International Booker Prize: Read this year’s winning novel and the previous top titles

A look back at the victors from the past four years, all of which showcase the wonders of the written word

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld has become the youngest author to ever win the International Booker Prize, taking the award of their debut novel The Discomfort of Evening.

The winner of the International Booker Prize (formerly known as the Man Booker International Prize), was due to be announced on 19 May, however, due to the impact of coronavirus, this was postponed until 26 August.

Chair of judges for the prize, Ted Hodgkinson, said: "This book astounded us all when we first encountered it early in the judging process, and our fascination has only deepened on a second and third rereading."

Describing the book as a "tender and visceral evocation of the strangeness of a childhood caught between shame and salvation," Hodgkinson added that the novel is an "undeniable force by a writer of thrilling talent and ability."

Marieke Lucas Rijneveld beat five other finalists spanning from North and South America, the Middle East, South East Asia, and Europe. Each of these brilliant shortlisted novels shares common themes of trauma, loss, and illness.

The award was open to any work of fiction, written in any language, and published over the past year in English in the UK or Ireland.

It honours the best fiction from around the world, with previous winners including Korean author Han Kang, as well as Polish laureate Olga Tokarczuk.

The prize acts as an important reminder that storytelling transcends languages, cultures, and ways of experiencing the world, and gives us access to different places and characters.

In honour of the International Booker Prize announcement, we take a look at this year's winning novel and the previous four top titles that have preceded it, all of which showcase the wonders of the written word.

You can trust our independent round-ups. We may earn a commission from some of the retailers, but we never allow this to influence selections. This revenue helps us to fund journalism across The Independent.

2020 winner: 'The Discomfort of Evening' by Marieke Lucas Rijneveld translated by Michele Hutchison, published by Faber & Faber: £10.59, Blackwell's

Intensely lyrical, raw, and gritty, The Discomfort of Evening explores what life is like within a devout Christian family in the Netherlands. It's told from the perspective of 10-year-old Jas, whose brother dies in a sudden accident after she wishes him dead instead of her pet rabbit. It’s a dark portrait of childhood and is awash with compelling imagery of a family dislocated and destroyed, not just by grief, but by a failure to acknowledge and articulate it. Rijneveld's debut carries heavy themes with confidence through wildly pervasive prose.

2019 winner: ‘Celestial Bodies’ by Jokha Alharthi, translated by Marilyn Booth, published by Sandstone Press: £6.69, Amazon

While this is the second novel written by Alharthi, it's a first for many other literary reasons – it’s the first novel written in Arabic to win the International Booker Prize, and the first novel written by a woman from Oman to be translated into English. Celestial Bodies paints a vivid picture of the rapidly changing Omani culture – set between the 19th century slavery period to its 20th-century abolition and beyond. By telling the story of three sisters, Mayya, Asma, and Khawala, it exposes marriage and its miseries, passion, conflict, love, and loss. It provides a cross-generational glimpse into all degrees of society – from the poor local slave families to those making money through the advent of new wealth. Breaking free of narration that is commonly associated with Western fictional literature, it’s poetic and song-like. A cultural kaleidoscope you will devour.

2018 winner: 'Flights' by Olga Tokarczuk translated by Jennifer Croft, published by Fitzcarraldo Editions: £8.76, Blackwell's

This novel explores what it means to be a traveller, a wanderer, and a body in motion, not only through space but also time – from the 17th century through to the 19th century. Interweaving notions of the human body, life, death, motion, and migration, Flights analyses travel and human connection in a polarised world. Made up of a series of short observations sandwiched within a number of longer essays, this is a category-defying piece of work. Through its use of brilliantly imagined characters and narratives, it is a masterpiece in storytelling.

2017 winner: 'A Horse Walks Into a Bar' by David Grossman translated by Jessica Cohen, published by Vintage Publishing: £8.99, Waterstones

Set in a 1990s comedy club in a small city in Israel, Dovaleh Greenstein, a comedian a bit past his time, is doing a stand-up night. But, it doesn't go to plan. The audience members act as a cross-section of the country's society (a group of off-duty soldiers, local kids, a lonely single or two, and young and old couples) and watch as the comedian falls apart on stage, crumbling before their very eyes. Over the course of his two-hour set, Dovaleh gradually unspools, releasing demon after demon. The narrative exposes his deep pain, grief, and loss, as well as an exploration into how the country has lost its ways. While a short book, it still manages to encapsulate major themes of humanity, relationships, politics, and trauma in an all-consuming way. A must-read.

2016 winner: 'The Vegetarian' by Han Kang translated by Deborah Smith, published by Portobello Books: £6.95, Amazon

A taut novel that tells the story of two sisters, Yeong-hye and In-hye, and their marriages. Split into three sections, from three points of view, each acts as a novella in its own right. The first section begins with the painful conflicts between Yeong-hye and her husband as she breaks cultural norms and declares herself a vegetarian following a vicious dream that repels her from eating meat. It ends with a haunting family scene that escalates into an act of abuse that permeates the following two parts. Written in a poetic, but matter of fact way, The Vegetarian touches on shame, desire, and faltering attempts to understand one another. It is at once disturbing and beautiful.

