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
It’s that time of year again… I haven’t had much success with my Booker Prize predictions in the last couple of years, but it’s still fun to consider which books might appear on the longlist, due to be announced this Tuesday. Eligible novels must have been published in the UK between 1st October 2024 and 30th September 2025.
I would of course like to see Ripeness by Sarah Moss on the longlist alongside Nesting by Roisin O’Donnell which is my stand-out debut novel of the year so far. Confessions by Catherine Airey could also be in with a chance. Continue reading
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One More Croissant for the Road by Felicity Cloake documents her gastronomic travels cycling 2,300 kilometres around France and sampling all the regional culinary delights the country has to offer. I enjoyed Red Sauce Brown Sauce which saw Cloake travelling around the UK in search of breakfast food, although that particular tour was frequently scuppered by Covid-19 restrictions, so it was nice to read a pre-pandemic travelogue this time. Cloake writes delicious descriptions of the food she consumes, but there are plenty of stressful moments too, including train strikes, punctures, torrential rain and erratic opening hours. The Pause Café sections about the history of French food were very interesting and Cloake is an enthusiastic Francophile who pokes gentle fun at French idiosyncrasies while developing a system for ranking croissants with the seriousness that the task deserves. I am looking forward to reading Cloake’s new book Peach Street to Lobster Lane about American cuisine.
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It’s that time of year again… here are my favourite books I read in 2024.
I usually read more non-fiction these days and 2024 was an excellent year for memoirs. My Family: The Memoir by David Baddiel is a pretty much perfect blend of comedy and empathy about his dysfunctional parents. Knife by Salman Rushdie is a frank account of the near-fatal attack the author suffered in 2022 at a literary event and My Good Bright Wolf by Sarah Moss is about the author’s eating disorder which saw her relapse during the pandemic.
From 2022, Original Sins by Matt Rowland Hill is an extremely candid memoir about his evangelical Baptist upbringing in south Wales and substance abuse as an adult. Ruskin Park by Rory Cellan Jones is a very affecting book about how his parents met in the 1950s while working at the BBC and Politics on the Edge by Rory Stewart is an astutely observed political memoir about the nine years he spent as an MP and government minister.
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The Booker Prize longlist was announced on Tuesday. The 13 titles are:
Wild Houses by Colin Barrett
Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel
James by Percival Everett
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
My Friends by Hisham Matar
This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud
Held by Anne Michaels
Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
Enlightenment by Sarah Perry
Playground by Richard Powers
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood Continue reading
The longlist for this year’s Booker Prize is due to be announced on Tuesday 30th July. I’ve had mixed results over the last decade or so in my attempts to predict some likely contenders alongside my personal preferences and other possibilities, but it’s always fun to guess anyway.
Irish authors often dominate the shortlists as they did last year when ‘Prophet Song’ by Paul Lynch won the Prize. I am keen to read Long Island by Colm Tóibín which is a sequel to Brooklyn. Ghost Mountain by Rónán Hession is a fable about a mountain that suddenly appears and sounds rather different from his first two novels Leonard and Hungry Paul and Panenka. I don’t know much about Intermezzo by Sally Rooney which will be published in September – books eligible for this year’s Prize must have been published in the UK between 1st October 2023 and 30th September 2024 – but it’s hard to imagine Rooney moving too far away from the themes of her previous novels including Normal People which was longlisted in 2018. Continue reading
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The Booker Prize longlist was announced on Tuesday. The 13 titles are:
A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀
Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry
Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein
If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery
How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney
This Other Eden by Paul Harding
Pearl by Siân Hughes
All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
In Ascension by Martin MacInnes
Western Lane by Chetna Maroo
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng
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In my Booker Prize blog post last year, I noted that my longlist predictions lists in 2020 and 2021 included the eventual winners in those years: Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart and The Promise by Damon Galgut. I posed the question of whether I could make it three years in a row. The answer was a resounding no, but I think it’s fair to say that last year’s winner The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka didn’t feature in too many other predictions lists either, so I guess that was a small consolation.
