An anonymous narrator, a North Vietnamese mole embedded in the South Vietnamese army, recounts life after the fall of Saigon while living among a South Vietnamese exile community in the United States.

Set in late-19th-century London, the novel follows an agent involved in espionage for an unnamed foreign power amid a small circle touched by anarchist agitation. The book traces the effects of political plotting and covert operations on ordinary lives, especially relationships marked by dependency and vulnerability.

Set against the political tensions of the early 1960s, an American intelligence officer, Paul Christopher, investigates the assassination of President John F. Kennedy.

Set around 1959 and the Congo's decolonization era, the novel follows an American missionary household transplanted into a rural African village.

A small collective of guerilla gardeners called Birnam Wood accepts backing from a charismatic tech billionaire to undertake a project on neglected farmland.

Set in 1960s Nigeria around the outbreak of the Nigerian Civil War (1967–1970), the novel traces three principal lives—a village youth who becomes a houseboy, a university intellectual, and the intellectual's partner—whose personal relationships are reshaped by political upheaval.

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.

Philip Marlowe, a private investigator in mid‑century Los Angeles, becomes entangled with a damaged newcomer and the consequences of that friendship. The novel follows Marlowe’s investigation and its social fallout while using detective work to probe characters’ motives and the city’s moral landscape.

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.

An upper-class girl makes a misjudgment with far-reaching consequences; the novel follows the fallout across pre-war, wartime, and later life, and includes a self-aware reflection on writing and responsibility.

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.

A married couple's crisis becomes the novel's engine when the wife disappears and attention turns to the husband as a suspect.