(Source: The Independent)

Has the Booker prize lost its mojo?

Rows, gaffes and disdainful speeches – the Booker prize has always been in the news. But now, a creeping sense of bad decision-making is undermining its cachet

Documentaries about contemporary writers do not tend to liveliness – which is, perhaps, one reason why the BBC is increasingly reluctant to commission them. But Barneys, Books and Bust-ups: 50 Years of the Booker prize, to be screened on BBC Four on 15 October, the night before the announcement of this year’s winner, could not be boring even if it tried. There are no vengeful former muses; on this score, even Salman Rushdie gets off scot-free. But those who live in fear of lingering shots of honeyed bookshelves and the scratchy sound of a fountain pen moving across a sheet of paper can relax. Fifty years is a long time when it comes to gossip, feuds, giant egos, rank stupidity and mild lunacy, all of which the Booker prize used to deliver on a pretty regular basis. The film’s director, Jon Morrice, could have used no new material whatsoever, and he would still have had more footage than he knew what to do with.

The 2004 Man Booker prize ceremony, the year the award was won by Alan Hollinghurst’s The Line of Beauty. Photograph: Carl de Souza/AFP/Getty Images

Every moment bulges with incident; every anecdote involves cattiness, hubris or the plangent lessons offered by posterity (occasionally, all three). Hard to say what I enjoyed most. Was it the sight of a sweaty Anthony Burgess, shortlisted for Earthly Powers in 1980, describing the Booker as “a rather small, parochial prize suitable for rather small, parochial writers”? (Burgess, sulking in a hotel while everyone else attended the ceremony, by this point knew very well that William Golding had bagged it for Rites of Passage.) Or was it when John Banville, the winner in 2005 for The Sea, smoothly announced on his big night that it was at least “nice to see a work of art winning the prize”? At the end of the hour, the viewer can only conclude that a kind of madness is apt to descend on those who get involved with the Booker, be they writers, publishers, judges or critics.

Still, for all the madness and hype, the prize at least used to lead readers to books, sometimes in their millions. In Sheffield, in the 80s, my father would buy the shortlist every year as a matter of course, which is how he discovered such writers as William Boyd and Graham Swift. It is hard to imagine him doing so now. By general consent, its old shine is fast disappearing. “I think there has been a diminishment of the brand, one I would place at the feet of the last few winners,” says one former senior bookseller who, like almost everyone I approached about this piece, would talk only off the record. “The shortlist no longer has the power it had in terms of sales. It has stopped being a reliable indicator so far as readers go, and the fact that Colson Whitehead’s [Pulitzer prize-winning] The Underground Railroad wasn’t on the longlist last year, and that Sally Rooney’s Normal People hasn’t made it to the shortlist this year, are just other instances of that.”

The last time the public connected with the prize? 2012’s shortlisted authors (l-r) Deborah Levy, Tan Twan Eng, Hilary Mantel, Will Self, Alison Moore and Jeet Thayil. Photograph: Luke Macgregor/Reuters

Is he saying that, for the public, it has lost its lustre? “Yes, and I’m not the only one who thinks so. The last book that connected with readers was Hilary Mantel’s Bring Up the Bodies [in 2012]. It’s less the Oscars now, and more the Cannes film festival.” So who does he predict will triumph this year? “If I were still a bookseller, the book I would want to win is Esi Edugyan’s Washington Black [an adventure story about a runaway slave]. It’s such an enjoyable read. But the book I think will win is The Overstory by Richard Powers.” In case you don’t know – I’ve yet to meet anyone who’s read it – The Overstory is an idiosyncratic and, in the words of one plucky critic, “valiant” 500-page epic that is supposed to do for trees what Moby-Dick did for whales. Perhaps this is why my contact is laughing.

In certain quarters, of course, Powers would be an unpopular choice not only for commercial reasons. “American wins Booker prize for the third year running” isn’t, most insiders feel, a headline its director and trustees would want to see in the award’s 50th year. Publishers’ and authors’ nerves aside, in 2018, a more than usually large cloud of anxiety looms over the Booker and all who sail in her. The Man Group, the prize’s sponsor since 2002, is signed up only until 2020, and the word is that Luke Ellis, its CEO, is somewhat less keen on the company’s £1.6m annual commitment to both it and the International Man Booker prize than his predecessor. Given the well-publicised withdrawal of other sponsors from book prizes in recent years, no one is taking anything for granted. Meanwhile, publishers and booksellers alike agree that this year’s longlist was, for whatever reason, distinctly weird, with its inclusion of both a comic book (Sabrina by Nick Drnaso) and a crime novel (Snap by Belinda Bauer). “Next year, they’re going to get 30 crime novels,” says one confused publisher. “One of the criteria for entry is that you must publish two literary novels a year, and if a crime novel is now a literary novel, more imprints are going to believe they’ve eligible books on their lists.”

