The 2021 Booker Prize Shortlist
The Booker shortlist was published September 14th. Of the 158 books the selection committee read, they now have narrowed the list down to six novels.
The prize will be announced on the 3rd of November 2021.
The following novels are shortlisted:
A Passage North
by Anuk Arudpragasam
As Krishan makes the long journey by train from Colombo into the war-torn Northern Province to attend a family funeral, so begins an astonishing passage into the innermost reaches of a country. At once a powerful meditation on absence and longing, and an unsparing account of the legacy of Sri Lanka’s 30-year civil war, this procession to a pyre ‘at the end of the earth’ lays bare the imprints of an island’s past, the unattainable distances between who we are and what we seek. A Passage North is Arudpragasams (1988) second novel.
The Promise
by Damon Galgut
The narrator’s eye shifts and blinks, deliciously lethal in its observation of the crash and burn of a white South African family. On their farm outside Pretoria, the Swarts are gathering for Ma’s funeral. The younger generation detests everything the family stands for, not least the failed promise to the Black woman who has worked for them her whole life. After years of service, Salome was promised her own house, her own land, yet somehow, as each decade passes, that promise remains unfulfilled.
No One is Talking About This
by Patricia Lockwood
A social media guru travels the world, her entire existence overwhelmed by the internet or what she terms ‘the portal’. ‘Are we in hell?’ The people of the portal ask themselves.
‘Are we all just going to keep doing this until we die?’ Two urgent texts from her mother pierce the guru’s bubble.
As real life collides with the absurdity of the portal, she confronts a world that seems to suggest there is goodness, empathy and justice in the universe - and a deluge of evidence to the contrary.
Bewilderment
by Richard Powers
Theo Byrne is an astrobiologist. He is also the widowed father of a most unusual nine-year-old. Robin is loving, funny and full of plans to save the world. He is also about to be expelled, for smashing his friend’s face in with a metal thermos. What can a father do, when the only solution offered is to put his boy on psychoactive drugs?
What can he say, when his boy asks why we are destroying the world?
The only thing to do is to take the boy to other planets, while helping him to save this one.
The Fortune Men
by Nadifa Mohamed
Mahmood Mattan is a father, a chancer, a petty thief. Many things, in fact, but he is not a murderer. So when a shopkeeper is brutally killed and all eyes fall on him,
Mahmood isn’t too worried - secure in his innocence in a country where justice is served.
But as the trial nears, it starts to dawn on him that he is in a fight for his life - against conspiracy, prejudice and the ultimate punishment.
In the shadow of the hangman’s noose, he realises that the truth may not be enough to save him.
Great Circle
by Maggie Shipstead
Marian Graves was a daredevil all her life, from her wild childhood in the forests of Montana to her daring wartime Spitfire missions. In 1950, she sets off on her ultimate adventure, the Great Circle - a flight around the globe. She is never seen again.
Half a century later, Hadley Baxter, a scandal-ridden Hollywood actress, whose own parents perished in a plane crash, is irresistibly drawn to play Marian Graves.
This role will lead her to uncover the real mystery behind the vanished pilot.