Six novels out of a long list of 13 books made it to the shortlist for the 2022 Booker Prize. And it includes the shortest book and oldest to be nominated, in addition to “authors from five countries and a treasure trove of fantastic fiction”, as the Booker website states. The winner will be announced on 17 October at the Roundhouse in London. Meet the contenders:
novaelet bulawayo
splendor
At the center of this political story – inspired by the events of Zimbabwe’s November 2017 coup – is a goat, Destiny, who witnesses the impending revolution. According to new York Times, it’s “sharp-toothed satire, grumpy, and very, very funny”. Two-time Booker nominee Bulawayo shares how the book, which began as a work of non-fiction, is influenced by African folklore and George Orwell Animal Farm.
Claire Keegan
little things like this
The novel – the shortest book ever on the Booker Shortlist (116 pages) – follows Irish coal merchant Bill Furlong as he confronts the collusive silence of a town controlled by the Church. While some say that the novel can be read as a feminist revision of Charles Dickens. Christmas Carol, Keegan told Guardian That, with its background of clerical abuse, it “may have something to say about … how our brand of 20th-century Ireland and Catholicism did not favor the brave”.
alan garner
trek walker
At 87, Garner is the oldest writer to be selected for the award. In his Booker interview, he revealed how he got the germ of the story from a physicist friend who, as a child, had met a vagabond named Treckle – “who claimed to cure everything except ‘jealousy'”. . Another short novel (150 pages), it blends myth and folklore as it follows a young boy, Joe Coppock, when he meets a rag-and-bone man and is given a cup and a horse. A stone is given with a picture of: the trinket that has the power to take him on a journey.
Sheehan Karunatilak
Mali Almeida’s Seven Moons
1990 Established in Sri Lanka, Mali Almeida, a closed gay man and a war photographer, woke up dead. Now, he has seven moons to approach the people he loves and lead them to a pile of photos that will rock the nation. “It was what I remember as the worst time in Sri Lankan history. A civil war, a Marxist insurgency, an Indian army, state anti-terrorist squads,” Karunatilaka said recently magazine, “I thought the ghost story would be an interesting way of understanding this trauma.”
Percival Everett
tree
Everett revealed in his Booker interview that it took both “more than a year” and “63 years” to write the novel. It is telling. He came to a Ku Klux Klan checkpoint when he was 11, and his father was driving with a pistol in his lap. These experiences inform the book, which deals with racism and gun violence in America, and points to the 1955 lynching of 14-year-old Emmett Till. Guardian Calls this a “powerful wake-up call, as well as an act of literary restoration”.
Elizabeth Stroud
Oh William!
Stroud decided to write Oh William! In 2020, during Laura Linney’s backstage at the one-woman show of her book, my name is lucy barton, Linney speculates that William is having an affair and Stroud decides that Lucy’s husband needs his book. With diary entry-style writing, the author paints a subtle picture of the couple’s partnership. But it is as much a story of relationships as it is a commentary on the American class system.
