Your weekend reading recommendations 📚

Fictional dads, ranked from worst to best for Father's Day; novels that explore toxic relationships; and the surprising books that publishers rejected, before they were nominated for the Booker Prize

The Booker Prize-nominated books that were rejected by publishers

The Booker Prize is the ultimate accolade for English language fiction and winning it is a story of unalloyed success for any author and their book. Isn’t it?

In fact, what has become clear in recent years is that the path to winning the Booker Prize is often far from a smooth one, and a win can come at the end of a long and bumpy road of rejection and frustration.

The bumpiest of all might have been the road travelled by Douglas Stuart’s debut novel Shuggie Bain, which won the Booker Prize in 2020. Following its win, it was revealed that the book had been rejected more than 40 times before being accepted for publication.

Read more as John Self explores some of the most famous Booker-nominated titles that were initially turned down by publishers, and speaks to editors, authors and agents about why those books struggled to secure a publishing deal.

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The most memorable fictional fathers from the Booker Library

The Booker Library has seen plenty of good and bad dads in recent years. George Saunders’s 2017 winner Lincoln in the Bardo featured Abraham Lincoln visiting the grave of his son, and finding new strength there to take control of the American Civil War. Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting, shortlisted in 2023, featured an Irish family with father Dickie Barnes at its centre, whose behaviour and past betrayals of himself lead everyone around him into danger.

Further back in Booker Prize history, Marina Warner’s The Lost Father, shortlisted in 1988, shows that even an absent father – in Warner’s novel the family patriarch died young – can shape the lives of those left behind.

For Father’s Day, we’ve put together a selection of some of the most striking fathers in the Booker Library – the good, the bad and the truly monstrous – and ranked them from worst to best. 

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Nine Booker Prize-nominated novels that explore toxic relationships

This year’s International Booker Prize winner, Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann, presents the intimate and devastating story of an age-gap affair in terminal decline. ‘How can something that seems right in the beginning, turn into something wrong?’ Erpenbeck said in a recent interview with the Booker Prizes website, revealing her inspiration behind the novel – it was this ‘transition’ that interested her.

Deeply flawed relationships have captivated many authors within the Booker Prizes’ canon. So, to celebrate Kairos’s win, we have rummaged through the shelves to find other books that grapple with toxic bonds just as unflinchingly as the 2024 International Booker Prize winner.

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Which books are on your TBR pile this weekend? Let us know in the comments below…