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.

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.

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.

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

Set in 1870s upper-class New York, the novel follows a man caught between an established engagement and an unexpected attraction that threatens his place within a rigid social world.

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.

Set at a small, elite liberal-arts college, the novel follows a tight group of Classics students whose scholarly intensity and social isolation lead to a violent rupture.

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.

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.