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The Booker Prize Shortlist was announced at Somerset House on Monday (16 September), with religion, climate change, and race among the key themes tackled by the selected titles.
Judges had the arduous task of whittling down the 13 longlisted books, announced in July, to just six, and broke records in the process.
The prestigious literary award’s 2024 shortlist features the largest number of women in its 55-year history, with five women and one man represented.
Each of the six shortlisted authors receives a £2,500 prize and a bespoke bound edition of their book. They are also likely to enjoy a significant uptick in sales owing to the vast publicity surrounding the Booker Prize.
Common themes among this year’s selected titles are those which transport readers around the world, out of the Earth’s atmosphere, and across time.
Announcing the news at Somerset House, Edmund de Waal, chair of the 2024 judges, insisted that the books were not selected for the “issues” they tackled, though he did acknowledge that they all grappled with ideas of identity and the “fault lines of our times”.
The list features mostly established writers, with only one debut author making an appearance. It’s a distinct change from the 2023 shortlist in which only debut authors were selected, including last year’s winner Paul Lynch, who won for his book Prophet Song.
There is one British author on this year’s list, Samantha Harvey. Australian, Dutch, American, and Canadian writers also appear.
The winner of the 2024 Booker Prize will be announced on Tuesday 12 November, and will be awarded £50,000 in prize money.
See the full shortlist below
James by Percival Everett (Mantel)
A re-telling of Mark Twain’s masterpiece Huckleberry Finn, Everett’s novel follows the experience of Finn’s companion James, a runaway slave. The author has said that he does not see his work as a corrective to the original, but rather as in “conversation” with Twain.
This is the second time that Everett has been nominated for the Booker, the first being for his novel The Trees in 2022. The American author’s 2001 novel Erasure was adapted into Oscar-nominated film, American Fiction starring Jeffrey Wright in 2023.
Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape)
Six astronauts rotate around the earth on the International Space Station in Orbital. Their minds wander to existential questions about life, earth, and relationships as they share intimate conversations with one other. Speaking about her novel, Harvey said she attempted to write from a place of realism rather than sci-fi and attempted to do so with “the care of a nature writer”.
Like Everett, this is the second time that the British author has been longlisted for the Booker, the first being in 2009 for The Wilderness. It is the first time she has been shortlisted.
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (Jonathan Cape)
Set amid the chaos of the climate crisis, Kushner’s novel follows protagonist Sadie Smith in her work as an undercover agent on a mission to infiltrate a commune of eco-activists in rural France led by a charismatic leader. Tensions arise when she finds herself falling under his spell.
The American author has been nominated for the Booker once before in 2018 with The Mars Room. She is an internationally bestselling author whose work has been translated into 27 languages. Speaking about Creation Lake, Kushner said that she had long wanted to write a novel about a group of people “on a collision course with the French state”.
Held by Anne Michaels (Bloomsbury Publishing)
The acclaimed Canadian author’s third book spans four generations, and revisits themes covered in her earlier work, including history, loss, trauma, and love. In Held, a carousel of characters appear including John who returns home from war grievously wounded; Alan, a war photographer, and Mara, a nurse in a field hospital. Their sense of the present is interrupted by memories of the past as Michaels does away with traditional narrative structures.
Speaking about the themes of her book, she said she had been moved by the voices that were needed “in these urgent times”. The author has won several awards in the past, including the Orange Prize for Fiction, and her books have been translated into more than 50 languages.
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (Viking)
A tale about desire and infatuation, The Safekeep tells the story of two very different women who find themselves living together when Isabel’s brother drops his irreverent and chaotic girlfriend off at his sister’s house. Set in the aftermath of the Second World War, a rage-fuelled obsession ensues as Isabel desperately grasps for order.
The Dutch author is the only debut writer on the list. Van der Wouden said the book was inspired by a short story she once wrote about “three siblings out for dinner and the additional girlfriend everyone hates”.
Stoneyard Devotional by Charlotte Wood (Sceptre)
A middle-aged woman returns to Sydney in need of rest and retreat. An atheist, she surprisingly finds herself embedded within a religious community whose sleepy existence is disturbed by three mysterious events.
Wood is an Australian author whose oeuvre includes seven novels and three works of nonfiction. She said that Stoneyard Devotional “grew from elements of my own life and childhood merging with an entirely invented story about an enclosed religious community”.
