The Booker Prize Longlist 2023
By The Booker Prizes
The Booker Prize Longlist 2023
By The Booker Prizes
The Booker Prize 2023 longlist has been announced! It features work from four continents, four Irish writers, four debut novelists – and ten authors who are recognised by the Booker Prize for the first time.
The 13 longlisted books explore universal and topical themes: from deeply moving personal dramas to tragi-comic family sagas; from the effects of climate change to the oppression of minorities; from scientific breakthroughs to competitive sport. The list includes:
- 10 writers longlisted for the first time, including four debut novelists
- Three writers with seven previous nominations between them
- Writers from seven countries across four continents
- Four Irish writers, making up a third of the longlist for the first time
- A novel featuring a neurodiverse protagonist, written from personal experience
‘The list is defined by its freshness – by the irreverence of new voices, by the iconoclasm of established ones. All 13 novels cast new light on what it means to exist in our time, and they do so in original and thrilling ways.' Esi Edugyan, Chair of judges. Read what the panels of judges had to say about the 2023 Booker Prize longlist below.
Discover these extraordinary novels and support independent bookshops across the land.
Western Lane
Chetna Maroo
£14.99 £14.24Skilfully deploying the sport of squash as both context and metaphor, Western Lane is a deeply evocative debut about a family grappling with grief, conveyed through crystalline language which reverberates like the sound ‘of a ball hit clean and hard...with a close echo’.
All the Little Bird-Hearts: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023
Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow
£18.99Written from the perspective of an autistic mother, All the Little Bird-Hearts is a poetic debut which masterfully intertwines themes of familial love, friendship, class, prejudice and trauma with psychological acuity and wit.
The Bee Sting
Paul Murray
£18.99 £18.04Paul Murray’s saga, The Bee Sting, set in the Irish Midlands, brilliantly explores how our secrets and self-deceptions ultimately catch up with us. This family drama, told from multiple perspectives, is at once hilarious and heartbreaking, personal and epic. It’s an addictive read.
This Other Eden
Paul Harding
£16.99 £16.14Based on a relatively unknown true story, Paul Harding’s heartbreakingly beautiful paean to Apple Island, off the coast of Maine, transports us to the unique tiny community scrabbling a living there – descended from trafficked Africans, immigrant Irish and indigenous Penobscot. The arrival of a well- intentioned though racist preacher brings with it the unwelcome attention of 19th century America, with inevitably disastrous results. The judges were moved by the delicate symphony of language, land and narrative that Harding brings to bear on the story of the islanders.
How to Build a Boat: AS SEEN ON BBC BETWEEN THE COVERS
Elaine Feeney
£16.99 £16.14The interweaving stories of Jamie, a teenage boy trying to make sense of the world, and Tess, a teacher at his school, make up this humorous and insightful novel about family and the need for connection. Feeney has written an absorbing coming-of-age story which also explores the restrictions of class and education in a small community. A complex and genuinely moving novel.
If I Survive You
Jonathan Escoffery
£14.99 £14.24An astonishingly assured debut novel from Jonathan Escoffery, lauded by the panel for its clarity, variety and fizzing prose. Jamaican husband and wife Topper and Santa flee from the troubles of their 1970s Caribbean home to make a new life in Miami with their sons Delano and Trelawney. In the remorseless, laugh-out-loud code switching of the recently arrived, they attempt to survive America and each other, as the reader is confronted with the immigrants’ eternal questions: who am I now and where do I belong?
Prophet Song: WINNER OF THE BOOKER PRIZE 2023
Paul Lynch
£16.99 £16.14Paul Lynch’s harrowing and dystopian Prophet Song vividly renders a mother’s determination to protect her family as Ireland’s liberal democracy slides inexorably and terrifyingly into totalitarianism. Readers will find it timely and unforgettable. It’s a remarkable accomplishment for a novelist to capture the social and political anxieties of our moment so compellingly.
Pearl: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023
Magpie Books) Hughes Sian (Author
£11.99 £11.39Pearl, by Siân Hughes, an exceptional debut novel, is both a mystery story and a meditation on grief, abandonment and consolation, evoking the profundities of the haunting medieval poem, Pearl. The degree of difficulty in writing a book of this sort—at once quiet and hugely ambitious—is very high. It’s a book that will be passed from hand to hand for a long time to come.
Study for Obedience: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2023
Sarah Bernstein
£12.99 £12.34Study for Obedience is an absurdist, darkly funny novel about the rise of xenophobia, as seen through the eyes of a stranger in an unnamed town – or is it? Bernstein’s urgent, limpid prose upsets all our expectations, and what transpires is a meditation on survival itself.
Old God's Time
Sebastian Barry
£18.99A murder investigation leads a retired policeman to confront the loss and sorrow of his past. Barry brilliantly evokes the distorting effect of trauma on memory as we enter an easy companionship with his gentle, funny protagonist. Both the legacy of historic child abuse in Ireland and the enduring power of love are sensitively explored in this compassionate and quietly furious book.
The House of Doors
Tan Twan Eng
£20.00 £19.00Drawing on the life and writing of Somerset Maugham, The House of Doors is a magisterial and haunting tale of forbidden love and loss in the shadow of revolution and empire. This is historical fiction at its finest.
A Spell of Good Things: Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2023
Ayobami Adebayo
£18.99 £18.04A Spell of Good Things is an examination of class and desire in modern-day Nigeria. While Eniola’s poverty prevents him from getting the education he desperately wants, Wuraola finds that wealth is no barrier against life’s harsher realities. A powerful, staggering read.