This, in turn, could bring the prize’s organisers yet more woe. Anecdotally, it’s getting ever harder to find willing Booker judges, largely because the task is so onerous (this year, the judges read 171 novels). At least one high-profile writer who was approached to chair the judges in its birthday year said no. There are even niggling anxieties about the ceremony itself, a grand dinner that is held in the Guildhall, in the City of London, and attended by the Duchess of Cornwall. Last year, most of the invited journalists seemed to have been seated together, far away from any authors, publishers or random celebrities, a move that seemed to many a kind of insult given that publicity, good or bad, continues to be the Booker’s most vigorous engine.

Above all, the majority of publishers and many writers and agents remain furious at the trustees’ decision, five years ago, to throw open the prize to any book written in English that is published in Britain – which was a roundabout way of saying that US writers would henceforth be allowed to enter (previously, only novels by Commonwealth and Irish writers were eligible). At an event marking the 50th birthday at the Southbank Centre last July, Peter Carey, who has won the Booker twice, called it an exercise in corporate branding that made no sense to literature; American prizes, he noted, are not open to writers from Australia or Britain. Julian Barnes, another former winner, described the decision as “daft”, pointing out that three of the six shortlisted writers in 2017 were American. Had one of these elbowed out, say, a fine Zimbabwean novel?

Kingsley Amis reacts to the announcement that he has won the 1985 Booker prize at the Guildhall, London. Photograph: PA/PA Archive

With only one exception, everyone I speak to feels the same: that something has been lost. “A big, big mistake,” says Carmen Callil, co-founder of Virago books and former managing director of Chatto & Windus. “Its USP has gone,” says a leading agent (this despite the fact that he represents some US authors). “This whole fucking thing about us having such a cultural cringe towards America,” says one publisher. In his view, it is now all but impossible for certain kinds of novel to succeed at the Booker (in four years of being eligible, two Americans have won it, while nine out of a possible 24 authors, have been shortlisted). “The judges seem to favour big, noble, American failures over smaller, quieter, non-American masterpieces.” Another publisher agrees: “It’s hard to imagine, say, an Alan Hollinghurst winning in this landscape.”

The irony is that the Booker, according to some of these same people, is now losing ground in the US. “American publishers loved the fact that it brought them writers from other territories,” says one. “They don’t need to be told about Anne Tyler or Paul Auster. They know about them already.” Just to add to the angst, some American agents now reportedly make entry to the Booker prize a condition of the sale of the work of a US author to a British publisher. Given that publishers are allowed only two entries for each imprint (plus the novels of previously shortlisted authors), this would, if true, contribute to a further pushing out of British and Commonwealth writers.Last February, Mark Richards, the publisher at John Murray, and Alex Bowler, then at Granta and now at Faber & Faber, drew up a letter asking the Booker trustees to reconsider their decision; it was signed by 30 publishers, and quietly supported by at least 10 more. The letter warned of a “homogenised literary future” permanently dominated by American writers. Some weeks later, the trustees and the prize’s literary director, Gaby Wood, invited its signatories to a meeting. “It was a bit fractious,” says one publisher who attended. Another admits: “It was, perhaps, a little over-emotional. People talked of authors having been betrayed.” Alexandra Pringle, who runs Bloomsbury, which published George Saunders, the American who won the 2017 prize, spoke passionately of how “a small, Cumbrian writer” would struggle for notice in this new realm. What was the attitude of Wood and the other trustees who attended to this? They were “defensive”. Why were the publishers talking of the prize’s “duty” to authors? It has no duty. Its role is only to reward the best book. If they didn’t like it, they were more than welcome to set up their own prize.

Some time after this, a second meeting was held between a smaller number of publishers, Wood and Helena Kennedy, the chair of the trustees. This was more conciliatory, though nothing really changed. “I can’t think of a single publisher who thinks it’s a good idea,” says one trade journalist. “But they’re resigned to it now.” Others are more optimistic: “My hope is that 2020, when Man’s sponsorship comes up for renewal, will provide the obvious moment for a rule change. I get the feeling that some trustees, if not all, are persuadable.” On the committee that advises the board of trustees about such matters – it comprises publishers, agents and critics, as well as, currently, James Daunt, the managing director of Waterstones, and Jonty Claypole, head of arts at the BBC – opinions are mixed. “I don’t think the decision should be reversed,” says one member. “I think that ship has sailed. But I know there are others who disagree.”

