William Mandella, a soldier who fought for more than a thousand years of Earth time thanks to relativistic travel, learns that the war with the alien Taurans started by mistake and has ended.

Edward and Florence, newlyweds in 1962, separate after a disastrous wedding night in a Dorset hotel.

Agnes Bain, Shuggie’s mother, dies from her alcoholism after years of struggle in 1980s Glasgow.

After a night of magical confusion in the woods, Oberon has Puck undo the love spells, so the four young lovers end up happily paired: Lysander with Hermia and Demetrius with Helena.

Paul Proteus, a top engineer who joins the Ghost Shirt Society’s revolt against a world run by machines, watches the rebellion succeed briefly in destroying factories in Ilium, New York.

Faina, the mysterious girl who appeared in the Alaskan wilderness after Jack and Mabel built a snow child, grows up, marries their neighbour’s son Garrett and has a baby.

Mamah Borthwick Cheney, who left her husband and children to live with architect Frank Lloyd Wright at his Wisconsin home, Taliesin, is murdered in 1914, along with her two children and four others, by a servant, Julian Carlton, who sets the house on fire and attacks them with an axe.

Christopher Boone, a fifteen-year-old maths genius who struggles with social situations, discovers that his father killed the neighbour’s dog, Wellington, and that his mother is alive, not dead as his father claimed.

Professor Otto Lidenbrock, his nephew Axel and their guide Hans descend into an Icelandic volcano and discover a vast underground world with a sea, prehistoric creatures and giant humans.

Joe Chip and his colleagues, who think they survived a bomb blast on the Moon, discover that they are actually in “half-life,” a state of suspended consciousness.