Some Books Chris Read

Booker Prize Longlist 2024

This year's Booker Prize longlist has been announced, with the shortlist to be released on the 16th of September. The list looks like this:

One thing I really like about the Booker list is that it exposes me to books I wouldn't otherwise be aware of. I've only heard of two of the novels on this list - Samantha Harvey's Orbital, which I DNFd earlier this month , and Percival Everett's James. The rest are new to me. I also feel particularly gratified as I predicted that Orbital would make this list.

Of the books on the longlist, these are the ones that appeal to me the most and that I'm most looking forward to reading:

Wandering Stars

A tender, shattering story of generations of a Native American family, struggling to find ways through displacement, addiction and pain, towards home and hope

Following its unforgettable characters through almost two centuries of history, from the horrors of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1865 to the aftermath of a mass shooting in the early 21st century, Wandering Stars is an indelible novel of America’s war on its own people.

Readers of Orange’s classic debut There There will know some of these characters and will be eager to learn what happened to Orvil Red Feather after the Oakland Powwow. New readers will discover a wondrous novel of poetry, music, rage and love, from one of the most astonishing voices of his generation.

Playground

Rafi and Todd are two polar opposites at an elite high school where they bond over a 3,000-year-old board game. Elsewhere, Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs; Ina Aroita grows up in naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home.

All of these people meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, marked for humanity’s next great adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out into the open sea. As the seasteaders close in, how will Evie play the ever-unfolding oceanic game? Will Ina engage in acts of destruction? Todd and Rafi, now estranged, still find themselves in competition: Todd unravels while working on an idea to redraw the boundaries of human immortality, while Rafi and the residents must decide if they will greenlight the new project on their shores and change their home forever.

The Safekeep

It’s 15 years since the Second World War and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the conflict is well and truly over. Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel’s life is as it should be: led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel’s doorstep-as a guest, there to stay for the season…

Eva is Isabel’s antithesis: she sleeps late, wakes late, walks loudly through the house and touches things she shouldn’t. In response, Isabel develops a fury-fuelled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house her suspicions spiral out of control. In the sweltering heat of summer, Isabel’s desperate desire for order transforms into infatuation – leading to a discovery that unravels all she has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva – nor the house – are what they seem.

Headshot

Headshot is the story of the eight best teenage girl boxers in the United States, told over the two days of a championship tournament in Nevada and structured as a series of face-offs. As the girls’ pasts and futures collide, the specific joy and violence of the sport comes to life with electric energy, and a portrait emerges of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness and sheer physical pleasure that motivates each of these young women to fight.

This is a novel about the radicalness and strangeness of being physically intimate with another human when you are measuring your own body, through competition, against theirs. What does the intimacy of a physical competition feel like? What does it mean to walk through life in the bodies we’ve been given, and what does it mean to use those bodies with abandon?

Since I'm also working my way through the Ursula K Le Guin prize shortlist and the Ignyte Awards finalists I'm not going to prioritise reading the Booker longlist above them, though I'll definitely make sure I read everything that makes the shortlist once it's announced. This looks like a strong list, though, and I'm looking forward to eventually digging in to some of these books. Two of the books on the list - Creation Lake and Playground - aren't even available in the UK until September anyway, so I wouldn't be able to read them now regardless.

This blog doesn't have a comments section, by design. If you want to chat about any of the posts here, drop me an email at chris @ loottheroom dot uk.

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