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.

In Lagos, a practical older sister wrestles with protecting her younger, more glamorous sister after the younger woman repeatedly kills romantic partners. The central pressure is the older sister’s daily management of evidence, social optics, and her own conflicted devotion while fearing discovery and moral compromise.

Set on Chicago's South Side in the 1930s, the novel follows Bigger Thomas, a young Black man shaped by crushing poverty and social isolation.

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.

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

A multi-century, character-focused account of a single house in New England and the people who inhabit, alter, and imagine it over time. The book traces lives and local change through episodes anchored to the house, using domestic objects and family relationships to show historical shifts and personal consequences.

Set primarily inside an Oregon psychiatric hospital, the narrative is told through the vantage of a patient who presents as deaf and mute. The plot focuses on tensions between the ward’s controlling staff and a charismatic newcomer whose actions unsettle the ward’s fragile order.

A multi-generational saga centered on a single family and the town they founded, tracking births, deaths, loves, and obsessions across decades.

A married lesbian couple becomes emotionally distant after one partner returns from a disastrous deep-sea dive. The novel tracks the aftermath: attempts at reconnection, the survivor’s altered presence, and the slow accumulation of dread tied to the sea and loss.