The Booker Prize announced its longlist of 13 books today, featuring works of fiction that span centuries and narrow in on single moments in a boxing ring. The list includes three debut novels, six authors who have been on the Booker longlist before, and the first Native American author to be longlisted for the prize, which honors works written in English that were published in the U.K. and/or Ireland. “I think of the Booker as a prize that is a threshold, a place looking forward into the truly new with a glorious sense of the richness of literature behind it,” said Edmund de Waal, chair of the judging committee. “Thresholds are places of risk. The Booker knows this.” In addition to de Waal, the judges this year were novelists Sara Collins and Yiyun Li, Guardian fiction editor Justine Jordan, and musician and producer Nitin Sawhney.
Along with the multigenerational saga Wandering Stars, by Cheyenne and Arapaho writer Tommy Orange, the Booker longlist this year includes its first novel by a Dutch author: Yael van der Wouden’s debut The Safekeep, an unnerving story set in the Netherlands after World War II. The longlist also features authors from Canada, Ireland, and Australia. Six American authors were nominated, including Percival Everett for James, a retelling of Huckleberry Finn, and Rita Bullwinkel for her first book, Headshot, a bracing, bruising novel about a girls’ boxing tournament in Reno, Nevada.
The other debut novel on the list is Wild Houses, by Irish Canadian author Colin Barrett, which the judges describe as a “slow-burn study of character and fate that’s also an edge-of-your-seat thriller.” And several selections, including Hisham Matar’s My Friends and Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History, tackle themes of exile and displacement; Matar and Messud were on the longlist together once before, in 2006. The shortlist will be announced on September 16.
