By Collection Management Librarian Kathy
The UK’s most prestigious literary award, The Booker Prize, is awarded annually to the best novel of the year written in English and published in the UK or Ireland. Check out the longlist titles below—featuring all of the titles currently or soon to be available in the U.S.—and look for the shortlist announced in September and the winner in November.
The longlist
Switzy by Emma Cline
Try it, if you liked: Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry, The Oldest Bitch Alive by Morgan Day, or Transcription by Ben Lerner
Description: A private plane cuts through the winter night, somewhere over Greenland. David, a retired executive, sits back in his leather seat, playing solitaire on his phone. The notebook in his jacket pocket is filled with familiar phrases, urgent reminders to himself, but he struggles to recognize his own handwriting. This is what David knows: Cody, his assistant, asleep in the seat next to him, will shepherd him along the voyage. A stopover in London. Dinner with his adult daughter. A meeting in France with an old friend, estranged for decades. His final destination is Zurich. David glides through hotel rooms and airports and foreign cities, running out the clock on his mortal life. His grasp on the present slips away, and the past rushes in: the Sunday roasts of childhood. The stiff clothes meant only for church. A summer at a school friend’s house. The losses and missteps that punctuate a life.
Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman
Try it, if you liked: Overstaying by Ariane Koch or Flesh by David Szalay
Description: Taking place over the course of one day, Helen of Nowhere introduces an intimate cast: an unnamed man at the end of both his career and marriage, a young realtor showing him an idyllic house in the countryside, and Helen, the mystifying former owner whose spectral presence seems to imbue the house’s every grain of wood. Through stories of the remarkable woman, the man is presented with an alternate way of life. But, as evening fades into black, the specifics of how to live it become more than what he bargained for.
The End of Everything by M. John Harrison
Try it, if you liked: Venomous Lumpsucker by Ned Beauman, The New Wilderness by Diane Cook, or Ultramarine by Mariette Navarro
Description: Phillip Tennent makes his living at the tideline, collecting artefacts that wash up from the Channel. It’s been years since the crisis changed everything, but its exact nature remains obscure. Government barely functions, the seas are full of new creatures, an entire continent has been mislaid. It feels like the end. Now Phillip has fished out of the water an object he can’t keep. A creature that keeps changing. An artefact he must take inland, before it destroys everything he thinks he knows.
The Disappearers by Marlon James
Try it, if you liked: What Storm, What Thunder by Myriam J.A. Chancy, The Great Believers by Rebecca Makkai, or On Earth We’re Briefly Gorgeous by Ocean Vuong
Description: In 1988, eight men in Kingston, Jamaica, begin rehearsals for a play. The men are strangers to one another and each has a different reason for being involved. But they all share one inescapable truth: All of them are gay — a “battyman” in Jamaican argot — and all of them must contend with the dangers that such a truth lays bare. One night a mob savagely attacks them, killing one of the men. For the survivors, their recovery is as much emotional as it is physical. As their bodies heal, each man grapples with the violence, the hatred, and the rage that the attack made plain. Some try to ignore what the attack has unearthed, while others double down on retribution.
Black Bag by Luke Kennard
Try it, if you liked: Black Buck by Mateo Askaripour, Early Work by Andrew Martin, or Bring Down the House by Charlotte Runcie
Description: A penniless and out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr. Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr. Blend’s students react to someone zipped into an oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of Fall lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon has unexpected consequences. A professor of post-humanism develops research questions of her own–in particular, can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag?–and the actor’s childhood friend forms a vision for monetizing this new situation . . .
The Renovation by Kenan Orhan
Try it, if you liked: Exit West by Mohsin Hamid or Bliss Montage by Ling Ma
Description: In Salerno, Italy, Dilara spends her days caring for her aging father and her hypochondriac husband. Since leaving her native Istanbul, she’s been unable to find a job–adrift, she becomes increasingly fixated on domestic improvement, specifically on the renovation of a second bathroom. When the work is completed, she enters and finds herself not in a bathroom but in a prison cell, and a Turkish one at that.
May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry
Try if, if you liked: Matrix by Lauren Groff, Whale Fall by Elizabeth O’Connor, or A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki
Description: A curator spends her days reconstructing the past—selecting and carefully arranging furniture, fabrics, and fragments of daily life to bring medieval rooms back to life. After accepting a commission to work on the private quarters of a medieval palace, the curator becomes absorbed in the story of a king almost forgotten by history. As she studies the traces he left behind, the boundary between her own life and his begins to blur. The King is an unlikely ruler: a man with little appetite for power, hurried to the throne after the sudden deaths of his brothers. At court, doubts about his judgment are whispered from chamber to chamber. Then an unthinkable possibility emerges among the gossip: maybe someone else will take the crown.
