Three women, three generations, one house. Each of them swears she will not repeat her grandmother's mistakes, and each of them finds a new way to make them.

Rachel Harrison's seventh novel changes its monster every time the day restarts. The reason it changes is the whole point, and it is not a twist so much as a diagnosis.

Blightfall by Brandon Sanderson and Janci Patterson gives five of its chapters to a creature with a forty-word vocabulary, and those chapters turn out to hold the novel's argument.

The Knave and the Moon by Rachel Gillig hands the moral centre of a grim fantasy to a talking gargoyle in a pink robe, and the joke turns out to be the argument.

An immortal swordsman kills the bandits who were beating a stranger, then sits down on the verge to wait for the stranger to freeze to death, because a dead wielder is a free sword. He lasts about forty minutes before he gets up and builds a fire.

A cremation worker takes a pair of bolt cutters to an unattended body, posts one finger to a high school principal, and explains afterwards that she meant it as a finger pointing at somebody. It is the most sensible thing any adult does in this novel.

An old woman sells herbs at the Woodhaven market in a dress of a yellow so vivid nobody else in town can manage it. She is the least dangerous person in the book and the first one hanged. The seventeenth-century half of this novel is far better than a mass-market thriller had any obligation to be.