A selection of 13 “timely and timeless” books that “navigate what it means to belong, to be displaced and to return” have been longlisted for the 2024 Booker prize.
Two British authors, Sarah Perry and Samantha Harvey, feature on a line up that also includes the first Dutch and Native American writers to be longlisted for the prestigious award, which is given to a full-length novel written in English each year.
Chair of the judges Edmund de Waal noted that “the precarity of lives” is a theme that “runs through our longlist like quicksilver” – but also stressed that the selected titles are “not books ‘about issues’”. Instead, he said, they are “works of fiction that inhabit ideas by making us care deeply about people and their predicaments”.
Half of the longlisted authors have previously earned a Booker Prize nomination. Pulitzer Prize winner Richard Powers appears on the list for a third time with his latest work Playground, which grapples with weighty issues such as climate change and the threat of AI.
After featuring on the longlist for the first time in 2022 with the darkly comic The Trees, American author Percival Everett is recognised again for James, a response to Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn that reimagines the classic novel from the perspective of Huck’s friend Jim. Everett’s novel Erasure was recently adapted into the Oscar-nominated film American Fiction.
British-Libyan writer Hisham Matar is another past nominee who is celebrated this year for My Friends, a story of two Libyan students caught up in a violent demonstration, while Canadian-American writer Claire Messud is recognised on the 2024 list for her family epic This Strange Eventful History.
The panel, which also includes The Confessions of Frannie Langton author Sara Collins, The Guardian’s fiction editor Justine Jordan, musician and producer Nitin Sawhney and writer and professor Yiyun Li, selected three debut novels as part of their “Booker Dozen”.
Headshot by American author Rita Bullwinkel is a kinetic and propulsive account of an amateur girls’ boxing championship in the United States, taking readers into the minds of each competitor. Darkly comic thriller Wild Houses is the first novel from Irish writer Colin Barrett, who has previously earned acclaim for his short stories, including “Calm With Horses”, which was adapted into a film starring Barry Keoghan.
The third debut is The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, the first Dutch author to appear on the longlist. Her book, which takes place in a remote country house in the early Sixties, has already earned comparisons with Sarah Waters and Patricia Highsmith.
Tommy Orange becomes the first Native American writer to appear on the longlist with his novel Wandering Stars, a story that spans centuries as it charts the pain of displacement and the search for belonging. The Booker judges called it “a literary tour de force that demands attention”.
Gaby Wood, the chief executive of the Booker Prize Foundation, said that the judging panel “wished their longlist could have been twice as long”, after finding “joy, entertainment, emotion and solace” in many of the 156 books submitted by publishers.
A shortlist of six titles will be revealed on 16 September, before the winner is announced on 12 November at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London. The winner receives £50,000, while shortlisted authors each get £2,500, along with a specially bound edition of their book.
Booker success can also prompt a huge boost in sales for novelists. In the week after Prophet Song by Irish writer Paul Lynch was announced as last year’s winner, sales increased by 1500 per cent, and the book climbed to number three in the Sunday Times bestseller list.
Other recent Booker winners include Shehan Karunatilaka, Damon Galgut, Bernadine Evaristo and Margaret Atwood.
The Booker Prize 2024 longlist in full
Wild Houses by Colin Barrett (Jonathan Cape)
Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel (Daunt Originals)
James by Percival Everett (Mantle)
Orbital by Samantha Harvey (Jonathan Cape)
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner (Jonathan Cape)
My Friends by Hisham Matar (Viking)
This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud (Fleet)
Held by Anne Michaels (Bloomsbury)
Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange (Harvill Secker)
Enlightenment by Sarah Perry (Jonathan Cape)
Playground by Richard Powers (Hutchinson Heinemann)
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden (Viking)
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood (Sceptre)