What Cleave’s first three novels share is a timeliness, an immersion in the political and social issues and events that have shaped the past decade. It is a departure, therefore, that Cleave’s fourth, Everyone Brave Is Forgiven, is a historical novel set in London and Malta during the second world war. The story is, Cleave discloses in an author’s note, inspired by the lives of his grandparents: his maternal grandfather served in Malta, and his paternal grandmother drove ambulances during the blitz. But dig below the surface of this novel, and Cleave is back in familiar thematic territory, exploring the ways that external events beyond the individual’s control influence the private lives of his characters, with either devastating or transformative consequences.