Both the primary characters of Anna Seghers’s Crossing: A Love Story, written in 1971 and translated into English for the first time by Douglas Irving, are returning to East Germany by cargo ship after their respective business trips in Brazil.

There is beauty in everything, the novel argues, if you take the time to see it, and at the final page one might look at one’s own surroundings with the sense that, in Baume’s words, “Now everything holds a diaphanous kind of potential.”

Belinda McKeon’s second novel, Tender, opens in 1997 in Dublin and follows a young woman, Catherine, and the shades of love that she has for her friend James as they navigate their early adulthood at Trinity, and is set against the last years of the Troubles in Northern Ireland and the recent decriminalization of homosexuality.