John Banville, the 2005 Booker winner for The Sea, said during his acceptance speech that it was ‘nice to see a work of art winning the prize’. Photograph: Leon Neal/AFP/Getty Images

Where did the decision to include US writers originate? Publishers like to blame the Man Group, and what they regard as its greedy lust for global publicity. But according to one Booker insider, this is not the case. For two years, the trustees looked at the possibility of setting up a new, separate prize in the US; the consultants McKinsey were commissioned to explore this. When it became clear that it wouldn’t be feasible, Peter Mayer, the American former publisher of Penguin Books, and Ed Victor, the London-based American literary agent, suggested the change (both men have since died, as has Ion Trewin, then the literary director of the prize). Ask the Man Group, an investment management company, what it gets out of sponsoring the prize, and the talk is mostly of corporate social responsibility (the Booker prize foundation works in schools and libraries and supports a number of literacy programmes) and the “unique social networking opportunities” it provides for clients (among other things, it takes 200 seats at the award ceremony).

However, a spokesperson also tells me that the company regards it as a “brand that we own because we have our name on it”. Is the name Man Booker better known – more written and talked about – in the US since American writers became eligible? It is difficult to say. However, it is worth noting that the percentage rise in sales of books in the US for winners from outside the country dwarfs that of American winners (while Paul Beatty, the American who won in 2016 for The Sellout, only doubled his US sales, Eleanor Catton, the New Zealander whose novel The Luminaries won in 2013, multiplied hers tenfold).

To some, of course, all this is just a squall in an inkwell. As Professor John Carey puts it in the BBC’s film, Booker titles seem to many to conform ever more strongly to the bien-pensant tastes of a small, urban coterie, a world so far removed from most bookshelves as to be almost absurd (one thinks of Edward St Aubyn’s 2014 novel Lost for Words, a satire about a prize very like the Booker, in which there appears a judge who is obsessed only with relevance and “consensus-building” and a novelist who writes “like a man walking backwards along a path, erasing his footsteps with a broom”). But while there may be truth in this, if you are of a certain age, and love novels, and didn’t grow up in a family with, say, a subscription to the Times Literary Supplement, it’s impossible not to care about its future. I remember so clearly the first time I saw the winner announced on the BBC: it was Kingsley Amis in 1986, for The Old Devils, who said, eyes popping, that he would spend the prize money on “booze, of course, and curtains”, words I’ve never forgotten. As a teenager, the Booker introduced me to Penelope Lively and Timothy Mo. As a student, it brought me to AS Byatt and Banville. Later on, I read Ahdaf Soueif’s The Map of Love and Mick Jackson’s The Underground Man – beloved books, both – for no other reason at all than because they were on the shortlist.

 Salman Rushdie, the only triple Booker winner. He is pictured in 1993, when he won the ‘Booker of Bookers’ award for his 1981 Winner Midnight’s Children. The novel also won the 2008 Best of the Booker prize in a public vote. Photograph: Fiona Hanson/PA

I would love it to seem glamorous and vital again: as widely and passionately talked about as it was in the 80s and 90s. But maybe we’ve simply come, down the years, to expect too much of it. “It’s just one literary prize,” a member of the advisory committee tells me. “Yet expectations of it are totally unrealistic.” People think that it has changed, he says, when really it’s only the world in which it operates that has: “No prize could have the same place as it once did in a culture that is so noisy. Maybe that’s the real reason quieter, more domestic books are losing out; they make less impact anyway.”

Or perhaps it has just become too slick, too professional, too boringly 21st century. Last year, hunkered in a corner with my fellow hacks, I looked out across the Guildhall at the massed ranks of sober-seeming guests (no wonder there are fewer punch-ups these days), so many of whose heads were bowed prayerfully over their mobile phones, and thought of Selina Scott’s famous faux pas when she stuck her microphone in the face of Fay Weldon, the chair of the judges in 1983, and asked if she really had read all the books. (This after she had already failed to recognise another judge, Angela Carter.) If I had seen Morrice’s film, I might also have pictured the distinguished biographer Hermione Lee phoning Keri Hulme, the pipe-smoking New Zealander who won for The Bone People in 1985, live from her table at the award dinner to ask how she was feeling (technology being what it was then, we could hear, but not see, the startled author shout the words: “Bloody hell!”). These things, and so many others, would never happen now – and perhaps we’re all the poorer for it.

The 2018 Man Booker prize for fiction will be announced on 16 October

(Source: The Guardian)

Kazuo Ishiguro: How I wrote The Remains of the Day in four weeks

The author reveals how the Tom Waits song Ruby’s Arms served as inspiration for his Booker prize-winning classic novel, The Remains of the Day.

Many people have to work long hours. When it comes to the writing of novels, however, the consensus seems to be that after four hours or so of continuous writing, diminishing returns set in. I’d always more or less gone along with this view, but as the summer of 1987 approached I became convinced a drastic approach was needed. Lorna, my wife, agreed.

