The 2024 Booker Prize Longlist

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

Wild Houses by Colin Barrett

Try it, if you liked: Big Girl, Small Town by Michell Gallen, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, or In Bruges

Description: As Ballina prepares for its biggest weekend of the year, introspective loner Dev answers his door on Friday night to find Doll English—younger brother of small-time local dealer Cillian English—bruised and in the clutches of Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, County Mayo's fraternal enforcers and Dev's cousins. Dev's quiet home life is upturned as he is quickly and unwillingly drawn headlong into the Ferdias' frenetic revenge plot against Cillian.

Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel

Try it, if you liked: Santa Olivia by Jacqueline Carey, The Fair Fight by Anna Freeman, or After the Lights Go Out by John Vercher

Description: Each of the 8 teenage girl boxers has her own reasons for the sacrifices she has made to come to Reno, Nevada, to compete to be named the best in the country. Through a series of face-offs that are raw, ecstatic, and punctuated by flashes of humor and tenderness, Rita Bullwinkel animates the competitors' pasts and futures as they summon the emotion, imagination, and force of will required to win.

James by Percival Everett

Try it, if you liked: The Good Lord Bird by James McBride, Julia by Sandra Newman, or The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead

Description: A retelling of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn told from the enslaved Jim's point of view. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan. Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town. Thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Try it, if you liked: The Wanderers by Meg Howrey, How High We Go in the Dark by Sequoia Nagamatsu, or The Disordered Cosmos by Chanda Prescod-Weinstein

Description: Selected for one of the last space station missions of its kind before the program is dismantled, six astronauts and cosmonauts—from America, Russia, Italy, Britain, and Japan—have left their lives behind to travel at warp speed as the earth reels below. We glimpse moments of their earthly lives through brief communications with family, their photos, and their talismans; we watch them whip up dehydrated meals, float in gravity-free sleep, and exercise in regimented routines to prevent atrophying muscles; we witness them form bonds that will stand between them and utter solitude. Most of all, we are with them as they behold and record their silent blue planet.

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

Try it, if you liked: Velvet Was the Night by Silvia Moreno-Garcia or American Spy by Lauren Wilkinson

Description: Like everyone Sadie targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her. Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her "contacts"—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more. In this region of centuries-old farms and ancient caves, Sadie becomes entranced by a mysterious figure named Bruno Lacombe, a mentor to the young activists who communicates only by email. Bruno believes that the path to emancipation from what ails modern life is not revolt, but a return to the ancient past. Just as Sadie is certain she's the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno Lacombe is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, and his own tragic story.

My Friends by Hisham Matar

Try it, if you liked: Dark at the Crossing by Elliot Ackerman or The Sorcerer of Pyongyang by Marcel Theroux

Description: As a young boy growing up in Benghazi, Khaled hears a bizarre short story read aloud on the radio, about a man being eaten alive by a cat. Obsessed by the power of those words—and by their enigmatic author, Hosam Zawa—Khaled eventually embarks on a journey that will take him far from home, to pursue a life of the mind at the University of Edinburgh. There, thrust into an open society that is light years away from the world he knew in Libya, Khaled begins to change. He attends a protest against the Qaddafi regime in London, only to watch it explode in tragedy. In a flash, Khaled finds himself injured, clinging to life, an exile, unable to leave England, much less return to the country of his birth. When a chance encounter in a hotel brings Khaled face to face with Hosam Zawa, the author of the fateful short story, he is subsumed into the deepest friendship of his life.

This Strange & Eventful History by Claire Messud

Try it, if you liked: Salt Houses by Hala Alyan, Afterlives by Abdulrazak Gurnah, or The Dearly Beloved by Cara Wall

Description: Inspired in part by long-ago stories from her own family's history, this story follows the Cassars over seven decades, starting with patriarch Gaston and his wife Lucienne, whose myth of perfect love sustains them, and ending with Chloe, who believes telling her family's buried stories will bring them all peace.

Held by Anne Michaels

Try it, if you liked: If You Leave Me by Crystal Hana Kim, The Lowland by Jhumpa Lahiri, or Some Luck by Jane Smiley

Description: 1917. On a battlefield near the River Aisne, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory—a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night. 1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire. He is alive but still not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and tries to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts with messages he cannot understand. So begins a narrative that spans four generations of connections and consequences that ignite and re-ignite as the century unfolds.

Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange

Try it, if you liked: Calling for a Blanket Dance by Oscar Hokeah, The Love Songs of W.E.B. Du Bois by Honoree Fanonne Jeffers, or Betty by Tiffany McDaniel

Description: Following its unforgettable characters through almost two centuries of history, from the horrors of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1865 to the aftermath of a mass shooting in the early 21st century, Wandering Stars is an indelible novel of America’s war on its own people. (The Booker Prize)

Enlightenment by Sarah Perry

Try it, if you liked: Possession by A.S. Byatt or Digging Stars by Novuyo Rosa Tshuma

Description: Thomas Hart and Grace Macaulay have lived all their lives in the small Essex town of Aldleigh. Though separated in age by three decades, the pair are kindred spirits—torn between their commitment to religion and their desire to explore the world beyond their small Baptist community. It is two romantic relationships that will rend their friendship, and in the wake of this rupture, Thomas develops an obsession with a vanished 19th-century astronomer said to haunt a nearby manor, and Grace flees Aldleigh entirely for London. Over the course of 20 years, by coincidence and design, Thomas and Grace will find their lives brought back into orbit as the mystery of the vanished astronomer unfolds into a devastating tale of love and scientific pursuit.

Playground by Richard Powers

Try it, if you liked: Counterweight by Djuna, This Other Eden by Paul Harding, or How Beautiful We Were by Imbolo Mbue

Description: Twelve-year-old Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world's first aqualungs. Ina Aroita grows up on naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home. Two polar opposites at an elite Chicago high school bond over a 3,000-year-old board game; Rafi Young will get lost in literature, while Todd Keane's work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough. They meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, whose deposits of phosphorus once helped to feed the world. Now the tiny atoll has been chosen for humanity's next adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out onto the open sea. But first, the island's residents must vote to greenlight the project or turn the seasteaders away.

The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden

Try it, if you liked: The Remains of the Day by Kazuo Ishiguro or Exhibit by R.O. Kwon

Description: It is 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is truly over. Living alone in her late mother's country home, Isabel knows her life is as it should be, led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis brings his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, leaving her at Isabel's doorstep as a guest, to stay for the season. Eva is Isabel's antithesis; she sleeps late, walks loudly through the house, and touches things she shouldn't. In response, Isabel develops a fury-fueled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house—a spoon, a knife, a bowl, Isabel's suspicions begin to spiral. In the sweltering peak of summer, Isabel's paranoia gives way to infatuation, leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva, nor the house in which they live, are what they seem.