Women dominate this year’s Booker Prize with a record five out of six places on the shortlist going to female novelists.
They include authors from Australia, Britain, Canada and the USA as well as the first Dutch writer to be shortlisted.
Among the six are Rachel Kushner and Percival Everett who have both previously been nominated as well as Yael van der Wouden who is shortlisted for her debut novel The Safekeep.
The line-up is completed by Samantha Harvey, Anne Michaels and Charlotte Wood.
Edmund de Waal, who is chairing this year’s judging panel, said he was “enormously proud” of the shortlist.
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He said: “We have spent months sifting, challenging, questioning – stopped in our tracks by the power of the contemporary fiction that we have been privileged to read. And here are the books that we need you to read. Great novels can change the reader. They face up to truths and face you in their turn.
“If that sounds excessive it reflects the urgency that animates these novels. Here is storytelling in which people confront the world in all its instability and complexity. The fault lines of our times are here.Borders and time zones and generations are crossed and explored, conflicts of identity, race and sexuality are brought into renewed focus through memorable voices. The people who come alive here are damaged in ways that we come to know and respect, and we come to care passionately about their histories and relationships.”
Kushner’s novel Creation Lake has been lauded as “a novel of ideas” disguised as a thriller and is set in the world of underground eco activism, while Everett’s James re-imagines Mark Twain’s classic Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of the escaped slave character Jim.
Canadian novelist Michaels is shortlisted for Held, a family saga spanning the globe and the century, while Australian Wood tells the story of a woman who retreats from life to join a convent in Stone Yard Devotional.
Harvey is nominated for her slim novel Orbital, set on a spaceship circling the earth, and van der Wouden gets a nod for The Safekeep which she wrote in English but which is set in her native Holland in a world still reeling from Nazi occupation.
The winning author will be announced on Tuesday November 12 in a ceremony at Old Billingsgate and will win £50,000 and can expect to see their book race up the best-seller lists.
