The longlist for the Booker Prize 2024 is announced!
The 'timely and timeless’ longlist features three debut novels alongside international bestselling authors and six writers previously nominated for the prize
The 2024 longlist for the Booker Prize – the world’s most influential prize for a single work of fiction – is announced.
The longlist of 13 books – the ‘Booker Dozen’ – has been chosen by the 2024 judging panel and features blackly comic page-turners, multigenerational epics, meditations on the pain of exile – plus a crime caper, a spy thriller, an unflinching account of girls’ boxing and a reimagining of a 19th-century classic.
The titles that make up this year’s longlist are as follows:
Edmund de Waal, Chair of the 2024 judges, says:
‘After seven months and 156 novels it is a great moment to be able to hand over this glorious longlist of urgent, resonant books for the Booker Prize 2024: a cohort of global voices, strong voices and new voices.
‘One of the true markers of the novels that we have chosen is that we feel they are necessary books, fiction that has made a space in our hearts and that we want to see find a place in the reading lives of many others. To reach the end of a novel and to be deeply moved and be unable to work out quite how that has happened is a great gift.
‘This is timely and timeless fiction, in which there is much at stake. Here are books that unfold with quietness and stealth, as well as books that are incendiary. There are books that navigate what it means to belong, to be displaced and to return. Crossing borders and crossing generations we find ourselves in a boxing ring in the US, in a small Irish town, in a convent in Australia, deep underground in rural France. We have one book on the list exploring deep oceans, another navigating outer space, a third tracking a comet. These are not books “about issues”: they are works of fiction that inhabit ideas by making us care deeply about people and their predicaments, their singularity in a world that can be indifferent or hostile. The precarity of lives runs through our longlist like quicksilver.
‘But there is no single register here. We need fiction to do different things – to renew us, give solace, to take us away from ourselves and give us back to ourselves in an expanded and reconnected way. And, of course, to entertain us.
‘We think our longlist does all of this and we hope you agree.’
What our judges said about each book on the longlist
The panel is chaired by artist and author Edmund de Waal, who is joined by award-winning novelist Sara Collins; Fiction Editor of the Guardian, Justine Jordan; world-renowned writer and professor Yiyun Li; and musician, composer and producer Nitin Sawhney.
Their selection was made from 156 books published between 1 October 2023 and 30 September 2024. The Booker Prize is open to works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland. Read on to hear what they had to say about each title on the longlist.
Wild Houses by Colin Barrett
‘With two collections behind him, Barrett is well established as a master both of the short story and the sentence; his debut novel confirms and extends all his promise. Wild Houses is a propulsive, darkly comic and superlatively written account of frustration and misadventure in a small Irish town. Nicky is a self-reliant 17-year-old whose dreams of escape are slowly coming into focus when her hapless boyfriend Doll gets taken hostage by local goons over a drug debt; misfit Dev is reluctantly embroiled. The connections between the cast and the past tragedies that have forged them are expertly revealed in a slow-burn study of character and fate that’s also an edge-of-your-seat thriller. Violence and farce mingle in a novel that feels as sharp, funny and bitingly bittersweet as life.’
Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel
‘A gripping and gutsy depiction of a young women’s boxing tournament in Nevada. In a compelling series of interconnected snapshots, Bullwinkel weaves a tapestry around several diverse, steely characters, each with their own unique backstories, motivations and perspectives. With great flair and candid detail, the author elevates the gritty physical realities of sport to a profound examination of identity, destiny and family dynamics, and of the transitory yet intense significance of human experience, lending the book a depth far beyond most sports fiction. An unflinching debut.’
James by Percival Everett
‘A masterful, revisionist work that immerses the reader in the brutality of slavery, juxtaposed with a movingly persistent humanity. Through lyrical, richly textured prose, Everett crafts a captivating response to Mark Twain’s classic, Huckleberry Finn, that is both a bold exploration of a dark chapter in history and a testament to the resilience of the human spirit. With its virtuosic command of language and moral urgency, James stands as a towering achievement that confronts the past while holding out hope for a progressive future, cementing Everett's deserved reputation as a literary sensation.’
Orbital by Samantha Harvey
‘Samantha Harvey’s compact yet beautifully expansive novel invites us to observe Earth’s splendour from the drifting perspective of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station as they navigate bereavement, loneliness and mission fatigue. Moving from the claustrophobia of their cabins to the infinitude of space, from their wide-ranging memories to their careful attention to their tasks, from searching metaphysical inquiry to the spectacle of the natural world, Orbital offers us a love letter to our planet as well as a deeply moving acknowledgement of the individual and collective value of every human life.’
