It’s Booker Prize season. Thirteen novels were longlisted in the summer, a shortlist of six has just been selected, and the winning novel will be announced in November. I’ve read all of the longlist this year, so let me tell you about the six books in the running for the £50,000 prize, plus a mention of my favourite longlisted novel which didn’t make the cut.
My absolute favourite from this year’s prize is Seascraper by Benjamin Wood. Like many people, I was slightly perplexed when it didn’t make the shortlist but don’t let that deter you; please pick up a copy. It’s short, biting, atmospheric and memorable. We follow Thomas, a young man in the northwest of England who feels twice his age due to his gruelling job, scraping the shore for shrimp with his horse. One day a man called Edgar turns up in his kitchen, with a wad of cash and a proposition. This is a book for fans of Muriel Spark and Claire Keegan; it’ll take you places you weren’t expecting, and some of the prose feels like it’s dancing underwater.
The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits is probably my least favourite from this year’s shortlist. We open with an interesting premise: Tom, a middle-aged man, found out his wife was having an affair years ago, and he promised her that he wouldn’t leave her until their daughter had left home. He’s now driving their daughter to college, and he’s not sure what his next step should be. Should he go home? Should he drive off into the sunset? There are some moments of light relief: when Tom’s reflecting on his wife, he notes “it was a gentle reminder of what her personality used to be like before being slowly eroded by long association with me.” However, alongside this self-deprecation, Tom is also friends with racist people, and seems to enjoy making his children uncomfortable with his views. In our divided society, I can see why a book like this could be interesting, but it didn’t always hold my interest. At its centre, the novel seems to be asking us what happens when someone with Tom’s views literally and metaphorically just puts their foot down and drives recklessly on. The predictable answer? Nowhere good.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai was only published after the shortlist announcement, so I’m sure its publisher let out a sigh of relief when it made the cut. The longest of the longlist, at nearly seven hundred pages, Desai’s novel follows Sonia and Sunny, two people whose grandparents once tried to set them up. We’re looking at meddling families, meta discussions on writing, Sonia’s white boyfriend telling her what she should or shouldn’t write about India. It’s about reinventing the self, and the novel, and the impossibility of both of those things. Its writing is rich, perhaps too rich for me in places, but there’s no denying the love and scope of this book. It certainly inspires awe.
Flesh by David Szalay was a novel I found a tad frustrating but could still appreciate. Its main character István feels like he’s stepped out of a computer game, not just because he lacks agency and seems to be waiting for other people to tell him where to go and what to do, but because of the book’s deliberately stilted dialogue. We follow István through several decades of his life, lightly examining power imbalance, masculinity and belonging, and whilst it did move me in a few places, the whole novel is detached, holding you at arm’s length to reflect the main character’s reluctance to emotionally connect with those around him. Given the themes, it was probably never going to be my favourite, but if you love Stoner by John Williams, then this one’s definitely for you.
The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller would be a wonderful book to curl up with in the colder months. Following two couples in rural England in the 1960s, it’s playing with the ‘non-time’ of winter, of waiting for life to begin (both in the ground, and also looking at pregnancy) – of things snowballing, both literally and metaphorically. It has a gentle foreboding, the muffled footsteps of something creeping up on all involved, and gorgeous, crisp language to reflect that. Talking about a bull owned by the farmer: “It was as if he were holding a planet on a kite string. The bull stood with its blackness bleeding into the air, unmoving, as if swallowed by its own mythology.” And later: “The bull was balanced on its slender legs like a grand piano.” It’ll be a long time before I forget that imagery.
Flashlight by Susan Choi is an ambitious family saga that I’m thrilled to see shortlisted, even if it didn’t always work for me. It feels like a hybrid of other books I’ve loved, such as River East, River West by Aube Rey Lescure, A Tale for the Time Being by Ruth Ozeki, and The Bee Sting by Paul Murray. The premise: Louisa is walking with her father along the shoreline, when something happens, and she wakes up with her father gone. From there we delve both into past and future, interrogating religion and spirituality, capitalism and communism, unearthing family secrets. Set across Japan, Korea, America, and a small section in Europe, it sometimes felt too meandering to me. However, I did love the characters, there’s fantastic disability representation, and the switch in tone towards the end of the book pleasantly surprised me.
Audition by Katie Kitamura is the book from this year’s shortlist that I find myself thinking about the most. It’s a tricky one to talk about without spoiling, so I’ll tread lightly. We open with an actress having dinner with a young man. This young man tells the woman that he was adopted and that he thinks she may be his mother. She tells him that’s impossible. A few scenes later, the book then reopens with the characters following a completely different plot. We’re unsure if we’re now reading a play the actress is performing, or perhaps a play that the young man is writing. We don’t know if the first part of the book is their “real” life, or the second, or neither. It’s clearly inspired by Edward Albee’s Who’s Afraid of Virginia Woolf? and I couldn’t help but compare it to Nathan Fielder’s The Rehearsal, too. It’s the sort of book that scoops out your brain, in the best way possible, asking us what roles are given to, or projected onto, middle-aged women, especially women who are not white, and the assumptions that an audience (in both life and theatre) makes about the people they are observing. There’s so much room for interpretation, so I’ll definitely be rereading it in the future.
The winner of The Booker Prize will be announced on Monday 10th November.
Jen Campbell is a bestselling author and award-winning poet. She also writes for TOAST Book Club.
Photography by Sanne Vliegenthart.
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