Until that point, since giving up the day job five years earlier, I’d managed reasonably well to maintain a steady rhythm of work and productivity. But my first flurry of public success following my second novel had brought with it many distractions. Potentially career-enhancing proposals, dinner and party invitations, alluring foreign trips and mountains of mail had all but put an end to my “proper” work. I’d written an opening chapter to a new novel the previous summer, but now, almost a year later, I was no further forward.

Emma Thompson and Anthony Hopkins in the 1993 film adaptation of Kazuo Ishiguro’s Booker prize-winning novel The Remains of the Day. public domain Photograph: public domain

So Lorna and I came up with a plan. I would, for a four-week period, ruthlessly clear my diary and go on what we somewhat mysteriously called a “Crash”. During the Crash, I would do nothing but write from 9am to 10.30pm, Monday through Saturday. I’d get one hour off for lunch and two for dinner. I’d not see, let alone answer, any mail, and would not go near the phone. No one would come to the house. Lorna, despite her own busy schedule, would for this period do my share of the cooking and housework. In this way, so we hoped, I’d not only complete more work quantitively, but reach a mental state in which my fictional world was more real to me than the actual one.

I was then 32 years old, and we’d recently moved into a house in Sydenham, south London, where for the first time in my life I had a dedicated study. (I’d written my first two novels at the dining table.) It was actually a kind of large cupboard on the half-landing and lacked a door, but I was thrilled to have a space where I could spread my papers around as I wished and not have to clear them away at the end of each day. I stuck up charts and notes all over the peeling walls and got down to writing.

This, fundamentally, was how The Remains of the Day was written. Throughout the Crash, I wrote free-hand, not caring about the style or if something I wrote in the afternoon contradicted something I’d established in the story that morning. The priority was simply to get the ideas surfacing and growing. Awful sentences, hideous dialogue, scenes that went nowhere – I let them remain and ploughed on.

By the third day, Lorna observed during my evening break that I was behaving oddly. On my first Sunday off I ventured outdoors, on to Sydenham high street, and persistently giggled – so Lorna told me – at the fact that the street was built on a slope, so that people coming down it were stumbling over themselves, while those going up were panting and staggering effortfully. Lorna was concerned I had another three weeks of this to go, but I explained I was very well, and that the first week had been a success.

I kept it up for the four weeks, and at the end of it I had more or less the entire novel down: though of course a lot more time would be required to write it all up properly, the vital imaginative breakthroughs had all come during the Crash.

Striking a chord … Kazuo Ishiguro took inspiration from a Tom Waits song when putting the finishing touches to The Remains of the Day. Photograph: David Levene

I should say that by the time I embarked on the Crash, I’d consumed a substantial amount of “research”: books by and about British servants, about politics and foreign policy between the wars, many pamphlets and essays from the time, including one by Harold Laski on “The Dangers of Being a Gentleman”. I’d raided the second-hand shelves of the local bookshop (Kirkdale Books, still a thriving independent) for guides to the English countryside from the 1930s and 50s. The decision when to start the actual writing of a novel – to begin composing the story itself – always seems to me a crucial one. How much should one know before starting on the prose? It’s damaging to start too early, equally so to start too late. I think with Remains I got lucky: the Crash came just at the right point, when I knew just enough.

Looking back, I see all kinds of influences and sources of inspiration. Here are two of the less obvious ones:

1) In the mid-70s, as a teenager, I’d seen a film called The Conversation, a thriller directed by Francis Ford Coppola. In it Gene Hackman plays a freelance surveillance expert, the go-to man for people who want other people’s conversations secretly taped. Hackman fanatically wants to be the finest in his field – “the greatest bugger in America” – but becomes steadily haunted by the idea that the tapes he gives to his powerful clients may lead to dark consequences, including murder. I believe the Hackman character was an early model for Stevens the butler.

2) I thought I’d finished Remains, but then one evening heard Tom Waits singing his song “Ruby’s Arms”. It’s a ballad about a soldier leaving his lover sleeping in the early hours to go away on a train. Nothing unusual in that. But the song is sung in the voice of a rough American hobo type utterly unaccustomed to wearing his emotions on his sleeve. And there comes a moment, when the singer declares his heart is breaking, that’s almost unbearably moving because of the tension between the sentiment itself and the huge resistance that’s obviously been overcome to utter it. Waits sings the line with cathartic magnificence, and you feel a lifetime of tough-guy stoicism crumbling in the face of overwhelming sadness. I heard this and reversed a decision I’d made, that Stevens would remain emotionally buttoned up right to the bitter end. I decided that at just one point – which I’d have to choose very carefully – his rigid defence would crack, and a hitherto concealed tragic romanticism would be glimpsed.

