MAN BOOKER PRIZE | 2018 LONGLIST

It’s that time of year again – Man Booker season! As you all know, I’m terrible at sticking to a TBR, so I’ve never managed to read more than two books from any longlist. But for some reason, this is one of the prizes that gets me excited every year, even if I know I’m not going to be able to read along with it. This year is particularly exciting because the list diverges from the usually predictable roster of big names. Don’t get me wrong, there are some big names on the list, but there is also a thriller, and, for the first time ever, a graphic novel. Also included in the list are a novel in poems and more than one debut. The literary world is a-buzz, and for good reason. This list is a fresh take on a prize some felt was getting stale, and it hopefully sets a precedent for where this prize could go – and how it can revive itself. So, without further ado, here’s the year’s list:

On a stifling summer’s day, eleven-year-old Jack and his two sisters sit in their broken-down car, waiting for their mother to come back and rescue them. Jack’s in charge, she said. I won’t be long. But she doesn’t come back. She never comes back. And life as the children know it is changed for ever.
Three years later, mum-to-be Catherine wakes to find a knife beside her bed, and a note that says: I could have killed you.
Meanwhile Jack is still in charge – of his sisters, of supporting them all, of making sure nobody knows they’re alone in the house, and – quite suddenly – of finding out the truth about what happened to his mother.
But the truth can be a dangerous thing . . .

In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister, our protagonist, is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle, and rumours start to swell, middle sister becomes ‘interesting’. The last thing she ever wanted to be. To be interesting is to be noticed and to be noticed is dangerous. Milkman is a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. It is the story of inaction with enormous consequences.

Video games, conspiracy theories, breakdown, murder: Everything’s gonna be all right—until it isn’t.

How many hours of sleep did you get last night? Rate your overall mood from 1 to 5, 1 being poor. Rate your stress level from 1 to 5, 5 being severe. Are you experiencing depression or thoughts of suicide? Is there anything in your personal life that is affecting your duty?

When Sabrina disappears, an airman in the U.S. Air Force is drawn into a web of suppositions, wild theories, and outright lies. He reports to work every night in a bare, sterile fortress that serves as no protection from a situation that threatens the sanity of Teddy, his childhood friend and the boyfriend of the missing woman. Sabrina’s grieving sister, Sandra, struggles to fill her days as she waits in purgatory. After a videotape surfaces, we see devastation shown through a cinematic lens, as true tragedy is distorted when fringe thinkers and conspiracy theorists begin to interpret events to fit their own narratives.
The follow-up to Nick Drnaso’s Beverly, winner of the Los Angeles Times Book Prize, Sabrina depicts a modern world devoid of personal interaction and responsibility, where relationships are stripped of intimacy through glowing computer screens. Presenting an indictment of our modern state, Drnaso contemplates the dangers of a fake-news climate. Timely and articulate, Sabrina leaves you gutted, searching for meaning in the aftermath of disaster.

When two English brothers take the helm of a Barbados sugar plantation, Washington Black – an eleven year-old field slave – finds himself selected as personal servant to one of these men. The eccentric Christopher ‘Titch’ Wilde is a naturalist, explorer, scientist, inventor and abolitionist, whose single-minded pursuit of the perfect aerial machine mystifies all around him.
Titch’s idealistic plans are soon shattered and Washington finds himself in mortal danger. They escape the island together, but then then Titch disappears and Washington must make his way alone, following the promise of freedom further than he ever dreamed possible.
From the blistering cane fields of Barbados to the icy wastes of the Canadian Arctic, from the mud-drowned streets of London to the eerie deserts of Morocco, Washington Black teems with all the strangeness and mystery of life. Inspired by a true story, Washington Black is the extraordinary tale of a world destroyed and made whole again.

For Selvon, Ardan, and Yusuf, growing up under the towers of Stones Estate, summer means what it does anywhere: football, music, and freedom, but now, after the killing of a British soldier, riots are spreading across the city, and nowhere is safe. While the fury swirls around them, Selvon and Ardan remain focused on their own obsessions, girls, and grime. Their friend Yusuf is caught up in a different tide, a wave of radicalism surging through his local mosque, threatening to carry his troubled brother, Irfan, with it. Provocative, raw, poetic yet tender, In Our Mad and Furious City marks the arrival of a major new talent in fiction.

