The Booker Prize shortlist 2024
By The Booker PrizesThe Booker Prize 2024 shortlist has been announced. In revealing this year's list, Chair of judges Edmund de Waal said 'We have spent months sifting, challenging, questioning – stopped in our tracks by the power of the contemporary fiction that we have been privileged to read. And here are the books that we need you to read. Great novels can change the reader. They face up to truths and face you in their turn.'
Here, we asked our judges to summarise each book – and say what they loved about them.
James: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024
Percival Everett
£20.00 £19.00‘This is a book that subverts all expectations, as well as further establishing its author as a masterful storyteller. The narrative experimentation challenges traditional genre conventions. It’s a book that compels us to question, and reflect on, the nature of morality, the corrupting influence of power and the resilience of the human spirit. Its universal themes of identity, freedom and justice will resonate with contemporary readers, despite the book presenting initially as the retelling of a classic novel.’
Orbital
Samantha Harvey
£9.99 £9.49‘It blurs the distinctions between borders, time zones and our own individual stories, provides a vantage point we haven’t encountered in fiction before, and is infused with such awe and reverence that it reads like a love letter, an act of worship. A brief yet miraculously expansive novel, it offers us a vision of our planet as borderless and interlinked, and makes the case for co-operation and respect for our shared humanity.’
Held: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024
Anne Michaels
£16.99 £16.14‘We loved the quietness of this book, and surrendered to it. Its large themes are of the instability of the past and memory, but it works on a cellular level due to the astonishing beauty of its details. There are very few books that can achieve a pitch of poetic intensity sustained across a whole novel. Starting with a wounded soldier on a French battlefield, this lyrical kaleidoscope of a novel is created from the scattered images and memories of four generations of a family.’
Creation Lake: From the Booker Prize-shortlisted author
Rachel Kushner
£18.99 £18.04‘Novels that investigate what it is to be human can veer into the sentimental; this one is utterly flinty and hard-nosed. It’s quite something to wrap a novel of ideas into a page-turning spy thriller, and to achieve a narrative voice that is so audaciously confident – and then subtly undercut it. There’s also mystery at the book’s core – both the mystery of human origins and of individual identity. The author’s prose is juicy, her narrator jaunty, her worldbuilding lush, and she also taps into something profound.’
The Safekeep
Yael van der Wouden
£16.99 £16.14‘This is a compelling and atmospheric story of obsession and secrets. It’s a novel that explores the things that are kept from us as children, and the things we tell ourselves about our own hidden desires. A quietly devastating queer love story which reveals itself to be a story of the Holocaust, it shows how alternate truths are held in fissile connection, something that is relevant to today’s world.’
Stone Yard Devotional: Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024
Charlotte Wood
£16.99 £16.14‘A fierce and philosophical interrogation of history, memory, nature, and human existence. It is set in a claustrophobic environment and reveals the vastness of the human mind: the juxtaposition is so artfully done that a reader feels trusted by the author to be an intellectual partner. It chronicles one woman’s inward journey to make sense of the world – and her life – when conflicts and chaos are abundant in both realms. ‘