Harriet and Wyn, who secretly broke up months earlier, pretend to still be engaged during a week with their college friends at a Maine cottage.

Nora Stephens, a literary agent, and Charlie Lastra, a book editor, fall in love during a summer in the small town of Sunshine Falls, North Carolina.

January Andrews, a romance writer, and Augustus Everett, a literary novelist, finish their genre-swap bet and each write a book outside their comfort zone.

Lucy Hutton and Joshua Templeman, rival executive assistants at a merged publishing company, both compete for the same promotion.

The unnamed narrator, a communist double agent, is captured in Vietnam and “re-educated” by his old friend Man, who is now the camp commissar.

Cath Avery finishes both her huge Simon Snow fan fiction, Carry On, and the original short story she owes her fiction-writing professor, proving she can write her own stories.

Ove, a grumpy widower who had planned to die, is pulled back into life by his neighbours, especially the pregnant Parvaneh and her daughters.

Park drives Eleanor to her uncle’s home in Minnesota so she can escape her abusive stepfather, Richie, and the two are separated.

Lydia Lee, the favourite daughter of a Chinese American family in 1970s Ohio, drowned when she rowed out onto the lake at night, intending to start a new life but forgetting she could not swim.

Jude dies after years of trauma and self-harm.