As ever, my annual list of predictions consists of what I think could be some strong possibilities alongside my own personal preferences, based on a few novels I have read and others I have heard about. Novels published in the UK between 1 October 2022 and 30 September 2023 will be eligible. It’s impossible to know for sure which novels have been submitted for consideration, although the latest efforts by previous winners are usually considered automatically. Continue reading
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The Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist for 2023 was announced yesterday. The 16 titles are:
Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo
Homesick by Jennifer Croft
Fire Rush by Jacqueline Crooks
Children of Paradise by Camilla Grudova
Stone Blind by Natalie Haynes
Trespasses by Louise Kennedy
Demon Copperhead by Barbara Kingsolver
Cursed Bread by Sophie Mackintosh
The Dog of the North by Elizabeth McKenzie
Black Butterflies by Priscilla Morris
The Marriage Portrait by Maggie O’Farrell
I’m a Fan by Sheena Patel
Pod by Laline Paull
Wandering Souls by Cecile Pin
The Bandit Queens by Parini Shroff
Memphis by Tara M Stringfellow
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The Booker Prize longlist was announced on Tuesday. The 13 titles are:
Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo
Trust by Hernan Diaz
The Trees by Percival Everett
Booth by Karen Joy Fowler
Treacle Walker by Alan Garner
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shahan Karunatilaka
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Case Study by Graeme Macrae Burnet
The Colony by Audrey Magee
Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies by Maddie Mortimer
Nightcrawling by Leila Mottley
After Sappho by Selby Lynn Schwartz
Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout
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The 2022 Booker Prize longlist will be announced on Tuesday 26th July and I have made my annual list of predictions in terms of what I think could be some strong possibilities alongside my own personal preferences, based on a few novels I have read and others I have heard about. As ever, it’s impossible to know which novels have been submitted for consideration but those published in the UK between 1 October 2021 and 30 September 2022 will be eligible. My longlist predictions lists in 2020 and 2021 included the eventual winners in those years: Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart and The Promise by Damon Galgut. The question is, can I make it three years in a row…?
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The Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist for 2022 was announced on Tuesday. The 16 titles are:
The Bread the Devil Knead by Lisa Allen-Agostini
Salt Lick by Lulu Allison
Careless by Kirsty Capes
Remote Sympathy by Catherine Chidgey
The Paper Palace by Miranda Cowley Heller
Flamingo by Rachel Elliott
The Sentence by Louise Erdrich
Build Your House Around My Body by Violet Kupersmith
Sorrow and Bliss by Meg Mason
The Exhibitionist by Charlotte Mendelson
The Book of Form and Emptiness by Ruth Ozeki
This One Sky Day by Leone Ross
The Island of Missing Trees by Elif Shafak
Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
The Final Revival of Opal & Nev by Dawnie Walton
Creatures of Passage by Morowa Yejidé
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Empire of Pain by Patrick Radden Keefe won the Baillie Giffard Prize for Non-Fiction last year and examines the history of three generations of the Sackler family. Radden Keefe is a journalist for the New Yorker and ‘Empire of Pain’ was developed from his 2017 article about the Sacklers. The Sackler name is mostly associated with philanthropy. Several universities, museums and galleries have wings named after the family in recognition of the substantial donations they have made towards the arts and sciences. However, the Sacklers’ role in the development of the highly addictive drug OxyContin in 1996 and the subsequent opioid crisis in the United States has only recently become subject to proper scrutiny.
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My list of most anticipated books coming soon in 2022 is growing by the day, so here are some of the highlights. All publication dates where known apply to the United Kingdom only.
