This year’s Booker longlist is led by two previous winners. Twelve years on from A Brief History of Seven Killings, Marlon James returns to Jamaica in The Disappearers, out in September: a polyphonic epic of a murderous mob attack on a gay theatre group in 1988 Kingston, and the two-decade aftermath of trauma and revenge that follows. A brutal expose of Jamaica’s homophobia, it’s also an energetic portrait of queer culture and the Caribbean diaspora. Douglas Stuart, whose debut Shuggie Bain won in 2020, is included for John of John, in which a young gay man returns to his childhood home on the Hebridean island of Harris, where his devout father is also hiding his sexuality. Both novels open up territory not often trod in literature, with Stuart illuminating faith, repression and the fading traditions of the Scottish Hebrides.
It’s no surprise either to see a third nomination for Elizabeth Strout. The Things We Never Say introduces new characters to her fictional universe, in the story of a fiftysomething teacher with a secret in his marriage and a sadness in his heart. Strout has always been interested in class and deprivation in American society; the spectre of Trump brings a growing darkness, but as ever her spiky warmth and wisdom carry the reader through. The other big-name American author on the list is Emma Cline; Switzy, out in September, takes us inside the mind of a high flyer whose grip on the world is failing as dementia encroaches. David is taking his last journey, to a euthanasia clinic in Zurich, and on the way will hopefully make his final reckonings with friends and family while he can still recognise them. It’s a technical tour de force of the unreliable narrator, and a hugely moving account of life’s meaning as everything is stripped away.
This year’s big omission is also American: Ben Lerner was widely seen as a shoo-in for Transcription, his compact but intricately allusive meditation on family inheritance, technology and the effect of smartphones on the way we see the world. But there will be rejoicing at a nomination at last for British author Gwendoline Riley, who has been writing devastatingly precise indictments of family relationships and emotional narcissism for a quarter of a century. The Palm House finds her in a more tender mood, investigating a long friendship against the precarity of London life.
It’s fantastic too to see M John Harrison’s The End of Everything, a fabulously destabilising vision of an England drifting through alien invasion into terminal decline. Harrison, who has been called “the missing evolutionary link between William Burroughs and Virginia Woolf”, began his career in the late 1960s as part of the science fiction New Wave, and has been subverting genre and perspective in steely modernist sentences ever since. This portrait of apocalypse-at-a-remove, with wars in the distance, reality bending, new forms of intelligence on the rise while humans dissociate and muddle confusedly through, perhaps speaks more to our times than realism ever could.
Indeed judge Patricia Lockwood, known for her own dazzlingly idiosyncratic prose, claimed in an interview with the Observer that “in the face of AI and the fractured attention span, I think we’re going to see a new avant garde that insists on the participation of the human … there is a new, weird literature emerging”. She jokingly threatened to choose “the craziest book on Earth!” And there’s certainly a weird and wild undercurrent in this year’s list, soaked through with absurdism and surrealism.
If one theme is the journey from margins to mainstream, it’s been a rapid progression for Missouri Williams, only on her second novel after cult success The Doloriad. Set in a university town overrun by vegetation, The Vivisectors is a deeply strange parable of culture wars, family dysfunction and civilisational decline, and an even stranger love story. “At the centre of my soul there was a big dead rock that wanted nothing to do with anything else,” says our young antiheroine, and while there are echoes of Ottessa Moshfegh here, Williams has a vision and energy all her own.
Rebecca Perry’s debut May We Feed the King is similarly uncategorisable, contrasting a contemporary narrative about a curator who recreates furnishings and feasts in historic houses with the story of an unwilling medieval ruler. It’s a puzzle box of a novel that toys with the reader but keeps them rapt throughout. American Makenna Goodman’s Helen of Nowhere is more unusual still: organised as a series of dramatic scenes, it is a witty fable of male entitlement based around a university professor whose status is upended by the changing zeitgeist. Like The Vivisectors, it’s interested in nature v civilisation, culture wars and identity politics.
“History repeats itself so fast in Turkey, faster than in any other country.” Kenan Orhan’s The Renovation uses a Kafkaesque absurdity – a bathroom in an Italian flat that suddenly becomes a prison cell in Istanbul – to open up a story about migration, home and political repression, in which the trials of loss and memory extend to the narrator’s father’s dementia. Even Luke Kennard’s comic romp Black Bag is tinged with absurdism. Here a failing actor who has “measured out my life in coffees I cannot technically afford” takes part in a university experiment, hanging around campus dressed only in a black leather bag: his parents appear as stone menhirs, and his best conversations are with a dog. Full of zinging one-liners, this is a very funny take on work, friendship, masculinity and other modern confusions.
Irish author Djamel White’s debut All Them Dogs, a tale of drug deals, bad choices and queer desire in the ganglands of Dublin, has a similarly riotous energy, while the Mexican-British author Chloe Aridjis’s The Shadow of the Object is a quieter, almost dreamlike story of a woman drawn into a fascination with magic lanterns and the technology of illusion; the ruminative mood is reminiscent of WG Sebald. The shortlist, released on 22 September, may have a different emphasis, but for the moment this is a longlist that’s eager to experiment.
