After predicting his friend Stan’s death, Luke is hounded by the local media. Depressed and confused by his ability, he develops and then kicks an addiction to painkillers. His parents fight; he meets a girl and loses her; he grows apart from his oldest friend, Fang. When Luke foresees the death of a missing girl, we seem to be involved briefly in an allegorical thriller. But she is alive, his [...]

The Ossians are a Scottish band about to tour their country’s far-flung venues. Connor, the frontman, is convinced the trip will show him the “real” Scotland, somewhere between tartan twee and Irvine Welsh. But with a head full of speed and gin, he finds it hard to concentrate on anything other than scoring the next hit.

Connor’s closest relationships are with his bandmates, and when they suffer the effects of [...]

Anthea and Midge are sisters who work for Pure, a brand expanding into every conceivable market. As Midge dreams of Pure Base Camp, a corporate promised land, Anthea wanders Inverness feeling lost.

It’s a long way from their magical childhood and gender-swapping grandparents’ tales of Burning Lily, popular agitator and arsonist.

Robin, a female graffiti activist in a full kilt, will change Anthea’s life, reveal her lesbianism, and confirm [...]

Emine Sevgi Özdamar’s Bridge of the Golden Horn is an unusual book. The story of an unnamed Turkish girl working in German factories in the 1960s, it eschews many of the conventions of plotting, pace and characterisation usually expected with a novel.

When the narrator travels from Istanbul to Cold War Berlin, she joins an immigrant culture that is fractious, mutable and wonderfully fertile. She becomes involved with expatriate Turks, [...]

Trespass is about invasion, and is framed by war. The Dale family, well-to-do Americans, protest at the coming war in Iraq, while Chloe protests at her son Toby’s disagreeable girlfriend, Salome, a refugee from former Yugoslavia. When Salome becomes pregnant, a fissure appears in the Dales’ untried domesticity.

The focus shifts when Salome learns that her mother, Jelena, is alive. One family story eclipses another. Gradually, Chloe becomes superfluous not [...]

Alex and Merridy, both haunted by losses suffered in childhood, find themselves drawn to one another, each reassured by the other’s similar grief. Secrets of the Sea recounts the couple’s courtship and marriage, their attempts to make a go of their Tasmanian farm, to have children, to question and be reconciled with the choices they have made.

The episodic nature of this long novel about a family’s fortunes can sometimes [...]