Audition is very much a novel of two halves. A cliche, and one which has come up more than once in my recent reading, but never more true than here. In its first part, we are introduced to an unnamed female narrator, preparing for a role in an upcoming play, in which she is notably struggling to nail a key scene. A young man, Xavier, meets her for lunch in an upmarket restaurant, having previously explained that he believes she may be his mother (a seeming impossibility as the narrator has never given birth). They are observed briefly by her husband, Tomas, an art critic, who seems somewhat weary of her affairs and is behaving a little shiftily himself.

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.

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.