Three authors writing about love and loss have made the Booker Prize shortlist for the first time, among the six chosen as contenders for this year’s prestigious award.
The works explore “the ties that bind families together — and the moments of crisis that can pull them apart,” the prize organisers said late Tuesday.
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The shortlist features “both classical storytelling and novels that push the boundaries of narrative form”, they added.
“They are all brilliantly written and they are all brilliantly human,” said the chair of the jury, Irish writer Roddy Doyle, who won the prize in 1993 with “Paddy Clarke Ha Ha Ha”.
Three women and three men are in the running for the title, chosen out of a longlist of 13 authors, which had already been whittled down from 153 entries.
Among them is American writer Susan Choi who makes her debut on the shortlist with “Flashlight”, which follows 10-year old Louisa and her family in the aftermath of her father’s disappearance.
Other newcomers to the list are American journalist and art critic Katie Kitamura with her book “Audition”, about an actress whose life is turned upside down after she meets a troubling man for lunch.
“The Rest Of Our Lives” by first-time shortlisted author Ben Markovits tackles the issues around older people and the challenges of long-term marriage.
Indian writer Kiran Desai, a previous Booker Prize winner, spent two decades writing her epic “The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny”, which at 700 pages is the longest entry on the shortlist.
It is described as “a spellbinding story of two young people whose fates intersect and diverge across continents and years”.
Desai won the 2006 Booker Prize with her last novel “The Inheritance of Loss”.
British-Hungarian author David Szalay’s “Flesh”, about a Hungarian man’s rise from teenage criminality to high society, and British writer Andrew Miller’s “The Land in Winter”, about two couples whose lives intersect, complete the shortlist. Both authors are previous Booker nominees.
One of the judges, US actress Sarah Jessica Parker, said it had been a “real agony” to pare the list down to just six.
The Booker is open to works of fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK or Ireland between October 1, 2024 and September 30, 2025.
The prize ceremony will take place on November 10. Each of the shortlisted authors will receive £2,500, and the winner will get £50,000.
Last year’s winner was Samantha Harvey with her outer space-inspired “Orbital”, which at 136 pages was the second-shortest book ever to win the prize.
Other previous winners include Salman Rushdie, Margaret Atwood and Arundhati Roy.
AFP