Martyr! introduces us to Cyrus Shams, a recently sober son of Iranian immigrants (and evidently an autobiographical proxy for the author). As a child he moved to the US following the loss of his mother when her plane (Iran Air Flight 655; based on a real incident) was shot down over the Persian Gulf by US forces. His father, who made his way in the States as a factory farm worker, has also died, leaving Cyrus seeking meaning initially in narcotics but subsequently in poetry.

Pity is a short novel that trains its eyes on the former mining town of Barnsley, near to Sheffield in northern England. It focuses on three generations of the same family, covering the late twentieth century up to the present day (or thereabouts), and almost exclusively focusing on the men of the family.

Piranesi is a fantasy novel set largely in an imaginary ‘House’, composed of seemingly infinite halls filled with unique statues. Its basement level contains an ocean, teeming with sealife, and its upper level clouds, giving it its own weather system as well as an array of birds. Other than this, its only inhabitants seem to be the titular character ‘Piranesi’ (though he knows this not to be his real name) and a mysterious ‘Other’ who Piranesi meets a few times a week. Piranesi believes himself to have always lived in the House, has no awareness of a world outside of its existence, and believes the only humans ever to have existed to have been himself, The Other, and fifteen sets of skeletal remains he has cataloged in his extensive travels through the halls.

The Fraud is a historical novel set across the nineteenth century and focusing on two apparently disconnected real-world storylines. One is the story of the Tichbourne Claimant, one of the longest trials in British legal history in which a butcher in Wagga Wagga, Australia comes forward claiming to be the presumed-dead minor British aristocrat Sir Roger Tichbourne. The other is the story of forgotten British novelist William Harrison Ainsworth, who mixes with a literary milieu including the likes of Dickens and Thackeray, has early-career success with ‘scandalous’ novels, one of which outsells Oliver Twist, but by the bulk of the novel’s story has fallen on tougher times and is something of a critical laughing stock.

Hamnet is a creative imagining of the story of the death of Shakespeare’s only son. Despite its title, it focuses predominantly on the bard’s wife, here called Agnes (pronounced Ann-yis, and as named in her father’s will) though typically better known as Anne Hathaway. It’s a non-linear narrative with its substantial first section moving back and forth in time between the events leading up to Hamnet’s death from the bubonic plague, and the early days of William and Agnes’ relationship, covering the birth of their three children, first Susanna, whose conception leads to their marriage, and later the twins Judith and Hamnet.

Western Lane follows Gopi, an 11-year old British-Indian Jain girl living in suburban London in the 1980s, who has recently lost her mother. Alongside her two older sisters, she is left in the care of her Pa, who is clearly also struggling with grief despite a seeming lack of emotional empathy and uncommunicative nature. Both Gopi and her Pa channel their grief into an obsession with squash, training at the titular Western Lane centre where Gopi meets Ged, a white boy with whom she becomes quietly infatuated, and his mother, with whom Pa finds a connection.

Study for Obedience is something of a difficult one to summarize. It’s a short book but in no senses a simple one. The unnamed female narrator arrives in an unnamed Northern European country (seemingly Scandinavian or Baltic), to tend to the needs of her successful oldest brother. Her own background seems fairly obviously Jewish, a fact that inspires hatred in the local residents, seemingly in part down to their past as collaborators (at least) in major atrocities (most probably the Holocaust, though it isn’t specifically named) against her people. Various troubles in the town, largely involving death of or disruption to local pets and farm animals, are attributed by the locals to her, and she is avoided, feared, and seemingly plotted against by the residents. With her brother frequently away on business, and she unable to speak the language, the whole thing has a fairly dense layer of mystery about it.

If I Survive You is a mostly linked short story collection, based on the immigrant experience of a Jamaican family who moved to Miami following the turbulence in their home country in the 1970s. For much of the book, our focus is the somewhat autobiographical-seeming life of Trelawny, the family’s younger son, though we do also get stories told from the perspective of his father, his older brother Delano, and in the biggest departure of the collection, his cousin Cukie. The book deals with the struggle of survival in the face of everyday racism in the US, exacerbated by crises both personal and national - the latter including the major (and disproportionately racialised) impact of Hurricane Andrew and the 2008 Financial Crisis.

