The 2024 ‘Booker Dozen’
Wild Houses, Colin Barrett
The debut novel from one of the best Irish short story-writers of recent years is the tale of a hapless teenager in small-town Ireland taken hostage over a drug debt. It’s a crime caper with plentiful violence but also, as Catherine Lough noted in her Telegraph review, “a palpable sense of human eccentricity, and endurance”.
Headshot, Rita Bullwinkel
The second longlisting in a row for a book about girls’ sport, following Chetna Maroo’s squash novel Western Lane last year. This debut by the editor of the US literary magazine McSweeney’s Quarterly depicts the physical and mental combats that occur during a two-day boxing tournament for teenage girls in Nevada.
James, Percival Everett
Everett’s 24th novel retells the story of Jim, the runaway slave from Mark Twain’s Huckleberry Finn, and finds depths in his character that passed both Huck and Twain by. “Much as in Twain’s original work, Everett mixes the sweet with the bitter and horror with hilarity,” enthused the Telegraph’s critic Jessa Crispin.
Orbital, Samantha Harvey
The shortest book on this year’s longlist covers the most ground, transporting us to the International Space Station, where six astronauts find that distance lends them a new perspective on their lives. The Telegraph’s Lucy Scholes acclaimed Harvey’s fifth novel for its “beautiful and soulful vision”.
Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner
Due to be published in September, the fourth novel from the darling of the American critics features a freelance spy who infiltrates a commune of eco-activists in France. Anybody familiar with Kushner’s dense, ruminative fiction won’t be expecting a conventional take on the traditional espionage yarn.
My Friends, Hisham Matar
Fierce anger expressed with delicacy and restraint is a characteristic of Matar’s work, from his memoir The Return, about his Libyan father’s abduction by Gadaffi’s forces, to this, his third novel. The story of three Libyan dissidents exiled in Britain, it has already won this year’s Orwell Prize for political fiction.