If you loved how Hermes narrates and Zeus wanders into Adam Godley’s country house to toy with mortals in The Infinities, you’ll relish Phillips’s playful take where a down-at-heels pantheon in London tangles with two unsuspecting humans. The same mischievous divine interventions that complicate Helen’s visit and the vigil around Adam’s death recur here with a cheeky, irreverent charm—myth colliding with everyday life in ways that are witty, intimate, and just a little bit blasphemous.

You were drawn to the hush of that single house where The Infinities unfolds—family gathered around the dying Adam Godley while Hermes slips through rooms, overhearing and needling. In Lanny, Dead Papa Toothwort, a village spirit, drifts through an English town, catching whispers and secrets much like Hermes’s sly asides. It’s the same intimate, near-mystical proximity to ordinary lives—tender, eerie, and beautifully compressed.

Hermes’s omniscient glide through the Godley household—alighting on Petra’s turmoil, Adam’s drifting consciousness, and the gods’ caprice—finds a brilliant echo in Bulgakov’s devilish visitor to Moscow. The narration swoops between lovers, writers, and bureaucrats as coolly as Hermes does among the Godleys, mixing comedy, menace, and metaphysical mischief with the same effortlessly panoramic touch you enjoyed in The Infinities.

If Banville’s jewelled sentences and Hermes’s languid, lyrical commentaries kept you entranced as the Godleys circle Adam’s deathbed, Little, Big offers that same sumptuous texture. Crowley’s language unfurls across generations of the Drinkwater family as the boundaries with a hidden realm thin—echoing the way The Infinities lets gods seep into drawing rooms—giving you prose to linger over and a hushed sense of enchantment.

Drawn to how The Infinities contemplates death—Adam Godley hovering between worlds while Hermes muses on time and desire? Saramago imagines a country where death stops working, then follows the consequences with dry humor and compassion. Like Banville’s gods teasing meaning from a vigil-bound household, Saramago uses a single uncanny twist to probe love, endings, and what makes a life worth its passage.