A middle-aged man discovers a diary that takes him back to his thirteenth year at the turn of the twentieth century; through that recovered record he reconstructs a formative episode in which a naïve boy becomes entangled in adult secrets and social expectations.

Four very different people converge in an Italian villa during the later stages of World War II: a severely burned, anonymous patient; the Canadian nurse who tends him; a Sikh sapper; and a Canadian thief.

Set in Victorian-era Britain, the novel follows characters entangled in theft, deception, and social constraint in London. The central pressure revolves around trust and betrayal among people on different rungs of the social ladder, where schemes and personal desires collide and reshape relationships.

A country solicitor is drawn into defending a mother and daughter accused of abducting and assaulting a visiting young woman. The plot hinges on assembling testimony, scrutinizing inconsistent claims, and testing how community suspicion and newspaper pressure shape culpability.

Anne Elliot, a woman in her late twenties, confronts the social consequences of having broken an earlier engagement after others persuaded her to do so.

Set in a recent historical past, the story focuses on a coal-merchant and shopkeeper whose ordinary routines are interrupted when he encounters evidence of suffering connected to a local institution.

A first-person account by an English butler who undertakes a road trip and uses the journey to recall years of service at a great house. The narrator reconstructs past events and relationships while confronting what his lifelong commitment to duty has cost him.

Set during the First World War, the novel follows officers treated for shell shock at a military psychiatric hospital. The plot focuses on their therapy, conversations, and struggles to reconcile wartime experiences with civilian identities while clinicians and fellow patients negotiate guilt, duty, and recovery.

Set across multiple time periods beginning in the early 20th century, the novel places two close young women inside a secluded, quasi-religious community on a Scottish island.

A contemporary Black woman living in 1970s Los Angeles is repeatedly pulled back in time to a Maryland plantation in the early 19th century, where she encounters ancestors and must navigate slavery's social and moral realities to survive and return to her own time.

A first-person narrator recalls growing up at an elite boarding school in an alternate late-20th-century England and the friendships and loyalties formed there while an institutional ethical situation quietly shapes their lives.

Set in antebellum Virginia, the novel tracks interconnected lives in a county shaped by slavery and unexpected ownership dynamics, including Black Americans who themselves become slaveholders.