The 2021 Booker Prize shortlist
By The Booker Prizes
The 2021 Booker Prize shortlist
By The Booker Prizes
A Passage North
Anuk Arudpragasam
£14.99 £14.24‘We had to find a place on the shortlist for A Passage North, in which Anuk Arudpragasam turns his poetic sensibility and profound, meticulous attentiveness to the business of living in the aftermath of trauma. The story unfurls like smoke as our narrator sifts through memories of a lost love affair while turning over in his mind the strange death of his grandmother’s carer, a woman irrevocably damaged by the death of her young sons in the Sri Lankan civil war. In hypnotic, incantatory style, Arudpragasam considers how we can find our way in the present while also reckoning with the past.’
Great Circle: The soaring and emotional novel shortlisted for the Women's Prize for Fiction 2022 and shortlisted for the Booker
Maggie Shipstead
£18.99‘A book of tremendous narrative ambition and scale, Great Circle pulled us into its vividly-created worlds—from prohibition-era Montana to wartime Britain to present-day Hollywood—and made us want to dwell in them indefinitely. Maggie Shipstead has an extraordinary ability to conjure characters and settings so fully-realised one feels one knows them—and spills her story out in one gorgeously-crafted sentence after another. Absorbing in the manner of the immersive realist novels of the 19th century, the book speaks to ever-present questions about freedom and constraint in womens’ lives.’
No One Is Talking About This: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2021 and the Women’s Prize for Fiction 2021
Patricia Lockwood
£14.99‘This is a first novel from a writer already outstanding as a poet and memoirist, and her gifts in both roles are much in evidence in this extremely funny, poignant and challenging book. Patricia Lockwood manages to tell her story in the glancing, mayfly-attention-span idiom of contemporary social media, but she uses this apparently depth-free dialect with precision and even beauty. The drastic shift of gear in the middle of the story, the introduction of real suffering, love and loss, doesn't break the seamless flow of wit; but the book's triumph is in evoking so full a range of emotional discovery and maturing within the unpromising medium of online prattle. We're left wondering about the processes by which language expands to cope with the expansiveness of changing human relations and perceptions at the edge of extremity.’
The Fortune Men: Shortlisted for the Costa Novel Of The Year Award
Nadifa Mohamed
£14.99‘The Fortune Men takes us to a place we haven’t encountered on the page before: the docklands of 1950s Cardiff, jostling with Somali, Welsh, Jewish, Jamaican, and Indian communities, thrown together by the tides of empire and war. In the story of Mahmood Mattan, a Somali sailor accused of murder, Nadifa Mohamed creates a story as local as it is exhilaratingly global. Grippingly-paced and full of complex, richly-drawn characters, the novel combines pointed social observation with a deeply empathetic sensibility. The Fortune Men demonstrates what historical fiction can achieve at its best—to get inside the head of the past—while implicitly yet urgently underscoring the present-day persistence of racism and injustice.’