This year’s Booker Prize shortlist features a reimagining of Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, its runaway slave; a “space pastoral” about astronauts orbiting the Earth; an exploration of what it is to be human disguised as a spy thriller; a British soldier coming to terms with the trauma of the first World War; a queer love story that is also a Holocaust novel; and an Australian woman on a religious retreat to make sense of the world.
Five women have been shortlisted for this year’s prize – a record number. While judges emphasised each book was chosen on its merits, one, Sara Collins, said that “literary recognition is often still reserved for men”, observing that last year’s shortlist featured “three Pauls”, a reference to Paul Harding and Irish authors Paul Murray and eventual winner Paul Lynch.
Colin Barrett was the only Irish author on this year’s longlist, with his debut novel, Wild Houses.
Booker shortlist
- James by Percival Everett
- Orbital by Samantha Harvey
- Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
- Held by Anne Michaels
- The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
- Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
Two shortlisted authors, Percival Everett and Rachel Kushner, are American, still a bone of contention for some. In the 11 years since US authors have been eligible, they have taken 24 of 66 shortlist places but won only twice. “It’s the Olympics, not the Commonwealth Games,” prize director Gaby Wood said. This year’s shortlist also features the first Dutch writer, debutant Yael van der Wouden; Charlotte Wood, the first Australian in 10 years, Canadian Anne Michaels; and Briton Samantha Harvey.
Everett was shortlisted for the Booker in 2022 for The Trees. His novel Erasure was adapted to become the Oscar-nominated film American Fiction. Kushner was shortlisted for the Booker in 2018 for The Mars Room. She has won the Prix Médicis, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Folio Prize. Harvey was longlisted in 2009 for The Wilderness, which won the Betty Trask Prize that year.
Michaels is best known as a poet but her 1996 novel Fugitive Pieces won 12 international awards, was adapted into a film in 2007 and included in the BBC’s 100 Novels that Shaped the World. Wood’s The Natural Way of Things won Australia’s $50,000 Stella Prize in 2016. Van der Wouden teaches creative writing and literature in the Netherlands. Her essay, On (Not) Reading Anne Frank, received a notable mention in The Best American Essays 2018 and she answers people’s problems in an online advice column, Dear David, posing as Sir David Attenborough.
The 2024 judging panel is chaired by artist and author Edmund de Waal, who is joined by novelist Sara Collins; Guardian fiction editor Justine Jordan; writer Yiyun Li; and composer Nitin Sawhney. The judges will now read the shortlisted works for a third time and the winner of the £50,000 prize will be revealed at a ceremony in London on November 12th.
Edmund de Waal said: “We have spent months sifting, challenging, questioning – stopped in our tracks by the power of the contemporary fiction that we have been privileged to read. And here are the books that we need you to read. Great novels can change the reader. They face up to truths and face you in their turn.
“If that sounds excessive it reflects the urgency that animates these novels. Here is storytelling in which people confront the world in all its instability and complexity. The fault lines of our times are here. Borders and time zones and generations are crossed and explored, conflicts of identity, race and sexuality are brought into renewed focus through memorable voices. The people who come alive here are damaged in ways that we come to know and respect, and we come to care passionately about their histories and relationships.
“My copies of these novels are dog-eared, scribbled in. They have been carried everywhere – surely the necessary measure of a seriously good novel. Our final meeting to choose this shortlist together was punctuated by delight at them. They are books that made us want to keep on reading, to ring up friends and tell them about them.
“We’re not bloody academics,” he said, insisting that a prize-winning novel has to impress on both a first reading and a third. “The book has to work on that immediate cellular level and then it absolutely has to endure, have the longevity of proper literature.”
Comments from authors and judges
James by Percival Everett
The author said: “Mark Twain’s The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn is the source of my novel. I hope that I have written the novel that Twain did not and also could not have written. I do not view the work as a corrective, but rather I see myself in conversation with Twain.”
