Another year, another Booker Prize shortlist featuring only one Brit, as well as a couple of notable omissions: The Colony by Women's Prize-shortlisted author Audrey Magree, and Booth by former Booker shortlistee Karen Joy Fowler.
Instead, this year's shortlist includes authors of five nationalities, from four continents — two from the United States, one from Zimbabwe, one from Ireland, and one from Sri Lanka.
Only one author has made the shortlist before (NoViolet Bulawayo), even as this year's list celebrates authors with hefty back catalogues — Americans Percival Everett and Elizabeth Strout, and 87-year-old British author Alan Garner (the oldest nominee in the prize's history).
Alongside them are three authors in the running with their second novels: Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka; Zimbabwean novelist NoViolet Bulawayo; and Irish author Claire Keegan (with the shortest book to be nominated in the prize's history).
The winner of the Booker Prize will be announced on October 18 (AEDT).
The Trees by Percival Everett
Text Publishing
In his 40-year writing career, Percival Everett has won praise for his playful, satirical exploration of American race relations. In this, his 21st novel, he takes it one step further. The Trees is angry, grisly and hilarious; a blistering critique of White America.
The book is set in the tiny town of Money, Mississippi, a place made famous by a lynching. In 1955, 14-year-old Emmett Till was brutally murdered by two White men, after he was accused of making suggestive remarks to a local White woman. Till's mother decided to have an open casket at the funeral, which revealed the extent of his injuries — a choice that is said to have galvanised the civil rights movement in Mississippi.
Everett's novel takes place in Trump-era Money. A White man is murdered, and his mutilated body is found lying next to the corpse of a Black man – a corpse that looks suspiciously like Emmett Till.
In a (possibly supernatural) twist, the corpse of the Black man goes missing, only to show up again, days later, next to the body of another murdered White man. The two murder victims? Descendants of Emmett Till's killers.
Two Black detectives, Jim and Ed, are called into town to investigate the baffling crimes. As they wryly negotiate the racism and unhelpfulness of the local community, the body count skyrockets.
The Trees is a buddy comedy, a murder mystery and a revenge fantasy all at the same time. It's gruesome, spooky, hysterical and unapologetic – an absolute tour de force by a writer who needs to be heard. CN
Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout
Viking (Penguin)
American writer Elizabeth Strout creates beautifully realised characters, and inhabits them in such detail that they reappear in book after book, revealing more and more about their lives, histories, friends and relationships. The spiky, brusque Olive Kitteridge is one such character, appearing in two books and winning Strout the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 2009; Lucy Barton is another.
Lucy Barton is a writer, but she is not Elizabeth Strout. She has appeared in the short story collection Anything Is Possible and the novels My Name Is Lucy Barton, Oh William! and, most recently, Lucy by the Sea (published this month), which gives the character a COVID lockdown experience after her road trip with William.
William had existed in the first few Lucy stories as an aside, a footnote perhaps – a first husband-shaped footnote – but he comes into focus in this novel, for various reasons involving grief and age and compassion. In it, Lucy is 63ish and William is 70ish (the story takes place over a year or so). Lucy's husband David had died not long before, and in thinking about her life and memories, Lucy reassessed William – not in a romantic way, but as both a friend and as father to her daughters.
Together, they go on a trip, searching for secrets about his mother, Catherine, a woman who used to introduce Lucy by saying, "This is Lucy, she comes from nothing."
Sparingly, elegantly, Strout gives us glimpses of entire lives and defining events, of abuse and poverty, kindness and care. Along with a certain crisp attitude from Lucy herself, we feel Strout's own tenderness towards her characters; tender but not sloppy or mawkish.
Lucy keeps looking sideways at this man she used to know, and the exclamation mark in Strout's title can mean so many things: exasperation, amusement, surprise. Oh, William! KE
Glory by NoViolet Bulawayo
Chatto & Windus (Penguin)
Imagine Robert Mugabe as a frail old horse and Donald Trump as a tweeting baboon. Glory, by NoViolet Bulawayo, is a political satire with bite; a Zimbabwean Animal Farm for the 21st century.
The story takes place in the fictional African country Jidada (an obvious stand-in for Zimbabwe). As it opens, the Old Horse (a fictionalised, four-legged Mugabe) is rambling through an Independence Day speech, while his powerful wife, a donkey known as Dr Sweet Mother, watches on. The Old Horse is doddery — a shadow of his former self — but he and his wife can still bring the poor, doubting crowd to elation.
Later, Old Horse is ousted in a coup, and his former deputy, Tuvius Delight Shasha, takes power. Could this new horse leader bring much-needed prosperity to the animals of Jidada?
Meanwhile, a goat called Destiny has returned to Jidada after a decade in exile, and stands as the human (or is that goat?) centre of the story.
Glory is the second novel by NoViolet Bulawayo. Her first, 2013's We Need New Names, also made the Booker shortlist, making her the first Black African woman to be shortlisted for the prize.
