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.

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 Glorious Heresies is a darkly humorous yet moving tale set in the criminal underworld of Cork, in post-crash Ireland. It shifts perspective between five central characters, most centrally Ryan Cusack, the eldest of six siblings who has lost his mother and despite high intelligence and a talent for music has fallen into a life of low-level drug dealing, only really gaining satisfaction from his relationship with Karine.

Pod is a distinctive novel in that it takes as its focus the lives of a series of marine creatures, notably dolphins. Its primary focus is on Ea, a spinner / ‘Longi’ dolphin who becomes detached from her peaceful and ‘civilised’ pod and finds herself among a boorish, violent pod of bottlenose dolphins, known in the book as Tersiops. Along the way we meet an array of other creatures, all with their own characteristics, including a wise old whale, a gender-switching Wrasse, giant clams and a fugu or two. Memorably, there’s also the captive bottlenose dolphin Google, who has been enslaved by humans (or ‘Anthrops’ in the novel’s parlance) for horrifying military purposes.

Nightcrawling tells the story of 17-year-old Kiara, a black girl living in poverty in Oakland, California.  Her situation is unenviable: her father dead, her mother imprisoned for a fairly horrifying reason, and taking responsibility for both her feckless aspiring-rapper brother and her virtually abandoned young neighbour Trevor. In desperation, she takes to the streets, where she is eventually picked up and abused by a gang of truly repulsive police officers and eventually finds herself at the centre of a court case against the police force.