Irish writers, debuts – and groundbreaking sci-fi: the Booker longlist in depth

The list is out … The Booker longlist 2023. Photograph: The Booker prize

Irish writers, debuts – and groundbreaking sci-fi: the Booker longlist in depth

This article is more than 3 months old

The personal meets the political in a list that includes dystopia and SF as well as little-known debuts
 Booker prize reveals ‘original and thrilling’ 2023 longlist

Justine Jordan
Tuesday 1 August 2023

Those accustomed to complaining about the number of American writers nominated for the Booker prize since the widening of eligibility in 2014 will get a pleasant surprise this year: the sector that leads is Irish writers – and people called Paul. That’s not the only surprise; the judges have chosen to spotlight some little-known debuts in the place of major novels. While it feels reductive to read the longlist in terms of what’s not included, many will have expected to see Zadie Smith’s September novel The Fraud, and Tom Crewe’s acclaimed debut The New Life, among others.

The presence of four Irish writers, meanwhile, is far from surprising (and that’s without the inclusion of Anne Enright’s fine forthcoming novel The Wren, The Wren, or Claire Kilroy’s scorching tale of new motherhood, Soldier Sailor). Sebastian Barry is a veteran author who pushes himself with each new book, and Old God’s Time is a devastating, dreamlike study of the lifetime repercussions of historic childhood abuse in Catholic institutions. Paul Murray, loved for 2010’s tragicomic Skippy Dies, writes the novel of his career with The Bee Sting, which uncovers a family’s slow-burning secrets against a backdrop of climate anxiety – in terms of pure page-turning pleasure, this is probably the most enjoyable novel on the list. Elaine Feeney’s How to Build a Boat explores the meaning of community and outsiderdom through one boy’s story, while Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, scheduled for September, is a chilling study of Ireland becoming a fascist state.

 

Illustration: Tim Bouckley

‘It took me a decade’: the 2023 Booker prize shortlisted authors on the stories behind their novels

Paul Murray, Chetna Maroo, Paul Lynch, Jonathan Escoffery, Sarah Bernstein, Paul Harding

Saturday 18 November 2023

Paul Murray

The Bee Sting (Hamish Hamilton)

 Photograph: Patrick Bolger/

I started writing The Bee Sting at the end of 2017. I’d spent the previous 18 months working on a screenplay and I was aching to get back to the freedom and possibility of a novel. But for a long time I couldn’t decide what to write. I had three very different ideas and I started making notes for each one: blocking out scenes, tracing character arcs, all that. Looking back, I can see I was nervous about beginning something new after being away from fiction for so long, and trying to prove to myself that it would work. But notes don’t tell you anything about a novel’s voice, which is the most important thing about it, and which you won’t discover until you actually start to write.

 

The Booker judge Esi Edugyan described the shortlist discussions as ‘often enthralling, sometimes intimate, sometimes charged’.

Just one British writer makes the Booker prize shortlist

This article is more than 1 month old

Chetna Maroo’s ‘mesmerising’ Western Lane has been chosen on a male-dominated list

 ‘Portraits of what it means to be alive today’: how we chose the 2023 Booker prize shortlist

Ella Creamer

Thursday 21 September 2023

Just one novel by a British writer has made the shortlist for this year’s Booker prize: Western Lane by Chetna Maroo. The list is also weighted towards male writers for the first time in eight years.

Four of the six shortlist places went to novels by men: Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, This Other Eden by Paul Harding, and If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery. Study for Obedience by the Canadian writer Sarah Bernstein completes the list. None of the six authors have been shortlisted for the prize before.

Booker prize reveals ‘original and thrilling’ 2023 longlist

Booker prize reveals ‘original and thrilling’ 2023 longlist

Previously nominated authors Sebastian Barry, Tan Twan Eng and Paul Murray join 13-strong field including four debuts

Ella Creamer

Tuesday 1 August 2023

A longlist of 13 “original and thrilling” books offering “startling portraits of the current” are in contention for the 2023 Booker Prize, the UK’s most prestigious literary award.

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.

The Booker prize 2023 longlist

A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ (Canongate)

Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry (Faber & Faber)

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein (Granta Books)

If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery (4th Estate)

How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney (Harvill Secker)

This Other Eden by Paul Harding (Hutchinson Heinemann)

Pearl by Siân Hughes (The Indigo Press)

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

Prophet Song by Paul Lynch (Oneworld)

In Ascension by Martin MacInnes (Atlantic Books)

Western Lane by Chetna Maroo (Picador)

The Bee Sting by Paul Murray (Hamish Hamilton)

The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng (Canongate)

 

Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein review – a masterly meditation on life as a survivor

One of Granta’s best young British novelists of 2023 weaves an unsettling tale of abuse, prejudice and blame told by the ficklest of narrators

Booker prize reveals ‘original and thrilling’ 2023 longlist

Miriam Balanescu

Sunday 2 July 2023

In the years since #MeToo, an outpouring of fiction by writers such as Emma Cline, Sophie Mackintosh and Rachel Yoder has grappled with what it means to be a victim, and what it takes to be an abuser. Montreal-born, Scottish-based author Sarah Bernstein’s second novel, Study for Obedience, spins a carefully woven web of culpability and criminality – of which gender is one fine thread – in answering its central question: if attacks on minority groups are unrelenting, in what ways do those groups internalise blame?

The narrator’s encounters with modern-day antisemitism are captured acutely and absurdly

“I knew they were right to hold me responsible,” professes Bernstein’s unnamed narrator at the outset. “They” are the native residents of an unspecified remote northern country where her entrepreneurial elder brother lives in a lavish, former gentry-owned manor house. After his marriage breaks down, she drops everything and travels to be at his beck and call. The crime of which she stands accused is begetting a series of local environmental catastrophes on her arrival: a dog’s “phantom pregnancy”; a depressive sow crushing her piglets; and a herd of crazed cattle.