In this new book she shows even greater skill than in her first, telling an important story with wonderful humour and playfulness. The book's long, rolling sentences are regularly punctuated with the refrain "tholukuthi", which in English translates to something like "only to discover", a repetition that is musical and powerful.
In Glory, NoViolet Bulawayo has set herself an ambitious project, which she executes in dazzling, stylish fashion. CN
Treacle Walker by Alan Garner
Fourth Estate (HarperCollins)
We all need more magic in our lives, and Treacle Walker has it in spades. Perhaps because British author Alan Garner has spent a lifetime writing fantasy, this book oozes with myth and mystery.
Born in 1934, Garner is the oldest author to ever be shortlisted for the prize. He was first published in 1960 with The Weirdstone of Brisingamen and has since written 27 books for either adults or younger readers, including a memoir.
Perhaps appropriately for a British fantasy author who draws on traditional folklore, Garner writes from his 600-year-old cottage in Cheshire, England, the place where most of his books are set. His many admirers include Philip Pullman and Neil Gaiman.
Treacle Walker follows young Joe Coppock, who is alone in his house when he's visited by a rag-and-bone man (someone who travels by horse and cart trading scraps for trinkets), who announces his arrival with the call: "'Ragbone! Ragbone! Any rags? Pots for rags! Donkey stone!" This man is the Treacle Walker.
After this encounter, Joe, who has trouble with his sight, is gifted with the "glamourie", which allows him to see in another dimension. With the glamourie he encounters Thin Amren, an ancient man living in a bog, as well as the protagonist of his favourite comic, Stonehenge Kit the Ancient Brit, who comes to life to battle with Whizzy the Wicked Wizard and the Brit Bashers.
The language in the novel is playful and harks to an earlier time; ever the sceptic, Joe's favourite phrase is "Don't be daft," and you'll encounter terms like hurlothrumbo and lomperhomock (look them up!).
What is Treacle Walker about ultimately? You'll need to read it to uncover its wonders, but perhaps you'll discover the gift of the glamourie, at least between the pages, and look afresh at the world. SL
Small Things Like These by Claire Keegan
Faber (Allen & Unwin)
Irish writer Claire Keegan likes to keep things short: she has published two collections of short stories (Antarctica and Walk the Blue Fields); "long short story" Foster (which we could just call a novella) that was recently adapted into the Irish-language film The Quiet Girl; and now, the novel Small Things Like These.
She is interested in supposedly small or ordinary lives, but she makes them momentous; ensures they matter.
In her novel, the focus is on Bill Furlong: coal and timber merchant, father of five daughters, fond and thoughtful husband. His mother was not married — Furlong never knew who his father was — but she was allowed by her employer to keep her job and her child, remarkable in itself in Catholic Ireland at that time.
The story begins slowly, in the mid-80s, as Furlong (as he's known) and his wife prepare for Christmas. Money is tight, and they have to think carefully about what they can give each other; what they can imagine for themselves. It's getting colder and colder, as Furlong heads out to deliver his loads of coal, coming back covered in dust and washing in cold water.
Cleanliness and gleaming linen comes into focus, though, at the nearby Magdalene laundries, where the nuns keep teenage girls locked and hidden away. Furlong chances upon some of these girls, their desperation and pleading eyes, and has to choose what to do and whether to look away. By this time in the book, you can hardly breathe with the power of it.
Furlong is a gentle man, but this is not a gentle book. It's devastating, beautiful, clever. If it's a Christmas story – and it is, in a way – then it's one to re-read every year, to ponder the questions it asks. KE
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka
Profile Books
This is the second year in a row that a Sri Lankan author has featured on the Booker Prize shortlist. Last year it was Anuk Arudpragasam's novel A Passage North, set in the aftermath of the Sri Lankan Civil War, which ended in 2009. (The best-known Sri Lankan Booker contender in its 53-year history is Canadian Sri Lankan author Michael Ondaatje, who won the prize in 1992 for The English Patient.)
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida is the second novel by Shehan Karunatilaka, who works as a copywriter when he's not writing books. His first novel Chinaman: The Legend of Pradeep Mathew, was a satirical take on cricket in Sri Lanka in the 80s and was awarded multiple literary awards, including the 2012 Commonwealth Book Prize.
He returns to satire with The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, set in 1989 during the quagmire of the Sri Lankan Civil War and released as the country is yet again experiencing political and economic instability.
It opens with Maali Almeida, a gay war photographer waking from a dream, not in his bed, but in the afterlife — which turns out to be a deeply bureaucratic and hierarchical place. The ghost of Maali has seven moons to uncover who his killer is and seek retribution for his death (which he discovers is difficult to do as a ghost). The challenge of finding his killer is compounded by the fact that there is conflict on multiple fronts; while the war rages with the Tamil Tigers, communists are also being persecuted — and Maali is thought to have worked with them all.
Along the way, Almeida encounters the ghosts of the people he photographed in mass graves, riots and public lynchings. The details are gruesome, but Karunatilaka is a writer who deftly balances gravity with gallows humour. Ultimately, The Seven Moons bears witness to the horrors of war and asks whether Sri Lankans are ready to face their complicated history. SL
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