The wait is over! The 2019 Booker Prize shortlist was announced on Tuesday. It contained some obvious choices, but also a few surprises. I’ve only completed one of the books on the long list – Girl, Woman, Other (review to come shortly) – but I had been watching reviews and predictions of some of the others so had a bit of a sense of which I thought would make it through. Here’s the list:
The Testaments – Margaret AtwoodIn this brilliant sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, acclaimed author Margaret Atwood answers the questions that have tantalized readers for decades.
When the van door slammed on Offred’s future at the end of The Handmaid’s Tale, readers had no way of telling what lay ahead for her—freedom, prison or death. With The Testaments, the wait is over. Margaret Atwood’s sequel picks up the story fifteen years after Offred stepped into the unknown, with the explosive testaments of three female narrators from Gilead. “Dear Readers: Everything you’ve ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book. Well, almost everything! The other inspiration is the world we’ve been living in.” —Margaret Atwood |
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Ducks, Newburyport – Lucy EllmannLatticing one cherry pie after another, an Ohio housewife tries to bridge the gaps between reality and the torrent of meaningless info that is the United States of America. She worries about her children, her dead parents, African elephants, the bedroom rituals of ‘happy couples’, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and how to hatch an abandoned wood pigeon egg. Is there some trick to surviving survivalists? School shootings? Medical debts? Franks ‘n’ beans? A scorching indictment of America’s barbarity, past and present, and a lament for the way we are sleepwalking into environmental disaster, Ducks, Newburyport is a heresy, a wonder – and a revolution in the novel. | |
Girl, Woman, Other – Bernardine EvaristoTeeming with life and crackling with energy – a love song to modern Britain and black womanhood
Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years. Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of history, a novel of our times: celebratory, ever-dynamic and utterly irresistible. |
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An Orchestra of Minorities – Chigozie ObiomaA heart-breaking and mythic story about a Nigerian poultry farmer who sacrifices everything to win the woman he loves, by Man Booker Finalist and author of The Fishermen, Chigozie Obioma.
A contemporary twist on the Odyssey, An Orchestra of Minorities is narrated by the chi, or spirit of a young poultry farmer named Chinonso. His life is set off course when he sees a woman who is about to jump off a bridge. Horrified by her recklessness, he hurls two of his prized chickens off the bridge. The woman, Ndali, is stopped in her tracks. Chinonso and Ndali fall in love but she is from an educated and wealthy family. When her family objects to the union on the grounds that he is not her social equal, he sells most of his possessions to attend college in Cyprus. But when he arrives in Cyprus, he discovers that he has been utterly duped by the young Nigerian who has made the arrangements for him. Penniless, homeless, we watch as he gets further and further away from his dream and from home. An Orchestra of Minorities is a heart-wrenching epic about destiny and determination. |
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Quichotte – Salman RushdieIn a tour-de-force that is both an homage to an immortal work of literature and a modern masterpiece about the quest for love and family, Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie has created a dazzling Don Quixote for the modern age.
Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, a courtly, addled salesman obsessed with television, who falls in impossible love with a TV star. Together with his (imaginary) son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand, gallantly braving the tragicomic perils of an age where “Anything-Can-Happen”. Meanwhile his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of his own. Just as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to satirise the culture of his time, Rushdie takes the reader on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse. And with the kind of storytelling magic that is the hallmark of his work, the fully realised lives of DuChamp and Quichotte intertwine in a profoundly human quest for love and a wickedly entertaining portrait of an age in which fact is so often indiscernible from fiction. |
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10 Minutes 38 Seconds In This Strange World – Elif Shafak‘In the first minute following her death, Tequila Leila’s consciousness began to ebb, slowly and steadily, like a tide receding from the shore. Her brain cells, having run out of blood, were now completely deprived of oxygen. But they did not shut down. Not right away…’
For Leila, each minute after her death brings a sensuous memory: the taste of spiced goat stew, sacrificed by her father to celebrate the long-awaited birth of a son; the sight of bubbling vats of lemon and sugar which the women use to wax their legs while the men attend mosque; the scent of cardamom coffee that Leila shares with a handsome student in the brothel where she works. Each memory, too, recalls the friends she made at each key moment in her life – friends who are now desperately trying to find her. . . |
I don’t think it surprised anyone that Margaret Atwood’s not-yet-released sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale made the shortlist. Neither is it a complete surprise to see Salman Rushdie’s retelling of Cervantes’ Don Quixote on the list (thought I wasn’t able to get my hands on this yet, and haven’t heard many reviews since it has only been out for about a week). Both of these authors have previously won the Booker Prize and had other nominations, so it’ll be interesting to see if either wins for a second time. I was a little surprised to see Elif Shafak’s 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World on the list, not because I’ve heard anything bad about it, but because I haven’t heard such effusive praise for it as for some of the other books on the longlist. Likewise Chigozie Obioma’s Orchestra of Minorities. Both seem to have been well received amongst the online bookish folk I follow, but others got much more attention and praise. Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other is one I would have been outraged not to see on the list (I was a bit disappointed about Lanny, but this was my top pick of the books I’ve read). It was stylistically beautiful, complex, diverse and fresh. Ducks, Newburyport is another I have only read some of (I mean come on, it’s 1,000 pages and only a few sentences. It’s gonna take a while) but am intrigued by the premise and have heard almost no criticism of from those who have managed to read it. This is the one I actually would pick as likely to win if I had to make an extremely early call (and not having heard anything yet about Atwood’s book since it’s so heavily embargoed). It seems that while the format is daunting, it’s not actually that difficult to get through. It tackles timely themes and presents a lot of ideas that are thought provoking and varied. So I wouldn’t be at all surprised if it were to win the 2019 Booker Prize.
I’d love to hear from you guys. Were you surprised by the shortlist? Did your favourite(s) make it? Which did you hope to see that didn’t? Which have you read or do you plan to read? Any early predictions as to this year’s winner?