To Paradise by Hanya Yanagihara is out this month and spans an alternative version of New York in 1893, 1993 and 2093. I’ve heard nothing but positive reviews so far, even from those who didn’t get on with her second novel A Little Life. I expect it will appear on several predictions lists for the Booker Prize later this year, along with Young Mungo by Douglas Stuart which is out in April, after the Scottish author’s debut novel Shuggie Bain won the Prize in 2020. Continue reading
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Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo was the joint winner of the Booker Prize in 2019 alongside The Testaments by Margaret Atwood which I read earlier this year. It follows the lives of 12 characters, mostly black British women, spanning several decades in four overlapping clusters. In the first part, we are introduced to Amma, a theatre director, her daughter Yazz, and Dominique who is Amma’s former partner in the theatre group. Then there is Carole who works in banking, her mother Bummi and her school friend La Tisha. Shirley is a teacher whose mother Winsome is retired in Barbados and has worked with her colleague Penelope for several years. Finally, Megan/Morgan is a non-binary social media influencer, whose relatives Hattie and Grace were based in the north of England in the early 20th century.
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The Booker Prize longlist was announced on Tuesday. The 13 titles are:
A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam
Second Place by Rachel Cusk
The Promise by Damon Galgut
The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris
Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
An Island by Karen Jennings
A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson
No One is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed
Bewilderment by Richard Powers
China Room by Sunjeev Sahota
Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
Light Perpetual by Francis Spufford
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It’s that time of year again – the 2021 Booker Prize longlist will be announced on Tuesday 27th July and I have made a list of predictions in terms of what I think could be some strong possibilities alongside my own personal preferences, based on a few eligible books I have read in recent months, as well as several that I haven’t. As ever, it’s impossible to know which novels have been submitted for consideration. Last year, for the first time since I started writing these posts, my longlist predictions list included the eventual winner Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, so my first prediction is that it is highly unlikely I will repeat this trick for a second year in a row….
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The Women’s Prize for Fiction longlist for 2021 was announced last Wednesday. The 16 titles are:
The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
Small Pleasures by Clare Chambers
Piranesi by Susanna Clarke
The Golden Rule by Amanda Craig
Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan
Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi
Because of You by Dawn French
Unsettled Ground by Claire Fuller
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi
How the One-Armed Sister Sweeps Her House by Cherie Jones
Luster by Raven Leilani
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood
Consent by Annabel Lyon
Nothing But Blue Sky by Kathleen MacMahon
Detransition, Baby by Torrey Peters
Summer by Ali Smith Continue reading
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There are lots of reasons why 2020 has been an unusual year. One of them is that several books I have both read and enjoyed have won major literary prizes this year – more often than not, my longlist or shortlist preferences don’t get as far as taking the big cheques home with them. However, Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart won the Booker Prize this year – a debut novel about a young boy growing up in 1980s Glasgow (and I’m still feeling smug about including it in my predictions post back in July before it was even longlisted). Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell won the Women’s Prize for Fiction for its moving portrayal of the death of William Shakespeare’s young son. And One Two Three Four by Craig Brown was awarded the Baillie Gifford Prize for Non-Fiction – a brilliantly original and comic biography of the Beatles told in 99 short chapters. Continue reading
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I have been following the Sunday Times/University of Warwick Young Writer of the Year Award since its relaunch in 2015 and shadowed the prize in 2017. This year’s shortlist was announced on Sunday 1st November and consists of two poetry collections, two novels and one memoir. The titles are:
Surge by Jay Bernard
Inferno by Catherine Cho
Exciting Times by Naoise Dolan
Tongues of Fire by Sean Hewitt
Nightingale by Marina Kemp
The poetry collections include Tongues of Fire by Sean Hewitt which draws on Hewitt’s time in Sweden, a translation of the Irish legend of Buile Suibhne, and his father’s terminal illness. Rooted in the natural world, these poems are very immersive, and deal with themes of identity and loss. Surge by Jay Bernard has already been shortlisted for several other major awards (Costa, Forward, Dylan Thomas and T. S. Eliot). It focuses on the New Cross house fire in south-east London in January 1981 which killed 13 black teenagers who were celebrating a birthday party. The cause has never been fully established but it is possible that the fire was started deliberately in a racist attack. In poems such as ‘Sentence’, Bernard explores parallels between the New Cross fire and the grief surrounding more recent tragedies such as the Grenfell Tower fire and the Windrush scandal. I don’t read poetry very often, but I could see ‘Surge’ being a potential winner with its thoughtful exploration of a powerful central theme.
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