Pearl tells the story of Marianne, a young mother who is reflecting on the loss of her own mother, who disappeared (presumed dead) when she was eight years old. Left with her father Edward and baby brother Joe, she has spent her life struggling to understand her mother’s motives, grieving both for her mother and for the family home which they had to abandon in the wake of her loss.

Prophet Song focuses on Eilish, a microbiologist and mother of four (ranging in age from a baby to a seventeen year old) living in Dublin. In the background is the looming threat posed by a new authoritarian government in Ireland. Her husband Larry is an official in the Teachers’ Union, at the start of the novel still absorbed in his work and organising protests against the new government, believing the protections he has been used to in a democratic society still apply. Relatively rapidly, though, we learn that this is a new and significantly darker world, in which protests are violently suppressed and Larry himself is taken in for questioning by the stasi-esque Garda National Services Bureau (GNSB). Within days, he has disappeared, along with many other men in Eilish’s immediate circle.

The Bee Sting is something of an epic at 600+ pages, focusing on a fairly affluent family in small-town Ireland, in the aftermath of the 2008 Financial Crash. It's a novel of perspectives, with its lengthy first four sections each seen through the eyes of a different family member.

This Other Eden is a fictionalised version of the story of Malaga Island, off the coast near Portland, Maine. The small island was historically home to a mixed interracial community from the Civil War until 1911, when all of its residents were forcibly evicted by the state. Relatively little is conclusively known about the origins of the settlement on the island, with much of its history until recently only having been told by prejudiced accounts which treated the islanders as outcasts and 'degenerates'. Harding creates a version of the island's history, renaming it Apple Island after the dreams of his version of the first settlers, an escaped slave and his Irish wife.

In Ascension is a novel is five parts, a languid yet grandiose journey that takes us from the deepest depths of our oceans to the farthest reaches of the solar system, set around a decade from now. Its protagonist is Dr Leigh Hasenboch, who we first meet in Rotterdam, in a section that focuses on her childhood. Her father, Geert, worked on flood defenses in the Netherlands, a centuries old challenge that is becoming ever more impossible as the climate breaks down, causing a similar deterioration in Geert's mental health, which in Leigh's telling we understand to be a motivator behind his outbursts of severe violence towards his daughters (her younger sister, Helena, is crucial later on.)

An American Marriage is focused on the marriage of a middle-class Black American couple from Atlanta, Georgia. Roy, a sales representative who has worked his way up from a relatively poor background, and Celestial, an artist who makes dolls from a more wealthy family, are introduced as newlyweds. The novel begins with a fairly domestic focus, with the pair arguing over their respective relationships with their parents and suchlike. Their lives are turned upside down when Roy is arrested and imprisoned for raping a woman in a motel, a crime he plainly did not commit, after only 18 months of marriage.

Home Fire is based on Sophocles' Antigone, in which two sisters respond differently to the repercussions of their brother's act of treason. Shamsie transplants the play's themes to the modern day, focusing on the Pasha family of Muslims based in suburban London, with the two sisters - Isma and Aneeka - responding to their brother Parvaiz moving to Syria to join ISIS (following in his late father's jihadist footsteps).

The Power is a science fiction novel based around the premise of almost all women on Earth suddenly developing an extra organ (a ‘skein’) that allows them to shoot powerful bursts of electricity from their hands. Over a very short period, the balance of power in genders shifts and the novel sets out to explore the impact of this shift on society generally and a specific cast of characters from different backgrounds and locations.

The Story of the Forest is a multi-generational tale of the Mendel family and its offshoots, over the course of much of the twentieth century. It begins with the young girl Mina, one of five children of a Latvian grain merchant, who wanders into the forest near their home in Riga, ostensibly to pick mushrooms. While she’s there she meets a group of young Bolshevik men and something undefined happens. Whatever it is, it takes on an almost mythological significance as a foundational story in the life of Mina and subsequent generations of Mendels.

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.

Biography of X is an elaborately constructed fictional biography a female artist, author and musician known only as X. It is written in the persona of C.M. Lucca, X's widow, and supposedly published in 2005 as the conclusion of a decade's research following X's death and initially in response to another, inaccurate, biography.

How to Be Both tells two stories, one from the perspective of George, an intelligent 16-year-old girl living in modern-day Cambridge, and another from the perspective of a relatively minor Italian renaissance artist, Francesco del Cossa.