Opinion | From Long List to Short List to the Prize, It’s Booker Time!

In four days from now, the short list of six books for this year’s Booker Prize will be announced. The long list of 13 books, or the ‘Booker Dozen’, was announced on August 1 and the winner of the 50,000-British pounds ‘Booker Prize for 2023’ will be announced at an event at Old Billingsgate, London on November 26, 2023.

The 2022 Winner

Last year’s Booker Prize was awarded to Sri Lankan writer Shehan Karunatilaka for his second novel The Seven Moons of Mali Almeida, earlier published in the South Asian subcontinent as Chats with the Dead.

In the process of emerging the surprise winner, Shehan bested the short list of books and writers comprising Glory by Zimbabwean NoViolet Bulawayo, a satire that probed persistent African political struggles; Small Things Like These by Irish virtuoso Claire Keegan, a novel that was shaped and driven by pressing questions of morality; Treacle Walker by octogenarian Alan Garner; and works of two veteran American writers, Percival Everett’s Trees and Elizabeth Strout’s Oh, William!.

Neil MacGregor, 2022 chair of judges for the Booker, said Shehan’s novel was chosen because “it’s a book that takes the reader on a rollercoaster journey through life and death right to what the author describes as the dark heart of the world … and there the reader finds, to their surprise, joy, tenderness, love and loyalty”.

He continued: “It is a metaphysical thriller, an afterlife noir that dissolves boundaries not simply of various genres, however of life and demise, physique, and spirit, east and west. It is an entirely serious philosophical romp that takes the reader to ‘the world’s dark heart’ — the murderous horrors of civil war Sri Lanka. And once there, the reader also discovers the tenderness and beauty, the love and loyalty, and the pursuit of an ideal that justify every human life.”

Two paragraphs of last year’s winner have stuck with me. One from the beginning: “Lankans cannot queue. Unless you define a queue as an amorphous curve with multiple entry points. This appears to be gathering point for those with questions about their death. There are multiple counters and irate customers clamour over grills to shout abuse at the few behind the bars. Afterlife is a tax office, and everyone wants a rebate.”

And the second from the end of the book. “Everybody is trying not to get eaten. I want a break from the food chain… there is no animal more savage than a human.”

There is Always a Near Miss

Two of my favourites from the long list of 163 novels that were eligible for this year’s Booker Prize failed to make the long list of 13 novels. And they must have missed by a whisker.

One, the classic 736-pages long The Covenant of Water – A Novel by Abraham Verghese. It is a stunning and magisterial epic of love, faith, and medicine, set in south India’s Kerala, following three generations of a family (1900-1977) seeking the answers to a strange secret. Verghese’s earlier creation Cutting for Stone, published in 2009, too, was a literary phenomenon, selling over 1.5 million copies in the United States alone and remaining on the New York Times bestseller list for over two years.

Two, an uncharacteristic sprawling 548-pages bold and brutal narrative Age of Vice by Deepti Kapoor, a novel that has set the global literary stage on fire. The book is a rare literary piece of art that is visceral with ferocious plot, arresting characters and electric dialogue with a thrilling style and extraordinarily rare. I had personally ranked the book as one of the best 20 original novels out of 50,000 titles of all genres that I have read in 65 years of my young life.

There is always a near miss and the task before this year’s panel of Booker Prize judges was humongous. Judges, including novelist Esi Edugyan (the Chair), twice shortlisted for the Booker Prize himself; Adjoa Andoh (actor, writer and director); Mary Jean Chan (poet, lecturer, editor and critic); James Shapiro (professor of English and Comparative Literature at Columbia University and Shakespeare specialist); and actor-writer Robert Webb, within seven months, read an astounding 163 books before zeroing down on the long list of 13.

The Long List

Thirteen novels that made the long list are:

1. The House of Doors written by Malayasian author Tan Twan Eng. Based on real events, this masterful novel of public morality and private truth examines love and betrayal under the shadow of the Empire.
2. The Bee Sting written by Irish author Paul Murra is a mesmerising piece of a patch of ice on the road, a casual favour to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil. It asks whether a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life.
3. Western Lane written by Indian-origin Kenya-born US resident Chetna Maroo. This is the story of an 11-year-old girl Gopi who has been playing squash since she was old enough to hold a racket. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen, and the game becomes her world. This tender and moving debut novel is about grief, sisterhood, a teenage girl’s struggle to transcend herself – and squash.
4. In Ascension, the third novel of Scottish author Martin MacInnes, is the story of Leigh who grew up in Rotterdam and was drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic Ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of Earth’s first life forms, but instead, what she finds calls into question everything we know about our own beginnings, and leaves her facing an impossible choice: to remain with her family or to embark on a journey across the breadth of the cosmos.
5. Prophet Song by internationally acclaimed Irish novelist Paul Lynch, who has published five novels. This is a novel where scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack faces a terrible choice, in exhilarating, propulsive and confrontational portrait of an Irish society on the brink.
6. All the Little Bird-Hearts is an amazingly touching novel by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow who has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Kent, and has extensive personal, professional and academic experience relating to autism. Like her protagonist Sunday in her debut novel, Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow is autistic. The novel offers a deft exploration of motherhood, vulnerability and the complexity of human relationships.
7. Pearl is the debut novel by Siân Hughes who grew up in a small village in Cheshire, England, the book’s setting. Hughes, in this haunting novel inspired by the medieval poem of the same name, contemplates both the power and the fragility of the human mind. It is the story of Marianne clinging to the fragmented memories of her mother’s love; the smell of fresh herbs, the games they played, and the songs and stories of her childhood. The mother went mysteriously missing when Marianne was eight-years-old, leaving behind her baby brother and grieving father in a ramshackle house on the edge of a small village.
8. This Other Eden is the spellbinding third novel by Paul Harding, who has taught writing at Harvard University and the University of Iowa. His debut novel Tinkers, published in 2009, won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction. His latest celebrates the hopes, dreams and resilience of those deemed not to fit in a world brutally intolerant of difference. Inspired by historical events, the novel tells the story of Apple Island, an enclave off the coast of the United States where castaways – in flight from society and its judgment – have landed and built a home.
9. How to Build a Boat by award-winning poet, novelist, short story writer and playwright from the west of Ireland Elaine Feeney is the story of 13-year-old Jamie O’Neill who loves the colour red, tall trees, patterns, rain that comes with wind, the curvature of many objects, books with dust jackets, cats, rivers and Edgar Allan Poe. Neill wants two things especially in life – to build a Perpetual Motion Machine, and to connect with his mother Noelle, who died when he was born. In his mind, these things are intimately linked. And at his new school, where all else is disorientating and overwhelming, he finds two people who might just be able to help him. His story is how one boy on a unique mission transforms the lives of his teachers and brings together a community.
10. If I Survive You announces the arrival of Jonathan Escoffery as a skilled chronicler of American life at its most gruesome and hopeful. In this novel, as the stories move back and forth through geography and time, readers are confronted by the immigrants’ eternal question: “who am I now and where do I belong?”. The book unravels beautifully what it means to carve out an existence between cultures, homes and pay cheques.
11. Study for Obedience is written by Sarah Bernstein, a Canadian writer and scholar who was born in Montreal and now lives in the Scottish Highlands, where she teaches literature and creative writing. In her accomplished and unsettling second novel, Sarah Bernstein explores themes of prejudice, abuse and guilt through the eyes of a singularly unreliable narrator.
12. Old God’s Time is written by Sebastian Barry, one among a small group of authors who have been nominated for the Booker Prize five times. In this haunting novel, in which nothing is quite what it seems, Sebastian Barry explores beautifully what we live through, what we live with, and what may survive of us.
13. A Spell of Good Things is the second book written by award-winning Nigeria-born author Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, whose first one, Stay With Me, was New York Times, Guardian, Chicago Tribune and NPR Book of the Year. It dazzles with the story of modern Nigeria and two families caught in the riptides of wealth, power, romantic obsession and political corruption. It is a story of haves and have-nots of Nigeria, and the shared humanity that lives in between.

From Long List to Short List

Launched in 1969, the Booker Prize is the world’s most influential prize for a single work of fiction. The longlist of 13 novels features books from four continents, four Irish writers, four debut novelists – and 10 authors who are recognised by the Booker Prize for the first time. The 2023 longlist also features a novel heroing a neurodiverse protagonist, written from personal experience.

In four days from now, we will have the official short list of six novels for this year’s Booker Prize, from which the winner will be announced on November 26. It is difficult to have one’s own version of short list, my contrarian vote goes to:

1. Old God’s Time written by Sebastian Barry
2. All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow
3. If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery
4. Western Lane by Chetna Maroo
5. A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀
6. This Other Eden by Paul Harding

Watch This Space

Irrespective of which six books finally become part of the official shortlist of Booker Prize on September 21, watch this space for a detailed review of all the six shortlisted books between September 21 and November 26 when the winner will be announced.

Akhileshwar Sahay is a Multidisciplinary Thought Leader and India based International Impact Consultant. He reviews books for News18 Platform. He works as President Advisory Services of consulting Company BARSYL. Views expressed in the above piece are personal and solely that of the author. They do not necessarily reflect News18’s views.