The judges said: “This is a book that subverts all expectations, as well as further establishing its author as a masterful storyteller. The narrative experimentation challenges traditional genre conventions. It’s a book that compels us to question, and reflect on, the nature of morality, the corrupting influence of power and the resilience of the human spirit. Its universal themes of identity, freedom and justice will resonate with contemporary readers, despite the book presenting initially as the retelling of a classic novel.”
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
The author said: “I wanted to write about our human occupation of low Earth orbit for the last quarter of a century – not as sci-fi but as realism. Could I evoke the beauty of that vantage point with the care of a nature writer? Could I write about amazement? Could I pull off a sort of space pastoral? These were the challenges I set myself.”
The judges said: “It blurs the distinctions between borders, time zones and our own individual stories, provides a vantage point we haven’t encountered in fiction before, and is infused with such awe and reverence that it reads like a love letter, an act of worship. A brief yet miraculously expansive novel, it offers us a vision of our planet as borderless and interlinked, and makes the case for co-operation and respect for our shared humanity.”
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
The author said: “I had long wanted to tell a story about a group of young people who decamp from Paris to a rural outpost in France, where they are set on a collision course with the French state. At the same time, I became interested in prehistory, both what can be known about ancient people and what the longing to know actually is, a sense that we have taken a wrong turn, that our ancestors hid messages from us that we don’t know how to read.”
The judges said: “Novels that investigate what it is to be human can veer into the sentimental; this one is utterly flinty and hard-nosed. It’s quite something to wrap a novel of ideas into a page-turning spy thriller, and to achieve a narrative voice that is so audaciously confident – and then subtly undercut it. There’s also mystery at the book’s core – both the mystery of human origins and of individual identity. The author’s prose is juicy, her narrator jaunty, her worldbuilding lush, and she also taps into something profound.”
Held by Anne Michaels
The author said: “Every day writing this book I asked myself: in these urgent times, what voice might be small enough to be heard; what do we need now? We measure history by events and actions, but this book wants to assert a different measure for history, the real and powerful effect of our inner lives – what we believe, what we value, what we love, what we aspire to.”
The judges said: “We loved the quietness of this book, and surrendered to it. Its large themes are of the instability of the past and memory, but it works on a cellular level due to the astonishing beauty of its details. There are very few books that can achieve a pitch of poetic intensity sustained across a whole novel. Starting with a wounded soldier on a French battlefield, this lyrical kaleidoscope of a novel is created from the scattered images and memories of four generations of a family.”
[ Held by Anne Michaels review: A profound literary experienceOpens in new window ]
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
The author said: [The book was inspired by] ‘A short story I once wrote about three siblings out for dinner and the additional girlfriend everyone hates; a fascination with how the Dutch narrativise national histories; wanting to explore desire as the flipside of repulsion. The way it happened was like this: I was on the way back from a funeral, looking out over flat Dutch fields, and somewhere between grief and a need to escape the idea bloomed, of a house, a woman and a stranger.’
The judges said: ‘This is a compelling and atmospheric story of obsession and secrets. It’s a novel that explores the things that are kept from us as children, and the things we tell ourselves about our own hidden desires. A quietly devastating queer love story which reveals itself to be a story of the Holocaust, it shows how alternate truths are held in fissile connection, something that is relevant to today’s world.’
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
The author said: ‘Stone Yard Devotional grew from elements of my own life and childhood merging with an entirely invented story about an enclosed religious community. Writing it during pandemic lockdowns, followed by a serious illness – and the way these twin upheavals demolished so many of our consoling certainties – gave me an urgent instinct to shed anything inessential in my work. I wanted nothing trivial, nothing insincere in this book.’
The judges said: “A fierce and philosophical interrogation of history, memory, nature, and human existence. It is set in a claustrophobic environment and reveals the vastness of the human mind: the juxtaposition is so artfully done that a reader feels trusted by the author to be an intellectual partner. It chronicles one woman’s inward journey to make sense of the world – and her life – when conflicts and chaos are abundant in both realms.”
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