Books

Previous winners Marlon James and Douglas Stuart shortlisted for Booker prize

The two authors are in the running for the £50,000 award alongside a Pulitzer winner, a science fiction legend, a comic writer and a debut novelist

 Booker judge Mary Beard on this year’s shortlist

Ella Creamer
Tuesday 22 Sep 2026 

This year’s Booker prize shortlist features some very familiar names – previous winners Marlon James and Douglas Stuart are in the running once more, along with Pulitzer winner Elizabeth Strout and prominent British speculative fiction writer M John Harrison.

I read 163 novels and these are the six best: Mary Beard on judging the Booker prize

The finalists … the Booker prize 2026 shortlist: L to r, Elizabeth Strout (The Things We Never Say), Marlon James (The Disappearers), M John Harrison (The End of Everything), Douglas Stuart (John of John), Luke Kennard (Black Bag), Rebecca Perry (May We Feed the King). Photograph: Yuki Sugiura/Booker prize foundation

I read 163 novels and these are the six best:

Mary Beard on judging the Booker prize

I found being a Booker judge hugely rewarding. All the works on our shortlist will change how you see the world

Mary Beard

Tuesday 22 September 2026

As a Booker judge, I think I have worked harder than I have ever done before. Reading 163 novels in six months, making careful assessments, being ready to argue for your judgment, going back to check you haven’t got it wrong … in some ways it took more energy than actually writing a book. But it was also hugely rewarding and fun. I shall never forget the discussions in our regular judging meetings, and the pleasure of discovering how we had sometimes reached almost exactly the same view of a book, and sometimes dramatically diverged. There were no big newsworthy squabbles, but a lot of discussion, a lot of listening and re-reading.

 

From dynamite debuts to must-read memoirs and magical children’s fiction, here’s our selection of this year’s hottest holiday reads

70 brilliant books for the summer

Leading authors Mark Haddon, Samantha Harvey, Zadie Smith select their favourites

Justine Jordan, David Shariatmadari, Imogen Russell Williams and Guardian staff 

Sat 13 Jun 2026

Fiction

Transcription

Ben Lerner

A middle-aged writer returns to his college townto record the final interview with his 90-year-old intellectual mentor. But he’s broken his phone, and doesn’t seem able to confess that it’s not recording … this anxiety dream of a beginning leads us into a series of sharp insights into family, memory, inheritance and storytelling – all that it means to be human, and how smartphones are changing our sense of the world at every level.

 

Elizabeth Strout

Where to start with: Elizabeth Strout

This article is more than 10 months old

A guide to the Pulitzer-winning novelist’s tales of small-town life, family secrets, and fraught relationships

American author Elizabeth Strout has captured millions of readers’ imaginations with her small-town stories of ordinary people with rich inner lives. Her novels – often set in Maine, where she grew up – have won her a Pulitzer and got her shortlisted for the Booker and, this year, the Women’s prize for fiction. Joe Stone gives us a tour of her interconnected oeuvre.

 

The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout review – readers will delight in these new characters

The Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton author branches out with the tale of a Massachusetts teacher haunted by trauma

Claire Adam

Monday 27 April 2026

The American author Elizabeth Stroutfamously persisted throughout years of rejection to publish her first novel when she was in her 40s, and the hard work has certainly paid off. She won a Pulitzer prize in 2009, and has been nominated multiple times for the Booker and Women’s prizes. The Things We Never Say is her 11th book.

Books to look out for in 2026 – fiction

 

Books to look out for in 2026 – fiction

This article is more than 4 months old

Maggie O’Farrell, Yann Martel and Julian Barnes are among the authors publishing new novels this year

Justin Jordan

Saturday 27 December 2025

The beginning of the books calendar is usually dominated by debuts, but January 2026 sees releases from some of the year’s biggest authors. Known for his surreally bittersweet short stories, George Saunders has written only one novel so far – but that one won the Booker prize. The follow-up to 2017’s Lincoln in the Bardo, Vigil (Bloomsbury) focuses on an unquiet spirit called Jill who helps others pass over from life to whatever comes next. She is called to the deathbed of an oil tycoon who is rapidly running out of time to face up to his ecological crimes, in a rallying cry for human connection and environmental action. Ali Smith’s Glyph (Hamish Hamilton) is a companion to 2024’s Gliff, and promises to tell a story initially hidden in that previous novel. Expect fables, siblings, phantoms and horses in a typically playful shout of resistance against war, genocide and the increasingly hostile social discourse. And in Departure(s) (Jonathan Cape), Julian Barnes announces his own – this blend of memoir and fiction, exploring memory, illness, mortality and love across the decades, will be his last book. “Your presence has delighted me,” he assures the reader. “Indeed, I would be nothing without you.”

Motherless Child by Elizabeth Strout

 

Illustration by Jules Julien

Fiction

Motherless Child 

by Elizabeth Strout

They were late.

Olive Kitteridge hated people who were late. A little after lunchtime, they had said, and Olive had the lunch things out, peanut butter and jelly for the two oldest kids, and tuna-fish sandwiches for her son, Christopher, and his wife, Ann. For the little ones, she had no idea. The baby was only six weeks old and wouldn’t be eating anything solid yet; Little Henry was over two, but what did two-year-olds eat? Olive couldn’t remember what Christopher had eaten when he was that age.

Elizabeth Strout on Returning to Olive Kitteridge

Elizabeth Strout

This Week in Fiction

Elizabeth Strout 

on Returning to Olive Kitteridge

By Deborah Treisman

July 29, 2019

Your story in this week’s issue, “Motherless Child,” revolves around Olive Kitteridge, who was the protagonist of your 2008 story collection, “Olive Kitteridge,” and will be the protagonist of a sequel, “Olive, Again,” which comes out this fall. What made you want to go back to Olive (or move forward with her)?

I never intended to return to Olive Kitteridge. I really thought I was done with her, and she with me. But a few years ago I was in a European city, alone for a weekend, and I went to a café, and she just showed up. That’s all I can say. She showed up with a force, the way she did the very first time, and I could not ignore her. This time, she was nosing her car into the marina, and I saw it so clearly—felt her so clearly—that I thought, Well, I should go with this.

Elizabeth Strout / ‘All ordinary people are extraordinary’

 

Elizabeth Strout

Elizabeth Strout: ‘All ordinary people are extraordinary’

The Pulitzer prize winner on uniting Olive Kitteridge and Lucy Barton in her new novel, her unfathomable dreams, and how she went from ‘blabbermouth’ to writer

Hephzibah Anderson

Sat 7 Sep 2024 18.00 BST

Pulitzer prize winner Elizabeth Strout, 68, has wooed readers and critics alike with a string of bestselling novels set in Maine, where she grew up and now mostly lives. Her latest, Tell Me Everything, unites two recurring protagonists from recent books – self-effacing author Lucy Barton and abrasive nonagenarian Olive Kitteridge – with sometime lawyer Bob Burgess, who first appeared in her 2013 novel The Burgess Boys, and is now set to be hauled out of semi-retirement by a murder case. As a New England winter finally yields to spring, pathos and dry humour gild tender reflections on loneliness and connection, and the redemptive power of storytelling.