The longlist for this year’s Booker Prize was announced today. The 13 books are:
Love Forms by Claire Adam
The South by Tash Aw
Universality by Natasha Brown
One Boat by Jonathan Buckley
Flashlight by Susan Choi
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai
Audition by Katie Kitamura
The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits
The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller
Endling by Maria Reva
Flesh by David Szalay
Seascraper by Benjamin Wood
Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga
Only one of my predictions made the longlist – The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai. You will have to take my word for it that I also considered including The South by Tash Aw, Audition by Katie Kitamura and Flesh by David Szalay as strong possibilities, but they didn’t make the cut in my blog post. The longlist features authors from nine different nationalities and has been described as the most global list for a decade. However, there are no books by Irish novelists this year, following strong showings in recent years.
I enjoyed reading The Ecliptic by Benjamin Wood when it was shortlisted for the Sunday Times Young Writer of the Year Award in 2016, and I am intrigued by his fifth novel, Seascraper, about a young man who scrapes the sea for shrimp while dreaming of a better future. Flashlight by Susan Choi is a family saga spanning the United States, Japan and Korea. I hadn’t heard of either of the two debut novels on the longlist including the bizarre-sounding Endling by Maria Reva which sees a scientist breeding rare snails travel through Ukraine during the Russian invasion with two sisters searching for their mother. I have yet to read any novels by Andrew Miller, but his latest work, The Land in Winter, has been well reviewed and is about two newly married couples in the West Country during the Big Freeze in 1962-63.
The shortlist will be announced on Tuesday 23 September. Which longlisted books are you looking forward to reading?
A Little Blog of Books 
I hadn’t read any but hope to read Flesh, One Boat, Universality and Seascraper. I really rhought there were be at least one Irish author on there, particularly as Roddy Doyle was a judge!
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