(Source: The Guardian)

On Fiona Mozley's Elmet, the Booker-shortlisted novel written on a mobile phone

I thought it would be fitting, then, that I read and write about the book in the same manner that it was composed, writes Sanjay Sipahimalani on DailyO. Read on: 

When Fiona Mozley’s debut novel was longlisted for the Man Booker Prize earlier this year, news reports claimed that she had written all, if not most, of it on her mobile phone. A pleasant if unexpected change from all those novelists who confess that they simply cannot get started unless they have just the right quality of stationery or stock of sharpened pencils.

Mozley started the book, she has said, while on the train commute between her home in United Kingdom's York and an internship in London. Watching the Yorkshire countryside go by, she started to muse on “what the relationship between a person and a place was”, a train of thought that led to Elmet, the book that’s now reached the shortlist. At 29, she’s the youngest author on the list.

I thought it would be fitting, then, that I read and write about Elmet in the same manner that it was composed: on my own mobile phone. This is a device on which I, for one, haven’t written a novel. Texts, tweets, messages, notes and mails: yes. Fiction: no. Here, then, is the fruit of my thumbed labour.

As the epigraph that quotes a verse by Ted Hughes indicates, Elmet refers to a vanished Celtic kingdom in Yorkshire. Mozley’s novel, set in the near-present, deals with the fortunes of an unusual family comprising a father, a giant of a man who earns his living by bare-knuckle fighting in local contests; a 15-year-old daughter, a girl with pent-up appetites and furies; and an impressionable, gender-conflicted 13-year-old son, who tells us their story of their lives in retrospect while he mentally and physically journeys back to his homestead.

A few pages in, and I realise that reading an entire book on a phone is something I could get used to. I may not prefer it to print or to an e-book, but it’s not undoable.

The only problem is an infernal urge to fiddle. Every so often I switch fonts, point sizes and background shades and then switch them back again. Eventually, this diminishes to acceptable levels. (Including, to my pleasant surprise, the itch to check e-mail and social media updates.)

Mozley’s sentences are striking, managing to be tough and tender at the same time. “The soil was alive with ruptured stories that cascaded and rotted then found form once more and pushed up through the undergrowth and back into our lives,” one reads, a deliberate calling forth of the links between person and place the author has spoken about. In this manner, she accretes rich and memorable details of the landscape, interiors, clothes, food and more.

Writing fully formed sentences on a touchscreen keypad is tricky, though. At least for me, it is; perhaps it’s to do with the size of my thumbs or that I hasten to put down words before they disappear from thought. As has been widely noted, predictive text is hit-or-miss – but when one turns it off, one is confronted by strings of unintelligible letters. One soldiers on, fingers crossed.

To begin with, Elmet’s chapters progress in the manner of overlapping episodes, speaking of the children’s interrupted stint in school, Christmas Eve celebrations, archery lessons, their father’s dealings with others, and more. Thus, it immerses us in a layered portrait of a realm that is aslant from our times. “In another world,” the boy recalls, “we might have grown up faster, but this was our strange, sylvan otherworld, so we did not.”

Soon enough, though, the narrative gathers momentum. The father takes the lead in organising resistance against a group of rapacious landlords; the locals start to come together for the cause; the landowners devise stratagems to regain power.

The latter half, with a nail-biting fight scene and its spiralling consequences, is almost unbearably tense and gripping. A tip: if you’re reading it on a phone screen, you’d be well-advised to turn off all those pesky notifications.

At the very end, one realises that the Gothic notes of the finale are cleverly foreshadowed from the start. (“It’s sort of like a Western, but set in Yorkshire,” the author has commented.) However, it can also be said that there are moments in the book that are overdone – for example, when people speak overtly of collectivism and the old ways.

Happily enough, though, I managed to remain riveted, even during an especially bumpy commute, and also managed to sneak in a few paragraphs during office meetings. (Shh.) It’s the narrative, the atmosphere and the language that stay in mind after the book is finished. Make sure your battery is charged.

2017 Man Booker Prize shortlist: What to expect on award day

With a different panel of judges each year, the prestigious literary award is famously unpredictable, writes Urvashi Bahuguna on DailyO. Read on: 

The Man Booker Prize, with a different panel of judges each year, is famously unpredictable. Two books from India, Aravind Adiga’s White Tiger and Kiran Desai’s The Inheritance of Loss, have won the prize in recent years. Though neither captivated readers the way Arundhati Roy’s 1997 winner The God of Small Things did, the prize catapulted both authors into lasting fame.

Not every year’s winner is a crowd or a critic favourite – in fact, bafflingly this is almost never the case. This year’s longlist has been criticised for favouring “subprime output from famous names” and for neglecting stronger, lesser-known debuts like Yaa Gyasi’s Homegoing. And now the five judges have whittled it down to six books. The winner of this year’s Man Booker Prize will be announced on October 17 where the winner will take home a £50,000 (Rs 41 lakh) prize.

