No debuts appear on this year’s Booker prize shortlist, which is dominated by established authors including previous winner Kiran Desai and previously shortlisted writers David Szalay and Andrew Miller.
Ben Markovits, Susan Choi and Katie Kitamura are also on the list, which was announced at an event at the Southbank Centre in central London on Tuesday evening.
This year’s judging panel includes the actor Sarah Jessica Parker, who runs publishing imprint SJP Lit, and is chaired by Irish author Roddy Doyle, who won the Booker in 1993.
Desai – who was awarded the prize in 2006 for The Inheritance of Loss – is shortlisted for the first book she has written since that win, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, a story of love and family set between India and the US. At nearly 700 pages, the Indian author’s third novel is the longest on the shortlist.
Hungarian-British writer Szalay, who was previously shortlisted in 2016, made this year’s list for Flesh, which follows protagonist István from his teens to midlife, and from Hungary to London. Szalay “has written a novel about the Big Question: about the numbing strangeness of being alive; about what, if anything, it means to amble through time in a machine made of meat”, wrote Keiran Goddard in a Guardian review.
British writer Miller, who was also shortlisted in 2001, is chosen this year for his tenth novel, The Land in Winter, about two young couples living in the West Country during the Big Freeze of 1962-63.
“All of the books, in six different and very fresh ways, find their stories in the examination of the individual trying to live with – to love, to seek attention from, to cope with, to understand, to keep at bay, to tolerate, to escape from – other people,” said Doyle. “In other words, they are all brilliantly written and they are all brilliantly human.”
Half the shortlist comprises American authors (Markovits, Choi and Kitamura). Asked about the dominance of American writers on the list, judge and writer Chris Power said that “there are books I would be very sorry not to have encountered when you’re judging a prize for the best novel written in English this year”, were the award not open to Americans. “I think we have to acknowledge that [English is] a global language, and this is a global prize.”
When the prize was first awarded in 1969, it was open to Commonwealth writers, but from 2014 onward, writers of any nationality could be entered.
Four of the six titles are published by Penguin: Flesh, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny, Audition and Choi’s Flashlight. Doyle said this was not an “indication in any way that independents aren’t publishing good fiction”.
Kitamura was shortlisted for Audition, described as a “literary performance of true uncanniness” in a Guardian review by Sam Byers. This is a “novel of mirrored halves”: in the first, a young man tells the narrator she is his mother, which she “makes clear is impossible”; in the second half, he is her son, or, at least, is “willingly performing that role”. At under 200 pages, Audition is the slimmest book on this year’s shortlist.
Choi’s Flashlight, which began life as a short story, is about the disappearance of a Korean émigré, and moves between postwar Japan, suburban America and North Korea.
Completing the shortlist is Markovits’s The Rest of Our Lives. Narrator Tom Layward, a 55-year-old law professor, drops his daughter off at university but doesn’t head back home to his wife in New York, instead driving west.
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Joining Doyle, Parker and Power on this year’s judging panel are the novelists Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀ and Kiley Reid.
The judges selected their longlist and shortlist from 153 books submitted to the prize this year. The meeting to decide the shortlist lasted “about four hours”, said Doyle.
Seven titles from the “Booker dozen” longlist did not make the shortlist: Love Forms by Claire Adam, The South by Tash Aw, Universality by Natasha Brown, One Boat by Jonathan Buckley, Endling by Maria Reva, Seascraper by Benjamin Wood and Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga.
Parker described the shortlisting process as “real agony”, adding that there is “nothing casual about letting a book go”.
The winner of the Booker prize will be announced on 10 November, and receive £50,000. Last year’s winner was Orbital by Samantha Harvey. Other recent winners include Paul Lynch, Shehan Karunatilaka, Damon Galgut and Douglas Stuart.