Two young people from different social backgrounds form a fraught, recurring relationship from secondary school into university.

Lucy Muchelney, escaping a painful public marriage scene, answers a call from the Countess of Moth to translate a significant French astronomy text. She arrives at the Countess’s London house expecting work and finds Catherine St Day, a widow who hoped to finish her late husband’s scientific legacy and retire.

Set in a past-leaning period context, the novel follows the developing relationship between two men whose attraction grows through social encounters, conversation, and constrained opportunities for openness.

Set in a future where living form is determined by exchangeable cellular units called cytes and by unstable morphotypes rather than fixed DNA, the novel follows people whose bodies and identities are socially and medically negotiable.

Set aboard a generation ship, the novel follows life inside a rigidly stratified vessel where social caste, inherited servitude, and systemic racism govern daily existence.

Set in 1893 Victorian England, the novel follows Cora Seaborne, newly widowed and pivoting toward amateur natural history, who leaves London for an Essex village where reports of a mythic sea-serpent unsettle the community.

Set in a period social world where dressmaking, tailoring, and horsemanship matter to status and identity, the novel follows characters negotiating intimate relationships across racial lines and strict social codes.

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.

Set in a historical social world, the novel focuses on women negotiating marriage, reputation, and intimacy within strict social codes. The central pressure comes from private desires and social constraint: a developing romantic relationship unfolds through constrained public behavior and more candid private exchanges.

A non-linear narrative pieces together the life and unexpected death of Vivek Oji, tracing childhood, family relationships, and the tensions around identity within a Nigerian setting.

Set in late-1950s New York, the story follows Nick Russo, a reporter who has risen from a tough Brooklyn background and must keep his sexuality secret in a hostile era.

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.