The artist, writer and chair of the 2024 Booker Prize panel describes this year's shortlist: the six best novels of the year published in English, in the judges' view. The winner will be announced on 12 November.
James
Everett has described his novel as a "conversation" with the "Adventures of Huckleberry Finn". It is a powerful conversation. Jim, an enslaved man who discovers he is to be sold away from his family, becomes James, a potently articulate protagonist and commentator in the tumult of the Deep South.
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Orbital
Samantha Harvey, 2023
Set on the International Space Station over 24 hours, this short and lyrical novel charts the lives of the six people in the cramped spacecraft as they observe the world beneath them, in all its beauty and vulnerability.
Available on The Week Bookshop
Creation Lake
Rachel Kushner, 2024
An uncategorisable novel – part spy-story, part- meditation on prehistory – that takes an American assassin to rural France to infiltrate a community of eco-activists. Funny, resonant and totally gripping, it asks searching questions about our compulsion to understand where we come from.
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The Safekeep
Yael van der Wouden, 2024
Set in the Netherlands after WWII, this is a compelling story of obsession and secrets. It is quietly devastating, simultaneously a love story and a narrative of life after the Holocaust.
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Held
Anne Michaels, 2023
This kaleidoscope of a novel is created from the scattered images and memories of four generations of a family. Through fragmentary passages, it asks with tenderness: "Who can say what happens when we are remembered?"
Available on The Week Bookshop
Stone Yard Devotional
Charlotte Wood, 2024
Stranded in middle-age, a woman returns to the place in which she grew up to join a small convent. This beautifully modulated book is set against the pandemic and the climate crisis. It explores the intimacy of living in intense proximity with an almost miraculous sensitivity.
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