This year’s Booker judges had a crowded field to pick from, with scores of eligible books from previously nominated writers and five new novels from winners alone (John Banville, Kiran Desai, Alan Hollinghurst, Ian McEwan and Ben Okri). Of these, Hollinghurst is one eyebrow-raising exclusion, for his elegiac and beautifully composed panorama of gay life in Britain over the past seven decades, Our Evenings. But it’s no surprise that the list is headed by Desai’s epic The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, a novel in the works since her Booker win two decades ago and due out this September.
Clocking in at nearly 700 pages, this is a love story about two people pulled between India and the US, family inheritance and personal ambition, intimacy and solitude. Immersive and gently funny, her vast canvas painted with an exquisitely fine brush, it looks like a leading contender on a canon-building list – nine of the authors are making their first Booker appearance. There is an emphasis on family stories; sometimes intimate and direct, as in Claire Adam’s account of a woman forced to give up her baby as a teenager, Love Forms, or Ben Markovits’s rueful study of a father contemplating life once the kids have left home, The Rest of Our Lives, but more often as a lens through which to examine the forces of history.
