The Booker Prize 2022 longlist
By The Booker Prizes
By The Booker Prizes
We are thrilled to present the 2022 Booker Prize Longlist. Explore the 'Booker Dozen' below, complete with the judges' comments for each of these extraordinary novels.
'Exceptionally well written and carefully crafted, in whatever genre, they seem to us to exploit and expand what the language can do. The list that we have selected offers story, fable and parable, fantasy, mystery, meditation and thriller.' – Neil MacGregor, Chair of Judges
After Sappho
Selby Wynn Schwartz
£9.99‘A poetic patchwork of fragments of literary history that together take shape as an intergenerational tale of the Lesbian family. An ancestry eruditely, playfully recovered.’
Nightcrawling: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022 - the youngest ever Booker nominee
Leila Mottley
£16.99 £16.14‘Nightcrawling is a dazzling and electrifying novel set in the streets of Oakland, where the protagonist Kiera will face the failure of the justice system that oppresses young black women. A spellbinding story and a Catcher in the Rye for a new generation.’
Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies: Longlisted for the Booker Prize
Maddie Mortimer
£14.99 £14.24‘Deliriously inventive and viscerally moving, Mortimer’s debut is a patterned, protean narrative that astonishes and overwhelms. Lia is dying while she’s living, her past, present and future a glorious cacophony of voices, from the webs of words that bind her to her daughter, to the mutating cancer that is an inexorable part of her self.’
The Colony: 'Vivid and memorable.' Sarah Moss
Audrey Magee
£14.99‘The summer of 1979. Sectarian murders claim victims across Ireland. An idyllic island fishing community off the west coast becomes the laboratory in which Magee dissects the gulf between what Ireland is and how the rest of the world wants to fantasise it.’
Case Study
Graeme Macrae Burnet
£14.99 £14.24‘A mystery story - or is it? - that takes us into the heart of the psychoanalytical consulting room. Or does it? Interleaving a biography of radical ‘60s ‘untherapist’ Collins Braithwaite with the notebooks of his patient ‘Rebecca’, a young woman seeking answers about the death of her sister, ‘GMB’ presents a forensic, elusive and mordantly funny text(s) layered with questions about authenticity and the self.’
Small Things Like These: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2022
Claire Keegan
£12.99 £12.34‘A story of quiet bravery, set in an Irish community in denial of its central secret. Beautiful, clear, economic writing and an elegant structure dense with moral themes.’
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida: Winner of the Booker Prize 2022
Shehan Karunatilaka
£16.99 £16.14‘Life after death in Sri Lanka: an afterlife noir, with nods to Dante and Buddha and yet unpretentious. Fizzes with energy, imagery and ideas against a broad, surreal vision of the Sri Lankan civil wars. Slyly, angrily comic.’
BOOTH: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022
Karen Joy Fowler
£18.99 £18.04‘What shapes us? And who gets to choose the stories we tell about our place in the world? With an eagle eye and a bone-dry wit, Fowler introduces the Booths, a 19th-century family forged by theatrical ambition and agonising grief within a household steeped in the racism and myth-making of the disunited States. As the novel unfolds, we know - and they don’t - that one day the ninth child, John Wilkes, will step forward with a gun in his hand to bring the narratives of dynasty and country decisively together.’
The Trees
Percival Everett
£9.99 £9.49‘Eerie, provocative, blackly comic Southern noir. A page-turner with a sharp, provocative edge, as it harks back to the real-life murder of the young Emmett Till, it has important things to say about race.’
Trust: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2022
Hernan Diaz
£16.99 £16.14‘There is a dazzling intelligence behind this novel, which challenges us to rethink everything we know both about the institutions on which nations are built and the narratives by which stories are told. Sly, sophisticated, insistently questioning, Diaz writes with assurance, determined to rob us of every certainty.’
Glory: LONGLISTED FOR THE WOMEN'S PRIZE FOR FICTION 2023
NOVIOLET BULAWAYO
£18.99 £18.04‘A fictional country of animals ruled by a tyrannical and absolute power is on the verge of liberation. The fiction becomes almost reality as we picture the parallel between this Animal Farm, Zimbabwe, and the fate of many African nations. An ingenious and brilliant political fable that bears witness to the surreal turns of history.’
The 13 books on this year’s longlist – the ‘Booker dozen’ – were chosen by the 2022 judging panel: cultural historian, writer and broadcaster Neil MacGregor (chair); academic and broadcaster Shahidha Bari; historian Helen Castor; novelist and critic M John Harrison; and novelist, poet and professor Alain Mabanckou.
Their selection was made from 169 novels published between 1 October 2021 and 30 September 2022 and submitted to the prize by publishers. Coincidentally, this year’s longlist includes the first and last book the judges read. The Booker Prize is open to works by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK or Ireland.