Booker Prize Longlist 2023 (updated with Shortlist)

Its that time of year again and the Booker Prize Longlist has just been announced. This year a longlist of 13 “original and thrilling” books offering “startling portraits of the current” are in contention for the 2023 Booker Prize (updated for Shortlist at the end)

The longlist features four debut novelists and six others who have been longlisted for the first time, alongside Sebastian Barry, Tan Twan Eng and Paul Murray, who have seven previous Booker nominations between them.

Interestingly four Irish writers appear on the longlist, which is testament to the current crop of wonderful writers from Ireland.

This year’s longlist was selected by a judging panel comprising twice-shortlisted novelist Esi Edugyan, actor Adjoa Andoh, poet Mary Jean Chan, Shakespeare scholar James Shapiro and actor and author Robert Webb.

Here is the Booker Prize Longlist 2023 in full

Ayobami Adebayo ̀(Nigerian) – A Spell of Good Things (Canongate)

Sebastian Barry (Irish) – Old God’s Time (Faber & Faber)

Sarah Bernstein (Canadian) – Study for Obedience (Granta Books)

Jonathan Escoffery (American) – If I Survive You (4th Estate)

Elaine Feeney (Irish) – How to Build a Boat (Harvill Secker)

Paul Harding (American) – This Other Eden (Hutchinson Heinemann)

Siân Hughes (British) – Pearl (The Indigo Press)

Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow (British) – All the Little Bird-Hearts (Tinder Press)

Paul Lynch (Irish) – Prophet Song (Oneworld)

Martin MacInnes (British) – In Ascension (Atlantic Books)

Chetna Maroo (British) – Western Lane (Picador)

Paul Murray (Irish) – The Bee Sting (Hamish Hamilton)

Tan Twan Eng (Malaysian) – The House of Doors (Canongate)

Click on the link to get a copy

Notable omissions eligible titles that did not make the longlist include Zadie Smith’s forthcoming The Fraud and Barbara Kingsolver’s Demon Copperhead, which this year won the Pulitzer prize for fiction and the Women’s prize.

The Booker Prize Shortlist 2023

The Booker Prize Shortlist 2023 has just dropped and we’ll take a look at the nominees below. It’s the Year of Paul as, strangely, three of the authors are named Paul! Also notable, just one novel by a British writer has made the shortlist for this year’s Booker prize, Chetna Maroo’s Western Lane. For all the writers it is their first shortlist appearance.

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

The Barnes family is in trouble. Dickie’s once-lucrative car business is going under—but Dickie is spending his days in the woods, building an apocalypse-proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife, Imelda, is selling off her jewelry on eBay and half-heartedly dodging the attention of fast-talking cattle farmer Big Mike, while their teenage daughter, Cass, formerly top of her class, seems determined to binge drink her way through her final exams. As for twelve-year-old PJ, he’s on the brink of running away.

If you wanted to change this story, how far back would you have to go? To the infamous bee sting that ruined Imelda’s wedding day? To the car crash one year before Cass was born? All the way back to Dickie at ten years old, standing in the summer garden with his father, learning how to be a real man?

The Bee Sting, Paul Murray’s exuberantly entertaining new novel, is a tragicomic family saga, and a dazzling story about the struggle to be good at the end of the world.

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo

Eleven-year-old Gopi has been playing squash since she was old enough to hold a racket. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen, and the game becomes her world. Slowly, she grows apart from her sisters. Her life is reduced to the sport, guided by its rhythms: the serve, the volley, the drive, the shot and its echo.

An indelible coming-of-age story, Chetna Maroo’s first novel captures the ordinary and annihilates it with beauty. Western Lane is a valentine to innocence, to the closeness of sisterhood, to the strange ways we come to know ourselves and each other.

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein

A young woman moves from the place of her birth to the remote northern country of her forebears to be housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has recently left him.

Soon after her arrival, a series of inexplicable events occurs – collective bovine hysteria; the demise of a ewe and her nearly born lamb; a local dog’s phantom pregnancy; a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed with some intensity at her and she senses a mounting threat that lies ‘just beyond the garden gate.’ And as she feels the hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother’s property, she fears that, should the rumblings in the town gather themselves into a more defined shape, who knows what might happen, what one might be capable of doing.

With a sharp, lyrical voice, Sarah Bernstein powerfully explores questions of complicity and power, displacement and inheritance. Study for Obedience is a finely tuned, unsettling novel that confirms Bernstein as one of the most exciting voices of her generation.

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery

Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston. But they soon learn that the welcome in America will be far from warm.

Trelawny, their youngest son, comes of age in a society which regards him with suspicion and confusion, greeting him with the puzzled question ‘What are you?’ Their eldest son Delano’s longing for a better future for his own children is equaled only by his recklessness in trying to secure it.

The thrilling linked stories in Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You pulse with inimitable style, heart and barbed humor while unravelling what it means to carve out an existence between cultures, homes and pay checks.

This Other Eden by Paul Harding

Set at the beginning of the twentieth century and inspired by historical events, This Other Eden tells the story of Apple Island: an enclave off the coast of the United States where waves of castaways – in flight from society and its judgment – have landed and built a home.

Benjamin Honey arrived on the island with his Irish wife, Patience, and discovered they could make a life together there. More than a century later, the Honeys’ descendants remain, with an eccentric, diverse band of neighbors. Then comes the intrusion of ‘civilization’: officials determine to ‘cleanse’ the island, and a missionary schoolteacher selects one light-skinned boy to save. The rest will succumb to the authorities’ institutions or cast themselves on the waters in a new Noah’s Ark.

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from Ireland’s newly formed secret police are here to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist. Ireland is falling apart. The country is in the grip of a government turning towards tyranny and when her husband disappears, Eilish finds herself caught within the nightmare logic of a society that is quickly unravelling.

How far will she go to save her family? And what – or who – is she willing to leave behind? Exhilarating, terrifying and propulsive, Prophet Song is a work of breathtaking originality, offering a devastating vision of a country at war and a deeply human portrait of a mother’s fight to hold her family together.

The winner will be revealed on 26 November.

Recent winners of the Booker Prize include Shehan Karunatilaka, Damon Galgut and Bernardine Evaristo.

Check out the International Booker Prize Longlist for 2023