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 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.

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 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.

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.

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 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.

Set against the realities of a mid-20th-century reform school in the American South, the novel follows young boys who confront daily physical and moral violence inside a state institution.

The novel follows a single day in post–World War I London as a well-to-do woman readies an evening party while the narrative follows through multiple characters' inner thoughts and memories.

Scotland Yard Inspector Alan Grant, laid up with a broken leg, occupies himself by researching a centuries-old royal mystery: whether King Richard III was truly guilty of the crimes long attributed to him.

Several loosely connected characters across different eras encounter anomalies that call into question the nature of reality, time, and memory.