Who’s out?
Arundhati Roy’s second novel, released to disappointed criticism and defensive praise, is out of the running, and can cease to dominate the conversation. Another literary heavyweight to bow out is Kamila Shamsie whose Home Fire garnered largely favourable reviews (some of whom have even called it Shamsie’s best work yet).

Colson Whitehead’s highly inventive The Underground Railroad, which won the Pulitzer, the National Book Award and the Andrew Carnegie Medal for Excellence, will have to settle for a place on the longlist. Another winner of other major literary prizes, Mike McCormack’s single-sentence novel called Solar Bones, is out of the running along with Zadie Smith’s Swing Time and Sebastian Barry’s Days Without End. Before we say goodbye to the longlist, we’d recommend Home Fire and The Underground Railroad as books readers shouldn’t miss.

Who’s still in?
Emily Fridlund’s debut novel, History of Wolves, is set at the edge of a lake in the cold, frigid forests of Northern Minnesota. The novel follows the lonely fourteen-year-old daughter of cult members, who are the last of their kind, as she attempts to befriend new neighbours across the lake. When she begins to babysit their young son, she quickly comes to understand that they aren’t as happy or as ordinary as they first seemed. Some readers think Fridlund could have written a tighter plot, but for others the book was the atypical, aromantic coming-of-age book they had been waiting for.

George Saunders’ original, unnerving work, Lincoln in the Bardo, is everyone’s guess for this year’s winner. For twenty years, Saunders was haunted by a story his wife’s cousin told him – when Abraham Lincoln was US president, he lost his 11-year-old son, and entered his crypt on numerous occasions to hold his body. Saunders’ first full-length novel (and his eighth work of fiction) imagines a correspondence between Lincoln and his deceased son in a purgatory where other disquieted ghosts suspended between two worlds hover. The illicit communication between these ghosts, Lincoln and his son inspire a terrifying battle for the son’s soul.

The 2017 shortlist (l-r): Fiona Mozley, Mohsin Hamid, Ali Smith, George Saunders, Emily Fridlund and Paul Auster.
Pics courtesy: The Guardian

Mohsin Hamid’s Exit West imagines magical doors that refugees can supposedly step through to escape an unnamed Middle Eastern country in the throes of a violent upheaval. The novel follows a young Muslim couple who attempt a relationship at a time when everything, include their own selves, are rapidly changing. When they run out of time, they must step through a door without any assurance of what lies on the other side. In a time of refugee crises all over the world, Hamid taps into the anxieties and the hopeful delusions of the displaced.

Ali Smith’s Autumn is set against the post-Brexit violence of a country rethinking itself. The book is the first in a series of four seasonal state-of-the-nation novels. It’s set between the tender, nurturing friendship between a young girl and her elderly neighbour who introduces her to art and literature, and the ugly, divisive atmosphere in the wake of the anti-immigrant Brexit vote.

In the present day, the young girl has matured into an art history teacher in her 30s and her ageing neighbour is in a coma in a residential care facility where she visits him. Autumn weaves their dream-like relationship and philosophical exchanges with the bigotry and xenophobia on the streets.

Paul Auster is known for slim, tightly written works. However, his latest, 4321, is a bulky, almost-900-page meditation on the four possible ways one average man’s life could have gone during the American Civil War. This one is the most surprising inclusion on the shortlist – we thought we were done reading about average men. But if you love a book that won’t end or are a man wondering the other ways your life could have gone, this might be the book for you.

Fiona Mozley, who works in a York bookstore, wrote her disturbing debut, Elmet, on her phone. Set to be published in November, the highly-anticipated book is set in rural Yorkshire where a father of two young children builds a house with his own hands on isolated woodland he doesn’t own.

Not having read the unreleased Elmet, we’re cautiously betting our money on Saunders, but we secretly can’t wait for the creepy, Yorkshire book.

Man Booker prize 2017 longlist led by Arundhati Roy's return to fiction

Twenty years after her first novel took the same award, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness leads a field of 13, ranging from established stars to newcomers

Twenty years after Arundhati Roy won the Man Booker prize for her debut novel The God of Small Things, the Indian author has been longlisted for the £50,000 award for her second, The Ministry of Utmost Happiness.

On a longlist thronged with literary titans, whose combined trophy cabinet would include the Pulitzer, the Costa, the Baileys, the Folio, the Impac and the Goldsmiths prizes, Roy – the only author to have won the Booker before – is listed for her novel about an Indian transgender woman, which judges called a “rich and vital book”. Speaking about why it took her two decades to produce a second novel, Roy told the Guardian earlier this year that “fiction just takes its time. It’s no hurry. I can’t write it faster or slower than I have; it’s like you’re a sedimentary rock that’s just gathering all these layers, and swimming around.”

