My favorite was The Owl Service (I still have my copy), though I’m a little vague about the others. Fowler is nominated this year for her historical novel, Booth, apparently an unusual take on the story of Lincoln’s assassin, which is described at Goodreads as “an epic and intimate novel about the family behind one of the most infamous figures in American history.”Īs a child, I was a fan of the award-winning British children’s author, Alan Garner. Her masterpiece, We Are All Completely Beside Ourselves, was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2013 and and won the PEN/Faulkner Award in 2014 – a family novel, about a psychologist’s daughter who is raised with a chimp, Fern, whom she regards as her sister – and then Fern disappears. I enjoy the eclectic work of the American writer, Karen Joy Fowler, who has experimented with genre over the years, including science fiction/historical fiction ( Sarah Canary) and women’s fiction ( The Jane Austen Book Club). Lucy, his first wife, left him years ago, taking their two daughters, and seems to have set a precedent. Lucy pities her ex-husband, William, whose second wife has just left him, taking their daughter with her. Her latest novel, Oh William!, is a sequel. I loved My Name Is Lucy Barton, a piercingly lyrical novel about a complicated mother-daughter relationship, and Lucy’s escape to New York, where she reinvents herself as a writer.

I have read one novel on the longlist, Oh William!, by the American Pulitzer Prize winner, Elizabeth Strout, who writes so gracefully she is like a prose ballerina. The inclusion of so many Americans is disappointing to us Anglophiles, because we use the list to learn about British and (formerly)”Colonial” literature. I read a review in the Chicago Tribune, and when I found the book at a local store, it came with a Booker Prize sticker.īut you want to know about this year’s longlist! There are many fascinating titles, but the list is heavily weighted by Americans: six Americans, three Britons, two Irish, one from Zimbabwe, and one Sri Lankan. I became obsessed with it when I discovered Ruth Prawer Jhabvala’s Booker-winning novel, Heat and Dust. The 2022 Booker longlist was announced today.

(That said, I have best luck with the longlisted books for the Women’s Prize.)

It is more alluring than the didactic International Booker, whose motto seems to be “LITERATURE IN TRANSLATION IS UNDER-READ,” (but is it?) or the more relaxed, where-are-all- the-women Women’s Prize, formerly known as the Orange Prize. The annual Booker Prize longlist is a “holiday” read: there is a glamour about this prize.

The booker prize 2022