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









The Booker Prize longlist (no longer sponsored by the Man Group) for 2019 is due to be announced on Wednesday 24th July which means it’s time for another game of what Julian Barnes once termed “posh bingo”. I’ve come up with 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 ones I haven’t. As ever, I have no idea which novels have actually been submitted for consideration.
I only started blogging about my predictions for literary award longlists relatively recently. Three of 
Having had some success with my 



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