This year’s International Booker Prize shortlist presents a diverse and intriguing array of books that all demonstrate the highly creative imagination and inventiveness of their authors – and translators, of course.
Readers are invited to immerse themselves in six richly told tales from Bulgaria to Brazil and several points in between. Across these novels, we meet the unreliable narrator of a meta-fiction, a failed modern witch, a family of Iranian émigrés, a filmmaker compromised by the Nazis, a brutal prison warden, and a gender-traversing figure who seeks to save their own skin by shapeshifting.
Booker panel chair Natasha Brown has great praise for the shortlist, saying: “With narratives that capture moments from across the past century, these books reverberate with history. While there’s heartbreak, brutality and isolation among these stories, their lasting effect is energising.”
