Booker Prize 2024: An odd and unexpected list of finalists revealed

Five of the six Booker Prize finalists are by women and all the books are short. Photo / 123RF

By Jeremy Rees of RNZ

Some expected favourites have not made the cut, five of the six novels are by women and all the books are short.

James, the retelling of the story of Huckleberry Finn from the point of view of Jim the slave, and a spy novel about eco-anarchists are probably the frontrunners for the Booker Prize after the judges announced an unusual and surprising shortlist.

For the first time in its 55 years, the award has five of its six shortlisted books written by women. It is now five years since a female novelist won the Booker despite one of the judges, Sara Collins, saying much publishing is dominated by women.

The shortlist, announced on Tuesday morning, could also be one of the most entertaining for some years.

The judges - chaired by Edmund de Waal, probably best known for his memoir The Hare with Amber Eyes - put together a longlist of 13 novels made up of some of the heavyweight books of 2024, and a mix of less recognised books often concerned with huge themes. For the shortlist, out went many of the heavyweights.

Gone were My Friends by Hisham Matar, winner of the Orwell prize for political fiction, Wandering Stars by Tommy Orange, the Native American Pulitzer Prize-nominated writer, This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud and Enlightenment by Sarah Perry, author of much-acclaimed The Essex Serpent.

In their place was a shortlist that was probably more interesting.

One of the oddities of the Booker literary prize is that it does attract betting. Even before the shortlist was announced, one brave early bookie was offering odds with James by Percival Everett the favourite by a mile. The odds have since disappeared as bookmakers, critics and readers digest the new mix.

Everett probably remains the favourite. He has been nominated before, in 2022 for The Trees; his novel Telephone was a finalist for a Pulitzer Prize. After a long career writing, he is having his moment. His novel Erasure was made into a film, American Fiction, and his funny novel Dr No about a mathematician meeting a Bond villain picked up awards and nominations. At the same time, Booker juries have been partial to stories with important themes, and race is at the heart of Everett’s novel.

But recently critics have been putting a lot of weight behind Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake, a kind of modern noir spy thriller. A 34-year-old secret agent infiltrates a commune of eco-anarchists in France to disrupt their activities and then is disrupted herself. It’s fun and cool. Kushner, too, is a previous Booker finalist (for The Mars Room) and like Everett is both upending novel genres and dealing in modern issues, with humour.

Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song was the winner of last year's Booker Prize. Photo / Getty Images

It’s possible Kushner and Everett will be like the “two Pauls” of the 2023 prize, with fans often split between Paul Murray’s The Bee Sting and the eventual winner, Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song.

If there is a third likely contender, it is probably the Canadian poet Anne Michaels. She is back on the shortlist for the dreamlike and poetic Held. Michaels won the Orange Prize for Fiction 27 years ago for Fugitive Pieces, which the BBC named as one of its 100 novels that shaped our world.

Among the other nominees is Samantha Harvey, whose Orbital is a tiny, beautiful novel of 24 hours on a space station as the astronauts watch 16 sunrises and sunsets and fall in love - again and again - with our planet.

Australia is represented by Charlotte Wood for Stone Yard Devotional, about a woman checking into a monastery in the Outback as the world faces a climate catastrophe. The judges said contemporary issues like climate change and Covid-19 can sometimes feel stale in fiction, but not here.

Yael van der Wouden is the first Dutch author to be shortlisted for the Booker - and her debut The Safekeep follows a lonely young woman whose life is overturned by an unlikely romance set in a Netherlands still grappling with Nazi-era atrocities.

While it is easy to dismiss literary prizes as an odd way to compare novels, there is no doubt millions of readers use the Booker as a signpost regarding what is worth reading among a deluge of books each year. It is open to novels from any country, as long as they are published in the UK and Ireland. Recently the prize has been more international, with winners from the UK, Ireland, South Africa, Sri Lanka and the US.

And it can do wonders for a novelist. The winner gets a £50,000 ($106,000) award and a huge jump in sales. Bernadine Everaristo (Girl, Woman, Other) doubled her lifetime sales in one week after sharing the 2019 prize with Margaret Atwood. Last year’s winner Prophet Song by Paul Lynch saw a 1500% increase in sales the week after it won.

The winner will be announced in London on November 12.

It is hard, as you would expect, to find common threads among the six books - though there is one characteristic which could make 2024 more accessible to busy readers. They are all fairly short. It is probably the shortest of shortlists. There is nothing like last year’s rollicking, entertaining but huge The Bee Sting.

Panel chair de Waal tried to find common ground by saying of the novels: “The fault lines of our times are here,” though he also said they are not “books about issues”.

But perhaps more pertinently, he went on to say at the launch of the shortlist “they are books that made us want to keep on reading, to ring up friends and tell them about them.”.

And that may well be the best recommendation for a Booker shortlist.