Multitudes by Mphuthumi NtabeniPhila Maseti, first introduced in Mphuthumi Ntabeni’s The Broken River Tent in 2018, is older now and dealing with the loss of his wife and a growing distance from his daughters. When he is asked to write a biography of South African writer and journalist Bloke Modisane, the work takes him into questions about family and belonging that have been sitting with him for years.His research moves between Cape Town and Europe as he traces Modisane’s life and looks at the stories South Africa has preserved, as well as those that have faded from view. Phila is also trying to reconnect with his daughters, who have inherited his history but experienced it differently.The novel reaches back into Eastern Cape history and Xhosa oral memory, particularly the gaps left by the colonial archive and the difficulty of recovering lives that were only partly recorded.Ntabeni is a South African writer based in Cape Town. The Broken River Tent won the 2019 University of Johannesburg Debut Novel Prize, while his second novel, The Wanderers, was published in 2021. His interest in Eastern Cape history and land dispossession is also central to his wider body of work. Phila’s relationship with his daughters brings these questions closer to home, particularly around the family history and cultural inheritance he wants to pass on, and the different meaning they may hold for the next generation.The Bridge by Colm TóibínAt just 128 pages, The Bridge is a compact novel set in a remote valley in the Catalan Pyrenees. Miquel lives there with his father, in the house his mother left after an argument. She died alone in a snowstorm, and her body was found months later, after the thaw. Fractured by her death, the two men have settled into a routine that keeps the outside world at a distance, even as the tension between them builds.Now a new bridge between two valleys is about to bring the outside world much closer. The bridge is nearly complete, opening a route long used by smugglers to move contraband through the mountains. Miquel’s father sees a way in, and a chance to make money from it. Miquel is far less convinced. To him, the bridge threatens to pull his father into a world he is ill-equipped to handle and to unsettle the life that has kept them apart from everything beyond the valley and given them a degree of protection.Tóibín, a master of short fiction, keeps the story tightly focused on the relationship between father and son. The death of Miquel’s mother still hangs over them, while Miquel is beginning to see that loyalty to his father could eventually cost him the chance to build a life of his own.The novel picks up from Tóibín’s earlier story A Long Winter, which first introduced this family and the circumstances surrounding the mother’s death. As the bridge nears completion, the valley starts to change, and the pressures on the two men become harder to ignore.Tóibín has been publishing fiction for more than three decades. Among his best-known novels are The Master (2004), Brooklyn (2009), Nora Webster (2014) and The Magician (2021). The Master was shortlisted for the Booker Prize, while Brooklyn was longlisted in 2009.Under Story by Chloe BenjaminChloe Benjamin made her debut with The Anatomy of Dreams in 2014, followed by the bestselling The Immortalists in 2018, the novel that brought her a much wider readership. Under Story is her third novel.Laurel Salter was once a promising mycologist. By the time Under Story begins, she is washing dishes at McMurdo Station in Antarctica, far from the life she once had. Then a strange light appears across the ice. It becomes known as the Arc, and scientists arrive to study it. Among them is Laurel’s former husband, Eli, a physicist. Their marriage fell apart after the drowning death of their seven-year-old son, Silas, and neither has found a way past what happened.The Arc appears to offer access to another universe, one in which time runs backwards. Laurel starts to believe that somewhere beyond it there may be another version of her life, one in which Silas is still alive. She and Eli eventually cross through the Arc, hoping they might reach the point at which their son’s death can somehow be changed.That possibility pulls Laurel back towards Eli and gives them both a reason to believe the worst moment of their lives might not be irreversible after all. Once they cross through the Arc, the idea of another version of Silas stops being theoretical. Laurel becomes increasingly willing to risk the life she still has for the chance to regain the one she lost.Switzy by Emma ClineDavid Hastings is a wealthy retired executive who has spent most of his life surrounded by the usual signs of success. He has money and influence and is used to having people make things happen for him. Now his memory is beginning to fail.Switzy follows him on a final journey through Europe with his assistant, Cody. He plans to see his daughter in London and visit an old friend in France before travelling to Zurich, where he has arranged an assisted death.Cline tells much of the story from inside David’s increasingly unreliable mind. He forgets things that have just happened, while small moments from decades earlier return with startling clarity. He relies on a notebook to keep track of his life and sometimes struggles to recognise his own handwriting.David remains difficult and privileged even as his independence starts to disappear. Cline keeps the story away from easy sentimentality as his memory becomes less dependable. As the things that once gave David status and control begin to fall away, he is left with the relationships he neglected and fragments of a life he can no longer hold together.Cline’s first novel, The Girls, appeared in 2016 and made her an international literary name. She followed it with the story collection Daddy in 2020 and the novel The Guest in 2023. Switzy is her third novel.The Disappearers by Marlon JamesMarlon James won the Booker Prize in 2015 for A Brief History of Seven Killings, published in 2014. The Disappearers begins in Kingston in 1988, when eight gay men come together to rehearse an openly homosexual play. Simply taking part is a risk. One night, a mob attacks the group, killing one man and leaving the others injured. Two of the survivors later disappear.James follows what happens after the attack and the different ways the men live with its consequences. Some try to get on with their lives, while others become consumed by anger and the need to find out what happened to the missing men. Among them are Eddy Porteous, an 18-year-old literature student, and Jordan Brown, whose search for answers becomes increasingly important as the story unfolds. The novel shifts between different accounts of what happened, including Eddy’s journal and Jordan’s later testimony to a journalist.The search for the missing men takes the story into Kingston’s criminal underworld and through the years that follow the attack. James writes about gay men living in a society where being open about who they are can put them in real danger, and about the anger and fear that follow violence of this kind.With The Disappearers, James returns to Jamaica and to some of the political and social territory of A Brief History of Seven Killings. Here, the focus is firmly on gay life and on what happens to people after violence has altered their lives.Business Day