusive man who is under suspicion of the murder of his mother; also living nearby is novelist Lucy Barton, living near the coast with her ex-husband William and now firm friends with Bob; and at Bob’s suggestion Lucy also begins to visit the now nonagenarian Olive Kitteridge in her nursing home, where the two share stories and ponder on life and love.

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 Persians focuses on the women from three generations of a wealthy and prestigious Iranian family, the Valiats, whose life paths bifurcated around the time of the Islamic Revolution. While sisters Shirin and Seema left (along with their brother, partners and Seema’s daughter Bita) for the USA, the family’s matriarch Elizabeth stayed behind in their homeland, as did - in more unusual circumstances - Shirin’s then six-year-old daughter Niaz.

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.

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).

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.

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.

Confessions is set across several decades of recent history, in sections split between New York City and rural Donegal, Ireland. It is told from multiple perspectives, of women in different generations of the same family. It opens memorably on September 11, 2001, with Cora Brady wandering the streets of New York following the attacks, in which it rapidly becomes apparent that her father has died. In an absence of any other surviving family members, we learn that she is to move to Donegal to stay with her aunt Róisín. And that’s the last we hear from Cora for a while, as we first jump back and later forward in time to learn about the stories of her mother, aunt, and later her daughter.

Held is a very difficult book to summarize in a short paragraph. In some sort of roundabout fashion, it’s a ‘grand historical sweep’ and a family saga, two things I usually very much enjoy. It begins in the trenches of the First World War, before we follow fairly logically into its aftermath, with the return of a soldier to something approaching ‘normal’ life in an early photography studio. In that same section, it takes a leap towards the supernatural, as the faces of his subjects’ loved ones begin appearing in his images. From here, things begin (deliberately) to fall apart, as the ‘novel’ (in as much as it is one) becomes progressively more fragmentary as it travels though the twentieth century and beyond, encountering along the way several generations of descendants of the original characters and the occasional famous figure like Ernest Rutherford or Marie Curie.

The Safekeep begins in the early 1960s in the rural Dutch province of Overijssel. We meet the book’s central character, Isabel, who lives alone in her family home, following her mother’s death. She obsessively tends to the house, while knowing she is only a temporary occupant. The house will eventually pass to her elder brother Louis, who like her other brother Hendrick has no interest in living in the house, having left and embraced city life. The three siblings meet for a dinner early in the book, at which Louis introduces his latest girlfriend Eva, to whom Isabel is openly and viciously rude. When Louis is later called away for work, he insists that Eva stay in the family home with Isabel, much to the latter’s dismay.

This Strange Eventful History covers the lives of three generations of a Franco-Algerian family, the Cassars, from 1940 to 2010. It begins with a couple of maps that highlight key locations in the novel, alerting us early on to a recurrent theme of the novel, that of dislocation and a lack of a discernable 'home', for a community (of which Messud herself is a direct descendant) represented by the novel's central family.

Instructions for a Heatwave is set during the UK’s record-breaking 1976 heatwave and drought. It focuses on an Irish family, led by Gretta and Robert Riordan, who moved to London and raised three children, who have all now left home.. Robert goes out one morning for a newspaper and mysteriously disappears, which is the impetus for a re-grouping of the remaining family members, all of whom are dealing with their own issues and harbouring secrets.

The Second Coming is set primarily around 2011, but with leaps in time that take it 2022, 2001 and occasionally elsewhere.  It focuses on two primary characters - Jolie Aspern, a precocious and troubled 13-year-old living in New York with her mother Sarah, and her estranged father Ethan, an ex-convict and recovering addict.  It begins compellingly, with Jolie finding herself hospitalised following a narrow escape on Subway tracks, and Ethan receiving a call from Sarah that convinces him that he has something to offer her, and returns to New York to seek her out.

Brotherless Night begins in Jaffna, in the Tamil-dominated north of Sri Lanka, in the early 1980s.  Sixteen-year-old Sashi is studying hard, dreaming of going to medical school with her brothers and friend K.  Her life is slowly torn apart with the onset of the Sri Lankan Civil War. While staying with her Grandmother in Colombo in 1983, she finds herself caught up anti-Tamil riots. Her eldest brother is killed and her grandmother’s house burnt down. Subsequently two of her brothers join the Tamil Tigers, and her fourth brother briefly detained by authorities before departing for England.

The Wren, The Wren is told from the perspective of three members of the same family. We begin from the perspective of Nell, a student and latterly author of clickbait-y online journalism, who is keen to break away from her claustrophobic relationship with her mother. This perspective alternates through most of the book with that of her mother Carmel, who has raised Nell alone after a brief affair. Looming over them both is the long shadow of Carmel’s poet father Phil., a womaniser who channels most of hs useful energy into poetry and otherwise appears as something of a moral and emotional vaccum. His nature-focused poems are dotted through the book, and we also get one chapter from his perspective towards the end.

Restless Dolly Maunder is the fictionalised story of Grenville’s grandmother, with the author trying to make sense of her mother’s distant and cold impression of the former by imagining the motivations and emotions that drove her ‘restless’ life. It begins with Dolly’s childhood, on a farm in New South Wales in the late nineteenth century. Dolly is a bright and promising pupil at the local one-room school, but grows up in an era when it’s practically unheard of for women to progress in education and take on a job of their own. Her ambition to become a teacher is futile, as teachers must relinquish their role upon marriage, an inevitability for a young woman of her time. Besides, her father couldn’t bear the shame of having a working daughter! ‘Over my dead body’ is his response to her request, and a phrase that haunts Dolly for the rest of her life.

In Defence of the Act is told from the perspective of Jessica Miller, who is fascinated by the subject of suicide. She works in a lab which investigates suicide in animals, among colleagues she is sure have taken on that particular role with the view that their research will help understand and therefore prevent suicide in humans. Secretly, though, Jessica believes suicide may be - in some cases - a justified ‘act’ and even one which could be considered altruistic, or at least to the benefit of those who surround them. The roots of her unusual perspective are clearly in an incident in her childhood, in which she alerted her family to her father’s suicide attempt, therefore preventing it. He then went on to be consistently abusive, primarily to Jessica and her mother.

Enter Ghost follows Sonia, a 38-year-old British/Dutch actor, with Palestinian heritage, who has recently broken off an affair with a London theatre director. She decides to take some time out from her career to visit her sister, Haneen, in Haifa. The two sisters spent summers in their youth visiting family in Haifa, and the latter returned there to forge a career as an academic. Haneen introduces Sonia to her friend Mariam, a theatre director, who is in the early stages of putting on an Arabic-language production of Hamlet in the West Bank. While Sonia is initially reluctant to get involved, she is pulled in by Mariam’s bluntness and idealistic spirit and agrees to help out with rehearsals, before eventually getting swept up by the energy of the production and taking on the role of Gertrude.

Ordinary Human Failings is set in London in 1990, as a housing estate community is rocked by the death of a toddler, with suspicion quickly falling on Lucy, the 10-year old daughter of an Irish family, the Greens. A tabloid journalist, Tom, is dispatched to investigate, with a strong focus on digging up dirt on the Green family, whose outsider, reclusive status means they are the inevitable target of attention for the crime. It’s pitched as a thriller, with a mystery to be solved, and Tom is convinced he’s going to be the one to solve it. He moves the family into a small hotel, plies them with drink and looks for the inevitable trauma that has led them here, and a motive for the crime.

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.