Legend has it that the 1976 Booker prize was decided by a coin toss when the exasperated judges were unable to agree on a winner. I’m not suggesting that this year’s chair of judges, art historian and former museum director Neil MacGregor, keep some loose change in his back pocket, but every book on the 2022 shortlist is a serious contender for the prize. Short of coin-tossing, arm-wrestling and plucking a name from a hat in a blind panic, I’ve no idea how we’ll pick a winning book from this spectacular final six.
In alphabetical order, the 2022 shortlist begins with NoViolet Bulawayo and her fabulist animal allegory, Glory: a furious, funny and energetic story set in the fictional animal kingdom of Jidada (read: Zimbabwe) as it surfaces from decades of dictatorship. Bulawayo captures the hope, dismay and disarray that follows the toppling of a tyrant. The animal cast includes Robert Mugabe as a doddery old horse and Donald Trump as a tweeting baboon. Bulawayo writes with an exhilarating anger and her surreal imagination puts the Dada into Jidada. It’s been touted as a Zimbabwean Animal Farm, but Glory equally draws from a rich tradition of African storytelling in which animals articulate the deepest truths of our societies.
