August 2, 2024 · 5:56 pm
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
I correctly guessed just one of the 13 titles in my predictions post and I think ‘James’ by Percival Everett will have been on pretty much every other predictions list too, along with ‘My Friends’ by Hisham Matar about three friends living in political exile in London.
Three debut novels made the cut, including ‘Wild Houses’ by Colin Barrett which was also the only Irish novel on the longlist. ‘Stone Yard Devotional’ by Charlotte Wood is the first Australian novel to be longlisted since J. M. Coetzee in 2016, and is set in a convent in rural New South Wales.
I’ve had some mixed experiences with previous books by the longlisted authors. I enjoyed The Essex Serpent by Sarah Perry and The Woman Upstairs by Claire Messud, so I am looking forward to reading ‘Enlightenment’ and ‘This Strange Eventful History’. I didn’t finish The Overstory by Richard Powers which I thought had too many plot strands, and ‘Playground’ sounds similarly complex if not quite as long. I thought The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner was a bit messy, but ‘Creation Lake’ has an intriguing premise in which an American woman infiltrates an anarchist collective in France. I didn’t love The Shapeless Unease by Samantha Harvey which is a non-fiction account of the author’s experience of insomnia, and ‘Orbital’ sounds similarly baggy and plotless, so I will probably give that a miss.
The shortlist will be announced on Monday 16 September. What do you think of this year’s longlist?
