Irish writers, debuts – and groundbreaking sci-fi: the Booker longlist in depth
Booker prize reveals ‘original and thrilling’ 2023 longlist
Tuesday 1 August 2023
It’s fantastic, too, to see a slice of science fiction on the list. Scottish author Martin MacInnes is an unusual and groundbreaking writer, and with his third novel he has come into his powers. In Ascension is a tale of cosmic exploration and existential wonder, delving into both intimate family ties and the beginning of life itself, and travelling from the ocean floor to deep space.
Malaysian author Tan Twan Eng is a familiar face on the Booker – this is his third nomination with as many novels. He excels at historical fiction, and The House of Doors begins in 1920s Penang as the visiting Somerset Maugham hears stories of colonial scandal and Chinese revolutionaries. It’s a sideways view on empire, global disruption and the court of public opinion with sharp relevance to today. The Pulitzer winner Paul Harding’s novel This Other Eden is also inspired by real-life events: here the forced resettlement of a tiny island off the coast of Maine at the beginning of the 20th century, where a handful of mixed-race families, descended from trafficked Africans and poor immigrants, had found hardscrabble autonomy and freedom from a racist society. Ideas about eugenics and “civilisation” intrude on the narrative as Harding uses lush, biblical language to conjure a vanished miniature world with the power of a fable. There’s also a fabular tinge to Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience, as a woman is ostracised by a community soaked in the horrors of the past.
The experience of the outsider, and the search for identity, is a strong theme on this year’s list. Jonathan Escoffery’s If I Survive You features a Jamaican family in late 20th-century Miami, and the two brothers’ struggles to survive racism and poverty. It’s a fluid, freewheeling work greeted by many as linked short stories rather than a novel, often darkly humorous and employing the second person to clever effect – “You were born in the United States and you’ve got the paperwork to prove it.” Ayòbámi Adébáyò’s A Spell of Good Things also exposes social inequality, along with state corruption and stifling conventions, in a novel about rich and poor families in noughties Nigeria.
Ayòbámi Adébáyò. Photograph: Murdo Macleod |
Adébáyò focuses on teenage Eniolá, whose promise is curtailed by the failings of the state. It’s striking how many of the longlisted titles include coming-of-age narratives and youthful protagonists. Chetna Maroo’s debut Western Lane is a stunning example of the often-tired trope of the child narrator who sees more than they can express. Her spare, tender, brilliantly achieved debut follows 11-year-old Gopi and her sisters after the death of their mother, as their father channels their grief into playing squash. It’s a novel that unfolds in silences and the echoes of the ball ricocheting around the court, and dares to leave much unsaid.
There’s another missing mother in the first of the two wild-card debuts on the list, poet Siân Hughes’s Pearl, from the tiny Indigo Press. Inspired by the medieval poem of the same name, it’s a gently folkloric tale of grief and healing grounded in eight-year-old Marianne’s memories of her mother’s love, and reaching forward to her own future as a mother. Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow’s All the Little Bird-Hearts also looks at motherhood, as autistic Sunday’s relationship with her teenage daughter is challenged by a dangerous new friend. Lloyd-Barlow is autistic, and her novel explores difference and connection within family bonds.
The anxious and obsessive 13-year-old Jamie in Feeney’s novel will also be read as neurodiverse (and is another character mourning their mother). There are many intimate, poetic novels here of grief and growing up, of what it feels like to be an outsider in relation to your community, or to be othered by the state. Across the list, the personal meets the political in fascinating ways.
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