On September 16 The Booker Prize 2024 Shortlist was finally announced!
As mentioned on their website: “The shortlist includes five women, authors from five countries, and stories which transport readers around the world and beyond Earth’s atmosphere.”
The list includes a retelling of Huckleberry Finn, a title that also made the Ursula K. Le Guin Prize 2024 shortlist, and orange representation with Dutch author Yael van der Wouden.
Held by Anne Michaels
This is a narrative that spans four generations, moments of connection and consequence igniting and re-igniting as the century unfolds. In luminous moments of desire, comprehension, longing, transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later.
Held is a novel like no other, by a writer at the height of her powers: affecting and intensely beautiful, full of mystery, wisdom and compassion.
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
Creation Lake is a novel about a secret agent, a thirty-four-year-old American woman of ruthless tactics, bold opinions, and clean beauty, who is sent to do dirty work in France.
Written in short, vaulting sections, Rachel Kushner’s rendition of “noir” is taut and dazzling. Creation Lake is Kushner’s finest achievement yet as a novelist, a work of high art, high comedy, and unforgettable pleasure.
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
The earth, from here, is like heaven. It flows with colour. A burst of hopeful colour.
A book of wonder, Orbital is nature writing from space and an unexpected and profound love letter to life on Earth.
An arresting, genre-defying novel about space, our world and the climate crisis. In Orbital, Samantha Harvey looks at the fragility of human life and asks questions such as: What is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?
James by Percival Everett
A brilliant, action-packed reimagining of The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, both harrowing and ferociously funny, told from the enslaved Jim’s point of view.
Brimming with electrifying humor and lacerating observations, James is destined to be a major publishing event and a cornerstone of twenty-first century American literature.
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
An exhilarating tale of twisted desire, histories and homes, and the unexpected shape of revenge – for readers of Patricia Highsmith, Sarah Waters and Ian McEwan’s Atonement.
It’s 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is well and truly over. Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel’s life is as it should be: led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel’s doorstep-as a guest, there to stay for the season . . .
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of the Australian outback.
She doesn’t believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident.
