From a longlist of 13 books, six novels made it to the 2022 Booker Prize shortlist. And it includes the shortest book and oldest author ever to be nominated, besides “writers from five countries and a wealth of fabulous fiction”, as the Booker website states. The winner will be announced on October 17, at the Roundhouse in London. Meet the contenders:
NoViolet Bulawayo
Glory
At the centre of this political tale — inspired by the events of Zimbabwe’s November 2017 coup — is a goat, Destiny, who bears witness to the ensuing revolution. According to The New York Times, it is “a satire with sharper teeth, angrier, and also very, very funny”. Bulawayo, a two-time Booker nominee, has shared how the book, which began as a work of non-fiction, is influenced by African folklore and George Orwell’s Animal Farm.
Shehan Karunatilaka
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida
Set in 1990 Sri Lanka, Maali Almeida, a closeted gay man and a war photographer, wakes up dead. Now, he has seven moons to contact the people he loves and lead them to a stash of photos that will rock the country. “It was what I remember as the worst time in Sri Lankan history. A civil war, a Marxist revolt, an Indian army, state counter terror squads,” Karunatilaka recently told the Magazine. “I thought a ghost story would be an interesting way of making sense of this trauma.”
Claire Keegan
Small Things Like These
The novel — the shortest book (116 pages) ever on a Booker shortlist — follows Irish coal merchant Bill Furlong as he confronts the complicit silences of a town controlled by the church. While some say the novella can be read as a feminist revision of Charles Dickens’ A Christmas Carol, Keegan told The Guardian that, with its backdrop of clerical abuse, it “may have something to say about... how 20th-century Ireland and our brand of Catholicism did not favour the brave”.
Alan Garner
Treacle Walker
Garner is the oldest author, at 87, to be shortlisted for the prize. In his Booker interview, he revealed how he got the germ of the story from a physicist friend who, as a child, met a tramp named Treacle — “who claimed to cure ‘everything but jealousy’”. Another short novel (150 pages), it blends myth and folklore as it follows a young boy, Joe Coppock, after he meets a rag-and-bone man and is given a cup and a stone inscribed with the picture of a horse: trinkets that have powers to take him on a journey.
Percival Everett
The Trees
Everett revealed in his Booker interview that the novel took both “more than a year” to write and “63 years”. It is telling. The sexagenarian recalls coming across a Ku Klux Klan checkpoint when he was 11, and his father driving through it with a pistol in his lap. These experiences inform the book, which deals with racism and gun violence in the U.S., and harks back to the lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till in 1955. The Guardian calls it a “powerful wake-up call, as well as an act of literary restitution”.
Elizabeth Strout
Oh William!
Strout decided to write Oh William! in 2020, while backstage at Laura Linney’s one-woman show of her book, My Name is Lucy Barton. Linney speculated on William having an affair and Strout decided Lucy’s husband needed his own book. Interspersed with diary entry-style writing, the author paints a subtle portrait of the couple’s partnership. But as much as it is a story about relationships, it is also a commentary on the American class system.
*Updated to include 2022 Booker prize winner Shehan Karunatilaka’s quote.
