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The Booker Prize shortlist for 2023 has been announced, and contains a few surprises.
The list is male-dominated for the first time in eight years — there are more authors named Paul than there are female authors — and features just one English author among Canadian, American and Irish writers.
The awarded authors are Sarah Bernstein (Study for Obedience), Jonathan Escoffery (If I Survive You), Paul Harding (This Other Eden), Paul Lynch (Prophet Song), Chetna Maroo (Western Lane) and Paul Murray (The Bee Sting).
The six writers were selected from the Booker dozen, 13 works of fiction published in the UK and Ireland between October 1 2022 and September 30 2023.
This year's judging panel is chaired by novelist Esi Edugyan and includes actor, writer and director Adjoa Andoh; poet, lecturer, editor and critic Mary Jean Chan; professor of English and comparative literature at Columbia University and Shakespeare specialist James Shapiro; and actor and writer Robert Webb.
In the shortlist announcement, Edugyan described the novels as "vibrant, nervy, electric".
"Together these works showcase the breadth of what world literature can do, while gesturing at the unease of our moment," she said.
"All are fuelled by a kind of relentless truth-telling, even when that honesty forces us to confront dark acts.
"And yet however long we may pause in the shadows, humour, decency, and grace are never far from hand."
While none of the authors had previously been shortlisted for the Booker Prize, they are not without substantial literary accolades.
Harding won the 2010 Pulitzer Prize for Fiction for his first novel, Tinkers, while Lynch's awards include the 2022 Gens de Mer Prize and the 2020 Ireland Francophonie Ambassadors' Literary Award.
Bernstein was named in Granta's Best of Young British Novelists; Murray's previous novel, Skippy Dies, was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2010; and both Maroo and Escoffery have received the Paris Review's Plimpton Prize for Fiction.
The Booker Prize winner, who will be announced on November 26, will receive £50,000 ($AU 96,000) and a trophy designed by the late Jan Pieńkowski — named Iris in honour of the 1978 Booker winner Iris Murdoch.
The recipient can also expect a substantial increase in global book sales, known as the Booker bounce.
Last year's prize went to Sri Lankan author Shehan Karunatilaka for his surreal satirical novel, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida.
So here's what to add to your reading list.
Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein
Bernstein's second novel centres around a young woman who moves to a remote country, where her ancestors were once persecuted, to work as a housekeeper for her brother.
Loading...After a series of disturbing events occur in the town, she feels hostility from locals, with the threat of imminent violence.
Both place and character are unnamed and evoke the trauma of the Holocaust through prose the judges call "urgent [and] crystalline".
"I was trying to think through what it might look like if certain (usually feminised) characteristics associated with passivity could take on a kind of power, especially over the people reinforcing those sorts of gendered norms," Bernstein said to The Booker Prize Foundation.
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray
Murray's hefty tragicomic saga is the heavyweight of the list, clocking in at over 600 pages, and follows a privileged Irish family through financial and existential turmoil.
Heavy in irony and pathos, the sprawling story covers everything from teenage angst to fatherhood, grief and poverty, and was inspired by Irish folklore and allegory.
Murray said he wanted to imbue the novel with a "sense of impending doom" as it relates to climate change.
"We really need to find a new way of being to get through it and we haven't found a way yet of doing that," he said.
"In short, what I'm interested is in not so much the past coming back, but the ways it obscures the present and stops us from embracing the future."
Western Lane by Chetna Maroo
Described by the judges as a "deeply evocative debut", Western Lane is the shortest book on the list, at just 161 pages.
It follows young Gopi, a teenage girl with a passion for the game of squash.
After the death of her mother, her father pours his grief into his daughter's training, and Gopi's life becomes increasingly governed by the game: "the serve, the volley, the drive, the shot and its echo".
The story spans many genres — while Maroo has calls it a sports novel, she said: "it's also been called a coming-of-age novel, a domestic novel, a novel about grief, a novel about the immigrant experience".
Prophet Song by Paul Lynch
Seemingly set in contemporary Ireland, Lynch's fourth novel centres on a woman named Eilish Stack, stuck at home with three of her children while her husband, Larry, is working late.
Then comes a knock at the door — and nothing will be the same again.
Co-host of ABC RN's The Bookshelf Kate Evans said the book's strength lies in the contrast between familiar daily life and an increasingly dystopian threat.
"It becomes more and more claustrophobic, but also familiar and mediated with this woman as this central character, who's just trying to keep her household running, while trying to find out what's happened to her husband.
"It becomes more and more breathless and intense and emotional as the story goes on."
This Other Eden by Paul Harding
Inspired by historical events, This Other Eden tells the story of Apple Island, an enclave off the United States coasts where castaways have settled.
A century later, their descendants remain, eking out a living on scraps from the mainland, until suddenly, civilisation intrudes.
Pulitzer Prize-winning Harding said he mingled historical fact with fiction, drawing on influences like Noah's Ark, The Tempest and Moby Dick.
The Booker Prize judges said they were "moved by the delicate symphony of language, land and narrative that Harding brings to bear on the story of the islanders".
If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery
Comprising eight connected short stories, Escoffery's kaleidoscopic debut follows a Jamaican family striving for prosperity in Miami.
The main character, Trelawny, stares down financial ruin, racism and a train of bad luck with "the exquisite, racking compulsion to survive".
Escoffery said he wanted to examine "fraught relationships between fathers and sons".
"I'm interested in what models we have for being good men, and in what potentially damaging messages we send men about how to be in the world, and in how those messages get passed from one generation to the next."
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