The Man Booker judging panel, picking from more than 150 titles, also went for four writers who have been shortlisted for the UK’s most prestigious literary prize before but not won it. Ali Smith was chosen for the “humane, zany, delightful, optimistic” post-EU referendum novel Autumn; Zadie Smith was picked for her story of the friendship and rivalry between two London girls who meet at a dance class, Swing Time; Sebastian Barry is in the running with Days Without End, about an Irish man who migrates to the US in the lead-up to the civil war; and Mohsin Hamid for Exit West, a love story set in a world where refugees use wormholes to travel from city to city.

The Booker was opened up to US authors in 2014, with Paul Beatty the first American author to win, for The Sellout last year. This year, three of the biggest names in US letters are competing for the prize: Paul Auster with 4321, which explores one man’s four simultaneous lives and was deemed “magisterial” by the judges; George Saunders, a short-story writer whose first novel Lincoln in the Bardo follows Abraham Lincoln’s visits to the graveyard where his 11-year-old son has been laid to rest in a crypt; and Colson Whitehead for his fantastical novel The Underground Railroad, about a female slave escaping from a Georgia cotton plantation, which has already won the Pulitzer and the National Book Award for fiction in the US.

“Obviously it has been very controversial, opening it up to the US,” said chair of judges Baroness Lola Young. “Before the Americans were included, I personally felt it did seem quite strange, to say it was for any book written in English from the UK, or the Commonwealth, and Ireland, and Zimbabwe – it was a slightly odd configuration. So [including America] seemed like a logical step and I don’t think readers, writers and publishers should feel too nervous.” This year, added Young, around a third of submissions were by American writers – slightly down on last year.

Saunders, Whitehead and Auster will be competing with two new names: 29-year-old Fiona Mozley, from the UK, and 38-year-old American Emily Fridlund, both picked for their debut novels, Elmet and History of Wolves respectively. They are joined by the Impac Dublin award-winning author Jon McGregor and his novel Reservoir 13, about the life of a Peak District village after a 13-year-old girl goes missing on holiday, and Kamila Shamsie’s Home Fire, a modern retelling of Sophocles’s tragedy Antigone that opens in an interrogation room in Heathrow airport.

International range … longlisted authors (from left) Arundhati Roy, Paul Auster and Zadie Smith

The longlist is completed with Irish writer Mike McCormack’s Solar Bones, a single-sentence novel that won him the Goldsmiths prize last year. First published in 2016 by tiny Irish publisher Tramp Press, McCormack’s novel was ineligible for last year’s Booker because Tramp is not based in the UK. After being picked up by Canongate, Solar Bones was made eligible for the award.

With a split of four UK, four US, two Irish, two UK-Pakistani and one Indian writer; seven men to six women; three debuts; and three novels from independent presses, chair of judges Baroness Lola Young insisted that only when the judges surveyed the 13 remaining contenders that they realised the diversity of their list.

“The longlist showcases a diverse spectrum – not only of voices and literary styles but of protagonists too, in their culture, age and gender. Nevertheless we found there was a spirit common to all these novels: though their subject matter might be turbulent, their power and range were life-affirming – a tonic for our times,” said Young. “Together their authors – both recognised and new – explore an array of literary forms and techniques, from those working in a traditional vein to those who aim to move the walls of fiction.”

With 144 novels submitted for the prize, and 10 books called in by the judges, the selection of Young and her fellow judges literary critic Lila Azam Zanganeh, author Sarah Hall, artist Tom Phillips and travel writer Colin Thubron overlooked new novels by names including former Booker winners Salman Rushdie and Roddy Doyle.

“It’s always a struggle [rejecting titles] because one is very aware of the energy and commitment it takes to produce something. You have to bear that in mind,” said Young. “Having said that, I wouldn’t say we found it incredibly difficult, in terms of having lots of arguments – there was a fair amount of consensus.”

Young and her fellow judges will now reread the longlist of 13 titles to come up with a shortlist of six, which will be announced on 13 September. The winner will be unveiled on 17 October, to join a roster of winners dating back to 1969, including Hilary Mantel, Iris Murdoch and Ian McEwan. Last year’s winner, The Sellout, has now sold more than 360,000 physical copies, with sales in the week after the prize announcement jumping by 658%.

The 2017 Man Booker prize longlist
4321 by Paul Auster (Faber & Faber)

Days Without End by Sebastian Barry (Faber & Faber)

History of Wolves by Emily Fridlund (Weidenfeld & Nicolson, Orion Books)

Exit West by Mohsin Hamid (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House)

Solar Bones by Mike McCormack (Canongate)

Reservoir 13 by Jon McGregor (4th Estate, HarperCollins)

Elmet by Fiona Mozley (JM Originals, John Murray)

The Ministry of Utmost Happiness by Arundhati Roy (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House)

Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders (Bloomsbury)

Home Fire by Kamila Shamsie (Bloomsbury)

Autumn by Ali Smith (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House)

Swing Time by Zadie Smith (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House)

The Underground Railroad by Colson Whitehead (Fleet, Little, Brown)

(Source: The Guardian)