This Wednesday we’ll discover the Man Booker Dozen, those 12 or 13 books chosen for the longlist from novels published in English between 1 October 2015 and 30 September 2016. So who should we expect, or hope, to see on the list?
For me, last year’s winner, Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, saw the Booker doing what it does best – bringing into the limelight a relatively little-known book that does something new in a way nobody else has. He became the first Jamaican writer to win, with a book of many voices that pummels conventional narrative into submission.
This year, the dates knock out two high-profile contenders – the new novels from Smiths Zadie and Ali won’t arrive until after the cutoff. All eyes will be on Ian McEwan, though, and his September novel Nutshell. When I heard it was narrated by an unborn child, I thought it might be written in some swirling stream-of-preconsciouness, but the opening line – “So here I am, upside down in a woman” – suggests otherwise.
Also sure to be noted for either absence or presence are Julian Barnes’s Shostakovich novel The Noise of Time, a portrait of art under dictatorship; Rose Tremain’s The Gustav Sonata, about personal and political neutrality; and Don DeLillo’s mordantly chilly Zero K, exploring the poetics of cryonics.
Other American possibles include acclaimed investigations of family dynamics from Elizabeth Strout, Ann Patchett, Mary Gaitskill and Adam Haslett, while Jonathan Safran Foer is back on form with September’s Here I Am, a darkly hilarious mile-a-minute novel about – again – family, as well as Jewishness and the Middle East conflict. Then there’s Garth Greenwell’s What Belongs to You, in which an American expat pursues a Bulgarian hustler: an exquisitely written investigation of desire and shame. Viet Thanh Nguyen’s The Sympathizer, an ambitious debut novel about the Vietnam war and its aftermath, has already won the fiction Pulitzer; Paul Beatty’s race satire The Sellout also picked up awards in the US.
Literary experiment has been in the air for a while now: this year sees followups from Paul Kingsnorth, who channelled Old English for the Booker-longlisted The Wake, with his man-on-a-moor monologue Beast, and Eimear McBride, who applies the choppy Joycean prose of A Girl Is a Half-Formed Thing to the world of London drama students in The Lesser Bohemians, published in September.
Deborah Levy made the shortlist in 2012 with Swimming Home; I found her follow-up Hot Milk, an uncomfortable mining of myth, motherhood and female self-definition, even better. AL Kennedy’s latest, the single-day London drama Serious Sweet, is her best book in years; All That Man Is by David Szalay is an impressive investigation of masculinity and – with excellent timing – Europe; and there are new novels this autumn from Donal Ryan and Peter Ho Davies that are already making waves. Karan Mahajan’s second novel The Association of Small Bombs, which traces the ripples of a terrorist attack in Delhi, has had an extraordinary reception in the US (though our reviewer wasn’t so impressed); Krys Lee’s How I Became a North Korean, out in August, is eagerly anticipated.
What about small presses and debuts? Could we see something from new indie press Cassava Republic, bringing African literature to the UK: Elnathan John’s portrait of religious extremism in Nigeria, Born on a Tuesday, perhaps? Under the Udala Trees by Chinelo Okparanta, about the coming-of-age of a young gay woman, is another notable Nigerian debut, while Harry Parker’s Anatomy of a Soldier boldly assembles a semi-autobiographical story of conflict, injury and rehabilitation through the narrative voices of inanimate objects. I’ve heard great things about Barney Norris’s novel of interacting lives, Five Rivers Met on a Wooded Plain; and I’ve recently been puzzling over a weird, wonderful and totally indefinable debut by Martin MacInnes, Infinite Ground. If not the Booker, the Goldsmiths prize surely beckons.
Personal favourites? From last winter, I’d love to see Rupert Thomson’s existential thriller Katherine Carlyle on the list, or Kevin Barry’s Lennon extravaganza Beatlebone. Francis Spufford’s fiction debut Golden Hill, a cod 18th-century romp with a serious heart about a stranger coming to 1750s New York, must be the most fun I’ve had with a novel this year, and Rachel Cusk’s Transit, coming in September, is bitingly thought-provoking about childhood, change and the meaning of freedom.
Then there are the titles I would be surprised but delighted by: Australian Charlotte Wood’s furious feminist parable The Natural Way of Things, Ian McGuire’s gloriously nasty whaling yarn North Water, or China Miéville’s This Census-Taker, which is perhaps too left field to make the cut.
But the book for which I’ll be crossing my fingers most tightly has to be Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent. I’ve been pressing this compulsive novel of Victorian ideals and ideas, myth and reason, friendship and love, on colleagues and friends for months, and would love to see it on Wednesday’s longlist.
What about you?
- This article was amended on 26 July. Mike McCormack was listed as a possible contender for his novel Solar Bones: however as it is published by independent Irish publisher Tramp Press, it will not be eligible to enter the Man Booker.
