No Julian Barnes, Alan Hollinghurst, Ali Smith, Peter Carey, Pat Barker – this is a longlist to overturn expectations, with a trio of young female authors at its heart. Sally Rooney set the books world buzzing last year with her debut Conversations With Friends; Normal People, due in September, is a girl-meets-boy story with a difference, interrogating the difficulties of sincere communication in a complicated, post-ironic world. It’s even more unusual and assured than her first book. Sophie Mackintosh’s debut The Water Cure is a spare, dreamlike dystopia about the violence of patriarchy; while Daisy Johnson’s Everything Under explores memory, family and gender in the story of a woman searching for her mother, as well as showcasing some wonderful writing about the natural world.
The jury includes a crime novelist and a graphic novelist, and so does the longlist: a rare inclusion for crime in the shape of Belinda Bauer’s Snap, a tale of childhood trauma from one of the genre’s most respected authors; and a first appearance for graphic novels with Nick Drnaso’s widely acclaimed Sabrina, in which a young woman’s disappearance becomes fodder for the rolling news cycle and the bored imaginings of conspiracy theorists. The relationship between Drnaso’s eerie, affectless images and muted dialogue, as he lays bare the loneliness and atomisation of the digital age, is powerfully claustrophobic. Poet Robin Robertson’s The Long Take, a novel about the America of the film noir age that mixes verse and prose, provides yet another genre surprise. Readers have become accustomed to the autofiction trend in recent years, merging fiction with memoir; it’s refreshing to find the Booker showcasing other ways of playing with form, seen again in Donal Ryan’s From a Low and Quiet Sea, which juxtaposes different narrative strands to highlight the role of fate and coincidence in ordinary lives.
Disgruntlement from the industry over the inclusion of American authors has shown no signs of abating; but after two US winners in a row, this year’s list is heavy on British and Irish authors. And the US choices are interestingly left-field: Sabrina is joined by Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room, a blistering novel about female poverty and incarceration, and Richard Power’s ecological baggy monster of trees and the battle to save them, The Overstory.
Canadian author Michael Ondaatje is not only the sole previous winner to appear on the list; earlier this month he took the Golden Man Booker, celebrating 50 years of the prize for The English Patient. His new novel Warlight is a strange, shadowy drama of family and state secrets set in the aftermath of the London blitz. Esi Edugyan, the second Canadian on the list, has taken seven years to follow up her impressive debut Half Blood Blues. Due to be published at the end of August, Washington Black, which begins as the story of a young field slave on a Barbados sugar plantation, is as harrowing a portrayal of slavery as Colson Whitehead’s The Underground Railroad, but it also becomes a globe-trotting, page-turning adventure story. A historical epic with much to say about the present-day world, it must be among the leading contenders.
What has suffered this year is international diversity. When the trustees changed the rules for the 2014 award to allow writers from outside the Commonwealth, it was intended to make the Booker truly global. But with only the UK/Ireland and North America represented on the 2018 longlist, this is a narrow snapshot of world literature in English.
But what it does achieve is an impressive synthesis between popular and literary tastes. There are many books here which, as the 2011 jury so unfortunately put it, “zip along”, but they also make fascinating innovations in style and genre. The list spotlights the brilliant, little-known Anna Burns, whose Milkman is a disorienting portrait of the Northern Irish Troubles, as well as a truly original debut from Guy Gunaratne, giving a literary voice to underprivileged young Londoners in In Our Mad and Furious City. The most urgent issues of our time – globalisation, migration, gender, environmental collapse, the internet’s effect on identity – are woven into the very fabric of these novels: they make for fresh, exciting reading.
