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 Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is an epic family saga centring on the lives of Sonia Shah and Sunny Bhatia, two young people from India whose paths intertwine. The story is initiated by a clumsy and half-hearted failed attempt to engineer an arranged marriage between the two by their neighbouring families in India. Sonia, an aspiring novelist who has been studying in Vermont, returns home to India after a deeply troubling relationship in New York with a memorably deranged and controlling older artist named Ilan de Toorjen Foss. She is haunted by this encounter, believing he may have cast a "dark spell" on her (which manifests - seemingly physically - as a ‘ghost hound’ later in the novel). Sunny, a struggling journalist, is working for the Associated Press in New York City, living in Brooklyn with his American girlfriend Ulla. He too returns to his home country, initially to help his friend Satya in his own attempts to secure an arranged marriage.

The Rest of Our Lives focuses on the 50-something law professor Tom Layward, based in New York with his wife Amy and about to see their youngest child Miri off to college in Pittsburgh. We learn early on in the novel that Amy had cheated on Tom over a decade ago, at which point he had privately vowed to leave her after their children had both left home. As they prepare for Miri’s departure, both experience some degree of ‘empty nester’ anxiety and Amy decides to stay home rather than face the emotional trauma first-hand.

The South is the first book in a planned quartet that centres on a family navigating a period of significant change both in Malaysia and in their own lives. The main events of the novel are set around 1997 and the Asian financial crisis, following the Lim family as they travel from their home in Kuala Lumpur to a dilapidated farm they have inherited in Johor, southern Malaysia. The central plot of the novel revolves around 16-year-old Jay's coming-of-age and sexual awakening. On the farm, he meets Chuan, the son of the farm's manager, and a transformative relationship develops between them over the course of the summer.

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.

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.

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.