The Booker Prize for Fiction, first awarded in 1969, is open to writers of any nationality, writing in English and published in the UK or Ireland. The longlist, or ‘Booker Dozen’, for the 2019 Booker Prize was announced on Wednesday 24 July 2019. Of the 13 longlisted authors, eight are women and five are men. Two former winners, Margaret Atwood of Canada and British Indian Salman Rushdie, are also on the list
The list was chosen from 151 novels published in the UK or Ireland between 1 October 2018 and 30 September 2019.
The eight female authors are Margaret Atwood, Oyinkan Braithwaite, Lucy Ellmann, Bernardine Evaristo, Deborah Levy, Valeria Luiselli, Elif Shafak and Jeanette Winterson. The five male contenders are Kevin Barry, John Lanchester, Chigozie Obioma, Max Porter and Salman Rushdie.
The shortlist of six books will be announced on Tuesday 3 September at a morning press conference. The shortlisted authors each will receive £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book. The 2019 winner will be announced on Monday 14 October at an awards ceremony at London’s Guildhall. The winner of the 2019 Booker Prize will receive £50,000 and can expect international recognition.
If you are a bookworm, we have included the 13 longlisted books, their author and a synopsis of the book below:
The Testaments, Margaret Atwood – The book could be called as a sequel to Atwood’s The Handmaid’s Tale(THT) and it is set 15 years after Offred’s final scene in THT and is narrated by three female characters.
Night Boat to Tangier, Kevin Barry – It’s late one night at the Spanish port of Algeciras and two fading Irish gangsters are waiting on the boat from Tangier. A lover has been lost, a daughter has gone missing, their world has come asunder. Can it be put together again?
This is a novel drenched in sex and death and narcotics, in sudden violence and old magic, but it is obsessed, above all, with the mysteries of love. A tragicomic masterwork from a multi-award-winning writer, Night Boat to Tangier is both mordant and hilarious, lyrical yet laden with menace.
My Sister, The Serial Killer, Oyinkan Braithwaite – When Korede’s dinner is interrupted one night by a distress call from her sister, Ayoola, she knows what’s expected of her: bleach, rubber gloves, nerves of steel and a strong stomach. This’ll be the third boyfriend Ayoola’s dispatched in, quote, self-defence and the third mess that her lethal little sibling has left Korede to clear away. She should probably go to the police for the good of the menfolk of Nigeria, but she loves her sister and, as they say, family always comes first. Until, that is, Ayoola starts dating the fit doctor where Korede works as a nurse. Korede’s long been in love with him, and isn’t prepared to see him wind up with a knife in his back: but to save one would mean sacrificing the other.
Ducks, Newburyport, Lucy Ellmann – Latticing one cherry pie after another, an Ohio housewife tries to bridge the gaps between reality and the torrent of meaningless info that is the United States of America. She worries about her children, her dead parents, African elephants, the bedroom rituals of “happy couples”, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and how to hatch an abandoned wood pigeon egg. Is there some trick to surviving survivalists? School shootings? Medical debts? Franks ’n’ beans? A scorching indictment of America’s barbarity, past and present, and a lament for the way we are sleepwalking into environmental disaster, Ducks, Newburyport is a heresy, a wonder—and a revolution in the novel.
Girl, Woman, Other, Bernardine Evaristo – Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of 12 very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years. Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of history, a novel of our times: celebratory, ever-dynamic and utterly irresistible.
The Wall, John Lanchester – The Wall is a thrilling and hypnotic work of fiction: a mystery story, a love story, a war story and a story about a voyage. Kavanagh begins his life patrolling the Wall. If he’s lucky, if nothing goes wrong, he has only two years of this: 729 more nights. The best thing that can happen is that he survives and gets off the Wall and never has to spend another day of his life anywhere near it. He longs for this to be over; longs to be somewhere else.
The Wall is a novel about why the young are right to distrust the old. It’s about a broken world you will recognise as your own – and about what might be found when all is lost.
The Man Who Saw Everything, Deborah Levy – In 1989, Saul is hit by a car on the Abbey Rd crossing. He is fine; he gets up and goes to see his girlfriend, Jennifer. They have sex and then break up. He leaves for the GDR, where he will have more sex (with several members of the same family), harvest mushrooms in the rain, bury his dead father in a matchbox and get on the wrong side of the Stasi.
In 2016, Saul is hit by a car on the Abbey Rd crossing. He is not fine at all; he is rushed to hospital and spends the following days in and out of consciousness, in and out of history. Jennifer is sitting by his bedside. His very-much-not-dead father is sitting by his bedside. Someone important is missing.
Deborah Levy presents an ambitious, playful and totally electrifying novel about what we see and what we fail to see, about carelessness and the harm we do to others, about the weight of history and our ruinous attempts to shrug it off.
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