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 late-colonial Nigeria, the novel follows Okonkwo, a powerful member of an Igbo clan, as local customs and personal codes confront outside forces and new beliefs.

A retelling of the Mahabharata told from Draupadi (Panchaali)'s point of view: the novel follows her life within royal courts, her relationships with brothers, husbands, and Krishna, and the personal consequences of living in a patriarchal world where public honor and private feeling collide.

A woman who has left a life tied to intelligence work is living overseas when a chain of events forces secrets from her past back into play, putting family and identity at risk.

A contemporary American family becomes entangled with unexplained, possibly supernatural occurrences that surface long-buried trauma and danger. The story places intimate domestic fractures next to uncanny events, creating a pressure between ordinary family life and escalating, mysterious threat.

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 Laos in the 1970s, an elderly physician with little formal forensic experience is appointed state coroner. He confronts suspicious deaths amid political upheaval and scarce institutional support, and must piece together causes and motives while navigating party politics and local customs.

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 in an imagined Antebellum United States, the novel follows Cora, an enslaved woman who flees a Georgia plantation via an Underground Railroad visualized as an actual subterranean railway.