Words are important to Gretel, always have been. As a child, she lived on a canal boat with her mother, and together they invented a language that was just their own. She hasn’t seen her mother since the age of sixteen, though – almost a lifetime ago – and those memories have faded. Now Gretel works as a lexicographer, updating dictionary entries, which suits her solitary nature.
A phone call from the hospital interrupts Gretel’s isolation and throws up questions from long ago. She begins to remember the private vocabulary of her childhood. She remembers other things, too: the wild years spent on the river; the strange, lonely boy who came to stay on the boat one winter; and the creature in the water – a canal thief? – swimming upstream, getting ever closer. In the end there will be nothing for Gretel to do but go back.
Daisy Johnson’s debut novel turns classical myth on its head and takes readers to a modern-day England unfamiliar to most. As daring as it is moving, Everything Under is a story of family and identity, of fate, language, love and belonging that leaves you unsettled and unstrung.

It’s 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women’s Correctional Facility, deep in California’s Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living, which Kushner evokes with great humor and precision.

magine a world very close to our own: where women are not safe in their bodies, where desperate measures are required to raise a daughter. This is the story of Grace, Lia, and Sky kept apart from the world for their own good and taught the terrible things that every woman must learn about love. And it is the story of the men who come to find them – three strangers washed up by the sea, their gazes hungry and insistent, trailing desire and destruction in their wake. Hypnotic and compulsive, The Water Cure is a fever dream, a blazing vision of suffering, sisterhood, and transformation.

In a narrative as mysterious as memory itself – at once both shadowed and luminous – Warlight is a vivid, thrilling novel of violence and love, intrigue and desire. It is 1945, and London is still reeling from the Blitz and years of war. 14-year-old Nathaniel and his sister, Rachel, are apparently abandoned by their parents, left in the care of an enigmatic figure named The Moth. They suspect he might be a criminal, and grow both more convinced and less concerned as they get to know his eccentric crew of friends: men and women with a shared history, all of whom seem determined now to protect, and educate (in rather unusual ways) Rachel and Nathaniel. But are they really what and who they claim to be? A dozen years later, Nathaniel begins to uncover all he didn’t know or understand in that time, and it is this journey – through reality, recollection, and imagination – that is told in this magnificent novel.

Nine strangers, each in different ways, become summoned by trees, brought together in a last stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest.
The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fable, ranging from antebellum New York to the late-twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond, revealing a world alongside our own – vast, slow, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world, and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.

A noir narrative written with the intensity and power of poetry, The Long Take is one of the most remarkable – and unclassifiable – books of recent years.
Walker is a D-Day veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder; he can’t return home to rural Nova Scotia, and looks instead to the city for freedom, anonymity and repair. As he moves from New York to Los Angeles and San Francisco we witness a crucial period of fracture in American history, one that also allowed film noir to flourish. The Dream had gone sour but – as those dark, classic movies made clear – the country needed outsiders to study and dramatise its new anxieties.
While Walker tries to piece his life together, America is beginning to come apart: deeply paranoid, doubting its own certainties, riven by social and racial division, spiralling corruption and the collapse of the inner cities. The Long Take is about a good man, brutalised by war, haunted by violence and apparently doomed to return to it – yet resolved to find kindness again, in the world and in himself.
Watching beauty and disintegration through the lens of the film camera and the eye of the poet, Robin Robertson’s The Long Take is a work of thrilling originality.

Connell and Marianne both grow up in the same town in rural Ireland. The similarities end there; they are from very different worlds. But they both get places to study at university in Dublin, and a connection that has grown between them despite the social tangle of school lasts long into the following years.
Sally Rooney’s second novel is a deeply political novel, just as it’s also a novel about love. It’s about how difficult it is to speak to what you feel and how difficult it is to change. It’s wry and seductive; perceptive and bold. It will make you cry and you will know yourself through it.
Rooney has achieved a feat that seems impossible after Conversations with Friends. Her new novel feels seminal and true and the hold it will have over its readers will be one of the finest occurrence this September.

Farouk’s country has been torn apart by war.
Lampy’s heart has been laid waste by Chloe.
John’s past torments him as he nears his end.

