The longlist for the 2021 Booker Prize is out, with the shortlist to follow early next month.
As one of the most prestigious literary awards in the English-speaking world, the stakes are high. Past winners have included literary giants such as Margaret Atwood, Hilary Mantel, and Graham Swift. As well as the rise in sales that usually accompanies the award, authors receive a substantial cash prize too.
Here’s our pick of five of the best books from the longlist that could be in the running for this year’s prize.
1. The Promise by Damon Galgut
Galgut is a South African novelist who has been shortlisted for the Booker prize twice before, for The Good Doctor and In a Strange Room.
The Promise follows the white South African Swart family as multiple generations meet for a funeral. Moving between characters and viewpoints, we see the younger generation’s disgust at everything the family stands for.
The head of the family, Herman “Manie” Swart, is the racist owner of a reptile park called Scaly City. It is his wife, Rachel, who makes the promise of the title. Rachel is on her deathbed when she promises a house on the farm to their black servant, Salome. And yet, over the years since, the promise has remained unfulfilled.
Moving from the mid-1980s to the present, Swart’s unkept promise finds parallels throughout a country in transition.
The judges have called it “convincing and heartfelt”.
2. A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam
Anuk Arudpragasam’s first novel, The Story of a Brief Marriage, was translated into seven languages and was shortlisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize.
A Passage North is his second novel. It begins with a telephone call confirming the suspicious death of our protagonist’s grandmother’s carer, who has been found with her neck broken at the bottom of a well.
Making the long journey to the funeral, Krishnan heads into the heart of the country and the heart of the devastation and loss left by the country’s civil war.
The novel has been described as “quiet by serendipity, possessing its power not on its face, but in hidden, subterranean places”.
3. Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead
Included as part of our guide to 5 of the best books of 2021 so far, Great Circle joins esteemed company on the Booker longlist. The story follows the lives of Marian Graves, a thrill-seeking aviator whose record-breaking attempt to fly from pole to pole ends in tragedy, and Hadley Baxter, the actress chosen to play Graves in a new biopic some 100 years later.
Growing up in Montana, the orphaned Graves witnesses the air display of two daredevil pilots and sets her sights on the skies. Hadley Baxter, meanwhile, has been sacked from a lucrative film franchise when she is offered a role that she finds herself instantly, and mysteriously, drawn to.
Great Circle is Maggie Shipstead’s third book.
4. A Town Called Solace by Mary Lawson
Lawson’s novel, set in Northern Ontario in 1972, follows three people brought together by fate and the mistakes of the past.
Clara’s sister Rose storms out of the house after an argument and vanishes when Clara is only eight years old. Not long after, Liam Kane moves into the house next door, and shortly after the police come knocking. Elizabeth Orchard, nearing the end of her life, is looking to make amends for a crime committed almost thirty years ago.
In this gripping novel, the mysteries, and mistakes at the heart of each of these characters lives will be unravelled.
5. Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro
Another book to feature in our first half of 2021 list, Klara and the Sun is Kazuo Ishiguro’s first novel since being awarded the 2017 Nobel prize in literature.
The book follows the life of Klara, an “Artificial Friend” who waits in her department store window for a family to choose her to take home with them. As she waits, Klara tries to make sense of the humans she watches walk past but it is only once chosen by a family that the real journey of discovery begins.
Exploring themes of power, status and fear, it also examines the future potential for human and AI relationships.
The Guardian described the novel as “another masterpiece, a work that makes us feel afresh the beauty and fragility of our humanity.”Â