The Palm House by Gwendolyn Riley
Try it, if you liked: Outline by Rachel Cusk, Orbital by Samantha Harvey, or The Vulnerables by Sigrid Nunez
Description: Laura’s long friendship with Edmund Putnam is tested when he resigns from Sequence magazine–one of the few places he has ever felt he belonged. Putnam repines. His sweet-natured father has recently died, which has not improved his mood. Meanwhile Laura’s relentlessly “outward-facing” mother is still at large and toting a new boyfriend as if he were a marotte. Laura, too, needs a new job, and a place to live that doesn’t have centipedes in the kitchen. Over wine and crisps the pair reflect on what has brought them to where they are. There are memories of childhood package holidays, teenage friendships and obsessions, peculiar love affairs, bad parties. Life is fleeting. Sequence magazine means something, but what? Might Putnam plot a return?
The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout
Try it, if you liked: The Correspondent by Virginia Evans, Commonwealth by Ann Patchett, or Rental House by Weike Wang
Description: Artie Dam is a man with a secret. He goes about his days teaching American history to high schoolers, correcting their casual ignorance, and lending a kind word to those who need it most. He spends his free time sailing the beautiful Massachusetts Bay, or with his adult son and his wife of more than three decades – and as Artie does these things, he plans the event that will forever change the world he inhabits. But when a startling accident awakens a new perspective in Artie, and he realizes that life has its own secret it’s been keeping from him – along with a lot more to say on the weighty matters of fate and freedom in his home and his country – he charts another course full of grief, hilarity, and heart, to a place where the end marks the beginning.
John of John by Douglas Stuart
Try it, if you liked: Isaac’s Song by Daniel Black, Big Girl, Small Town by Michelle Gallen, or Palaver by Bryan Washington
Description: Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry back home to the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides to find that little has changed except for him. He returns to the windswept croft and the two pillars of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, tweed weaver, and lay preacher in the local Presbyterian church, and his maternal grandmother Ella, a profanity-loving Glaswegian whose steady warmth helped Cal weather the sudden departure of his mother. Cal privately wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, while John is dismayed by his son’s long hair, strange clothes, and seeming unwillingness to be Saved. But Cal isn’t the only one in the croft house who is keeping secrets. As lambing season turns to shearing season, the threads holding together the community together become increasingly frayed, and nothing will remain as it was before.
All Them Dogs by Djamel White
Try it if you liked: Wild Houses by Colin Barrett, Blacktop Wasteland by S.A. Cosby, or Beartooth by Callan Wink
Description: Tony Ward has landed back in Lucan with his chest puffed up and a chip on his shoulder. After five years in the UK, staying out of trouble just like he’d been told to do, he’s returned home to his west Dublin estate ready to reinstate himself into the gangland scene. But things are different now. Tony’s old mentor is dead and his best pal Kenny Boyle has gone on the straight and narrow. That won’t do, so when an opportunity to work directly for Darren ‘Flute’ Walsh, an enforcer of notorious crime boss Aengus Lavelle presents itself, it seems like a no brainer. Flute Walsh is a far cry from the meek, quiet boy Tony knew in school. Already burned by the empty promises of one dead mentor, Tony is keen to prove himself as his own man, but there is a pull to Flute Walsh, one he’s felt before.
The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams
Try it, if you liked: Death Valley by Melissa Broder or Ripe by Sarah Rose Etter
Description: In a famed but crumbling university city overrun by nature, where power is held in a fragile balance between academics and a contingent of rogue gardeners, the reclusive narrator spends her days propping up the career of her needy and fraudulent professor boss. Then a controversy ruptures her careful routine: Adam, a contrarian student and an obsession of the boss, comes into heated conflict with a young professor, with both men claiming discrimination. The crisis subsumes the university, though the narrator is unmoved–not even the attempted suicide of her estranged mother has been enough to dispel her lack of engagement with the world. But when her boss commands her to befriend Adam, the narrator finds herself both caught up in the events threatening to tear the city apart and increasingly drawn to the alluring student at the heart of it all.