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
‘Sadie Smith – not her real name – is an FBI agent turned spy-for-hire, whose latest mission is to infiltrate a commune of eco-activists in rural France. She’s an extraordinary creation: sharp-minded, iron-willed, accustomed to moving fast and breaking things. As she investigates the group, she hacks into emails from their guru, a shadowy eccentric who has withdrawn from modernity into the ancient caves that dot the landscape; he has some beguiling ideas about the role of Neanderthals through history. What’s so electrifying about this novel is the way it knits contemporary politics and power with a deep counter-history of human civilisation. We found the prose thrilling, the ideas exciting, the book as a whole a profound and irresistible page-turner.’
My Friends by Hisham Matar
‘Two young Libyan students meet at university in Edinburgh and make a decision to join the protests outside the Libyan embassy in London. Both are wounded when they are fired on. This powerful story of exile charts the aftermath of this moment as the friends navigate a world where they cannot rest, where both the idea and the reality of homeland is contingent and dangerous. My Friends is both a complex and unsentimental meditation on what friendship means and a searingly moving exploration of how exile impacts those who are forced to live in this state of loss. It is a book that we loved for its spareness of language and its deeply affecting storytelling.’
This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud
‘The novel opens in June 1940 when Paris falls to the Germans, a moment that, like many important historical events, casts a centrifugal force on people's lives. The compelling narrative follows three generations of a Franco-Algerian family in their migrations around the world, from Algeria to the US, Cuba, Canada, Argentina, Australia, and France. Epic in its scale, while intimately rooted in each character’s internal landscape, the novel reminds us how literature can be expansive and timeless.’
Held by Anne Michaels
‘The first few pages of this brief kaleidoscopic novel from the author of Fugitive Pieces may seem forbidding, yet every member of the judging panel was transported by this book. Michaels, a poet, is utterly uncompromising in her vision and execution. She is writing about war, trauma, science, faith and above all love and human connection; her canvas is a century of busy history, but she connects the fragments of her story through theme and image rather than character and chronology, intense moments surrounded by great gaps of space and time. Appropriately for a novel about consciousness, it seems to alter and expand your state of mind. Reading it is a unique experience.’
Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange
‘This powerful epic entwines the stories of a diverse cast of characters, each grappling with the weight of history, identity and trauma. Through well-crafted prose and deftly drawn perspectives, Tommy Orange paints a vivid portrait of the Native American experience – both the pain of displacement and the resilience of those who continue ancestral traditions. Spanning centuries, the novel explores universal themes of family, addiction and the search for belonging in a society that often fails to recognise the value of its Indigenous people. Wandering Stars is a stunning achievement, a literary tour de force that demands attention.’
Enlightenment by Sarah Perry
‘There are some novels which set out to take time, that have a certain confidence in their pacing. Enlightenment does this splendidly. This long and quiet book brings together a compression of place – a small town in 1990s Essex – and an exhilarating exploration of the heavens, comets, faith, ghosts, love. The novel takes its main characters – a middle-aged novelist and reporter for a local paper and the 17-year-old daughter of the local pastor – and weaves a novel of great ambition. This is a book of deep pleasures, full of passion for the life of ideas, richly and satisfyingly written.’
Playground by Richard Powers
‘Economic motives quarrel with environmental ones and artificial intelligence poses threats as well as promises as the residents of a Polynesian island prepare to vote on a proposed seasteading project led by an unidentified American billionaire. This is a characterful, capacious and engaging novel, distilling subjects as diverse as oceanography, climate change, the legacies of colonialism and the arc of a lifelong friendship into an exhilaratingly entangled narrative in which Powers’ unparalleled gifts for revealing the magic and mystery of the natural world are on full display.’
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
‘Set in the early 1960s in the Netherlands in an isolated house, The Safekeep draws us into a world as carefully calibrated as a Dutch still-life. Every piece of crockery or silverware is accounted for here. Isa is the protagonist – a withdrawn figure who is safeguarding this inheritance. When her brother brings his new girlfriend Eva into this household the energy field changes as we sense boundaries of possession being crossed, other histories coming into the light. We loved this debut novel for its remarkable inhabitation of obsession. It navigates an emotional landscape of loss and return in an unforgettable way.’
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood
‘Sometimes a visitor becomes a resident, and a temporary retreat becomes permanent. This happens to the narrator in Stone Yard Devotional – a woman with seemingly solid connections to the world who changes her life and settles into a monastery in rural Australia. Yet no shelter is impermeable. The past, in the form of the returning bones of an old acquaintance, comes knocking at her door; the present, in the forms of a global pandemic and a local plague of mice and rats, demands her attention. The novel thrilled and chilled the judges – it’s a book we can’t wait to put into the hands of readers.’
Which books on the Booker Prize 2024 longlist have you read, or will you add to your TBR pile? We’d love to hear your thoughts in the comments below…
So delighted to see Wild Houses on this list. I am an Irish reader and really admire Colin's work. I have Messud Orange and Everett on my bookshelf ready to be read. Need to explore some of the female writers on the long list too as their books sound intriguing.
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