1970: Norman is the clever one of a closely-knit Jewish family in London's East End. Infant prodigy, brilliant barrister, the apple of his parents' eyes - until at 41 he becomes a drug addict

1972: This novel centres on G, who seems impervious to everything around him. His interests are purely sexual, his crowning ideal fulfilment.

1974: A married man returns alone to the seaside town where he used to holiday as a child. A multi-layered story of marriage, death, seduction and separation unfolds.... a novel about lives in crisi

1975: Heat and dust - these simple, terrible words describe the Indian summer. Year after year, endlessly, it is the same. And everyone who experiences this heat and dust is changed for ever.

1977: Tusker and Lily Smalley stayed on in India. Given the chance to return 'home' ... they chose instead to remain in the small hill town of Pan

1979: Offshore possesses perfect, very odd pitch. In just over 130 pages of the wittiest and most melancholy prose, Penelope Fitzgerald illuminates the lives of a group of barge-dwellers...

1981: Saleem Sinai was born at midnight, the midnight of India's independence, and found himself mysteriously 'handcuffed to history' by the coincidence.

1983: In a South Africa torn by civil war, Michael K sets out to take his mother back to her rural home. On the way there she dies, leaving him alone in an anarchic world of brutal roving armies.

1985: The Bone People is the story of Kerewin, a despairing part-Maori artist who is convinced that her solitary life is the only way to face the world.

1987: Claudia Hampton is dying. As memories crowd in, she re-creates the mosiac of her life, her own story enmeshed with those of her brother, her lover and father of her daughter,...

1989: There is so much in it that when you think back on it you wonder how on earth he fitted it all into 250 pages: the war, the notion of servitude, the love story, the ever-present tragedy...

1991: Survival in his chaotic African village is a struggle, though. Azaro and his family must contend with hunger, disease and violence, as well as the boy's spirit- companions, ...