Colin Barrett is the only Irish author on this year’s Booker Prize longlist, which was announced today. An award-winning short story writer, his novel Wild Houses is one of three debuts on the 13-strong longlist for the prestigious £50,000 prize, which was awarded last year to Irish author Paul Lynch for Prophet Song.
The judges called Wild Houses “a propulsive, darkly comic and superlatively written account of frustration and misadventure in a small Irish town”.
The other debuts are Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel and The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden, the first Dutch author to be longlisted.
Among the more familiar names on the list are Percival Everett, the author of more than over 20 novels, who was shortlisted in 2022 for The Trees, and whose novel Erasure was made into the film American Fiction. His novel James is a reimagining of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Jim, the escaped slave.
Sarah Perry, longlisted for Enlightenment, had huge success with The Essex Serpent, which was adapted into a successful Apple TV+ series. Richard Powers has been longlisted for Playground – his 2018 Booker Prize-shortlisted The Overstory sold a million copies, while The Mars Room by Rachel Kushner, longlisted for Creation Lake, was Time magazine’s No 1 fiction title of 2018.
The longlist
- Wild Houses (Jonathan Cape) by Colin Barrett (Irish)
- Headshot (Daunt Originals) by Rita Bullwinkel (American)
- James (Mantle) by Percival Everett (American)
- Orbital (Jonathan Cape) by Samantha Harvey (British)
- Creation Lake (Jonathan Cape) by Rachel Kushner (American)
- My Friends (Viking) by Hisham Matar (British/Libyan)
- This Strange Eventful History (Fleet) by Claire Messud (Canadian/American)
- Held (Bloomsbury Publishing) by Anne Michaels (Canadian)
- Wandering Stars (Harvill Secker) by Tommy Orange (American)
- Enlightenment (Jonathan Cape) by Sarah Perry (British)
- Playground (Hutchinson Heinemann) by Richard Powers (American)
- The Safekeep (Viking) by Yael van der Wouden (Dutch)
- Stone Yard Devotional (Sceptre) by Charlotte Wood (Australian)
Artist and author Edmund de Waal chairs this year’s judges, with award-winning novelist Sara Collins; Justine Jordan, fiction editor of the Guardian; writer and professor Yiyun Li; and musician, composer and producer Nitin Sawhney.
De Waal said: “After seven months and 156 novels it is a great moment to be able to hand over this glorious longlist of urgent, resonant books: 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.”
Themes of exile, displacement, identity and belonging feature frequently. Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood follows a woman who leaves her life behind to take refuge in an isolated nunnery in New South Wales. Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange, the first Native American author to be nominated, considers the devastating long-term effects of his people’s dislocation and forced assimilation. Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History tells the story of three generations of a Franco-Algerian family in their migrations around the world. Hisham Matar’s My Friends follows two Libyan students caught up in a violent demonstration in London.
British-Libyan Matar and Canadian-American Messud were longlisted together in 2006 (for In the Country of Men and The Emperor’s Children respectively), with Matar progressing to the shortlist that year. Kushner and Powers appeared together on the 2018 shortlist, with The Mars Room and The Overstory. Powers had been longlisted four years earlier for Orfeo, and went on to be shortlisted again in 2021, for Bewilderment, while Samantha Harvey was longlisted in 2009 for The Wilderness.
Reviewing Wild Houses in The Irish Times, Kevin Power wrote: “for page after faultless page, Wild Houses is sheer joy to read. The characters live, Barrett’s fictional world and its textures absolutely persuade. He’s the real deal. But then, we knew that already.
“Colin Barrett’s first novel wears the outward dress of a crime caper, but it is not a satire; it is not even satire’s close cousin. It is, rather, a delicate and beautiful book about the lives of lonely people on the fringes of small-town gangsterdom.”
Barrett (42), was born in Canada but brought up near Ballina, Co Mayo, where much of his work is set. His debut short story collection, Young Skins (2013), won the Rooney Prize for Irish Literature, the Guardian First Book Award and the Frank O’Connor International Short Story Award. A second collection, Homesickness, was published in 2022. Calm With Horses, a novella published as part of Young Skins, was made into a film starring Barry Keoghan.
Four Irish authors were longlisted last year and one this year is a disappointing return. Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, Caoilinn Hughes’ The Alternatives, Kevin Barry’s The Heart in Winter, Niamh Mulvey’s The Amendments and Ferdia Lennon’s Glorious Exploits were all strong contenders.
The six-strong shortlist will be announced on September 16th. Shortlisted authors each receive £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book. The winner will be announced on November 12th at a ceremony in London. The winner receives £50,000 and a trophy, named Iris after Dublin-born Booker Prize winner Iris Murdoch.
Before its longlisting, last year’s winner, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, had sold 4,000 copies in hardback. Over 100,000 hardback copies have now been sold in the UK, more than 90,000 in North America and strong sales in Ireland, Australia and India.
What judges said about 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 acknowledgment 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.