The Booker Prize 2024: Predictions, Preferences and Possibilities

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.

A reimagining of Huckleberry Finn in James by Percival Everett seems to be a strong favourite, as does Tell Me Everything by Elizabeth Strout which is set in the same universe as the other Olive Kitteridge books (I really must catch up with the rest of the series).

Parade by Rachel Cusk is vaguely about artistry and motherhood but is otherwise essentially plotless and sounds rather baffling, so could well be a shoo-in for the longlist, following her two previous nominations in 2005 and 2021. However, the Booker Prize judges occasionally go for something slightly more commercially popular, and my choice would be Christ on a Bike by Orla Owen which is a delightfully odd tale about a woman who receives a life-changing inheritance with very specific conditions attached.

I would be happy to see Wellness by Nathan Hill on the longlist, a 600+ page epic set in Chicago, or maybe the judges will plump for a different doorstopper such as Caledonian Road by Andrew O’Hagan, a state-of-the-nation novel set in present-day London.

Debut novels can be a bit trickier to predict. Possible contenders include Mongrel by Hanako Footman which is about three women and their Japanese heritage. Martyr! by Kaveh Akbar is about an Iranian-American poet. Glorious Exploits by Ferdia Lennon recently won the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize and is a humorous piece of historical fiction set in Sicily during the Peloponnesian War told in contemporary Irish dialect in which two friends decide to use Athenian prisoners of war to stage a play. The Borrowed Hills by Scott Preston is set in Cumbria during the foot-and-mouth disease outbreak in the early 2000s and has been described as a neo-Western.

Which books would you like to see on the Booker Prize longlist?