The refugee. The dreamer. The penitent. From war-torn Syria to small-town Ireland, three men, scarred by all they have loved and lost, are searching for some version of home. Each is drawn towards a powerful reckoning, one that will bring them together in the most unexpected of ways.

As you can see, this year’s list holds plenty of surprises, and likely at least a few you hadn’t heard of before the Longlist announcement. I find this year’s genre diversity interesting, but the list has once again been criticised for lack of diversity in terms of its authors – there’s a heavy skewing towards white authors from the Americas and the British Isles. There is a decent showing from women this year – seven women to six men – so at least that is a good split. I think a lot will come down to which books make the Shortlist.

I had five of the Longlisted books on my TBR already – Warlight, The Mars Room, From a Low and Quiet Sea, Normal People, and Washington Black. Warlight appealed to me based on the blurb – I haven’t read any Ondaatje before, but I know he’s a literary giant (not to mention a Canadian legend) and I finally felt like this was a book that appealed to me. It is set in a time and place I gravitate towards in literature, and I like that there seems to be an interesting mystery at its centre but also has the promise of character depth. I’ve read the first few pages and so far I like it. The Mars Room is one I’ve had on my shelf since publication but haven’t felt I was ready to tackle. I expect it to deal with some difficult topics – not least, for me, the separation of mother and child, which is a trigger for me. I still want to read it, but don’t know if I’ll be ready for it before Man Booker season is over. Both Sally Rooney and Donal Ryan have been on my radar for about a year – I read part of Sally Rooney’s first book, Conversations with Friends, and thought it was wonderfully written.I didn’t get along as well with Donal Ryan’s All We Shall Know, but am hoping From a Low and Quiet Sea will suit me better. And finally, Washington Black. Another I’m iffy on because of its heavy themes and the fact that I didn’t get on with Half Blood Blues and ended up DNFing it. But I plan to give Esi Edugyan another try, particularly as she’s another Canadian, I’m just not sure when.

There are a couple I’m not very interested in – The Long Take, The Water Cure, Sabrina and Snap. The Long Take is poetry, and that’s not a format I’m interested in as a rule. I haven’t heard much about it yet though, so I am open to having my mind changed. The Water Cure sounds similar to books like The Red Clocks and The Power but with a heavier religious leaning, and that doesn’t make me immediately want to pick it up. I may give it a try if it makes the Shortlist. Sabrina is the first graphic novel ever to make it onto a Man Booker list, and that does intrigue me, but I don’t know if it is enough to get me to try it. Another I will probably re-assess when the Shortlist is announced. And Snap is a thriller, so will likely be a slightly easier read than the others, but I’ve heard mixed reviews. I think it’s one I may pick up over other similar books if I’m in the mood for a thriller, but won’t push myself to try.

That leaves four that were new to me and that I’m interested in. Daisy Johnson’s debut novel Everything Under is about 50/50 for me – I’m interested in the language element, but the overall plot leaves me a bit cold. I’ve heard some positive reviews of both this and her short story collection Fen. Plus I like the cover, and we all know that’s what really matters, right? Milkman is one that appeals to me because of its setting, promise of character development, and narrative choices (unnamed location and narrator). I’ve read the beginning of it and can see why it made the list. The writing style is close to stream of consciousness, and we are looking through the eyes of the narrator which gives it a strong sense of intimacy and immediacy and a unique perspective on her life and suffocatingly intertwined community. The Overstory could just as easily have ended up in the previous section, except that since the Longlist announcement I’ve heard some BookTubers I trust either talking about how much they loved it or how excited they are to read it. That has got me curious, though I will admit I’m still daunted by its length. And finally, In Our Mad and Furious City, which is probably one of the most appealing just based on its blurb. It deals with important contemporary themes – youth navigating a rough urban setting and dealing with racial tension – and I’m hoping it will be one that does an excellent job of representing different points of view. I’m looking forward to giving it a try, and it’s probably near the top of my Man Booker TBR.

Important dates & Info

Shortlist Announcement: September 20, 2018

Winner Announcement: October 16, 2018

You can visit the Man Booker site here to see the Longlist and meed this year’s judges. The official Longlist announcement is available here.

I’d love to hear from you guys – which of these do you plan to read? Have you already read any? If so, what did you think?