The Booker Prize 2024 shortlist reveals ‘the fault lines of our times’

The Booker Prize is the world’s most significant award for the best sustained work of fiction written in English by authors from anywhere in the world and published in the UK and/or Ireland. The 2024 judging panel is chaired by artist and author Edmund de Waal, who is joined by award-winning novelist Sara Collins; Fiction Editor of the Guardian, Justine Jordan; world-renowned writer and professor Yiyun Li; and musician, composer and producer Nitin Sawhney.

The books shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024 are: 

• James (Mantle) by Percival Everett (American)
• Orbital (Jonathan Cape) by Samantha Harvey (British)
• Creation Lake (Jonathan Cape) by Rachel Kushner (American)
• Held (Bloomsbury Publishing) by Anne Michaels (Canadian)
• The Safekeep (Viking) by Yael van der Wouden (Dutch)
• Stone Yard Devotional (Sceptre) by Charlotte Wood (Australian)

‘“I love the fact that a book can be like a living thing,” said one of the judges as we were choosing the shortlist for the Booker Prize. I am enormously proud of this shortlist of six books that have lived with us. We have spent months sifting, challenging, questioning – stopped in our tracks by the power of the contemporary fiction that we have been privileged to read. And here are the books that we need you to read. Great novels can change the reader. They face up to truths and face you in their turn.

‘If that sounds excessive it reflects the urgency that animates these novels. Here is storytelling in which people confront the world in all its instability and complexity. The fault lines of our times are here. Borders and time zones and generations are crossed and explored, conflicts of identity, race and sexuality are brought into renewed focus through memorable voices. The people who come alive here are damaged in ways that we come to know and respect, and we come to care passionately about their histories and relationships.

‘My copies of these novels are dog-eared, scribbled in. They have been carried everywhere – surely the necessary measure of a seriously good novel. Our final meeting to choose this shortlist together was punctuated by delight at them. They are books that made us want to keep on reading, to ring up friends and tell them about them, novels that inspired us to write, to score music, and even – in my case – to go back to my wheel and make pots.’

Percival Everett was shortlisted for the Booker in 2022 for The Trees. He is the author of over 30 published works, was a Pulitzer Prize finalist, and his novel Erasure was adapted to become the Oscar-nominated film American Fiction.

Rachel Kushner was shortlisted for the Booker in 2018 for The Mars Room. Her work has been translated into 27 languages and she has won the Prix Médicis, the National Book Critics Circle Award and the Folio Prize.

Samantha Harvey is shortlisted for the first time, but was longlisted in 2009 for The Wilderness, which won the Betty Trask Prize that year. Her novels have been shortlisted for multiple awards, including the Women’s Prize, and she published a memoir about her insomnia, The Shapeless Unease: A Year of Not Sleeping, in 2020. 

While the three other writers may be new to the Booker Prize, two of them have won and been nominated for multiple literary prizes. Anne Michaels is best known for her poetry and for her 1996 novel Fugitive Pieces, which won 12 international awards, was adapted into a film in 2007 and included in the BBC’s 100 Novels that Shaped the World. 

Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things won Australia’s $50,000 Stella Prize and a number of others in 2016. In 2019 she was made a Member of the Order of Australia and named one of the Australian Financial Review’s 100 Women of Influence. She is the first Australian author to be shortlisted in a decade, following Richard Flanagan in 2014, who went on to win the prize with The Narrow Road to the Deep North.

The 2024 shortlist features one debut novel: The Safekeep. Yael van der Wouden – the first Dutch author to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize – teaches creative writing and comparative literature in the Netherlands. She was raised trilingual and wrote The Safekeep in English. Her other writing includes non-fiction – her essay ‘On (Not) Reading Anne Frank’ received a notable mention in The Best American Essays 2018 – and an online advice column, Dear David, in which she answers people’s problems posing as Sir David Attenborough.

The shortlist includes five publishing imprints with strong Booker credentials. Two of the six books are published by Jonathan Cape (Creation Lake and Orbital), with the others published by Viking (The Safekeep), Sceptre (Stone Yard Devotional), Bloomsbury (Held) and Mantle (James). Cape has published six previous Booker winners, in 1974, 1976, 1981, 1984, 1991, and 2011. Bloomsbury last won the prize in 2017 with George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo, and Viking last won in 1995 with Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road. Sceptre titles have been shortlisted four times previously. Mantle, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, appears on the shortlist for the first time.

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

The author said: ‘I had long wanted to tell a story about a group of young people who decamp from Paris to a rural outpost in France, where they are set on a collision course with the French state. At the same time, I became interested in prehistory, both what can be known about ancient people and what the longing to know actually is, a sense that we have taken a wrong turn, that our ancestors hid messages from us that we don’t know how to read.’

The judges said: ‘Novels that investigate what it is to be human can veer into the sentimental; this one is utterly flinty and hard-nosed. It’s quite something to wrap a novel of ideas into a page-turning spy thriller, and to achieve a narrative voice that is so audaciously confident – and then subtly undercut it. There’s also mystery at the book’s core – both the mystery of human origins and of individual identity. The author’s prose is juicy, her narrator jaunty, her worldbuilding lush, and she also taps into something profound.’

Held by Anne Michaels

The author said: ‘Every day writing this book I asked myself: in these urgent times, what voice might be small enough to be heard; what do we need now? We measure history by events and actions, but this book wants to assert a different measure for history, the real and powerful effect of our inner lives – what we believe, what we value, what we love, what we aspire to.’

The judges said: ‘We loved the quietness of this book, and surrendered to it. Its large themes are of the instability of the past and memory, but it works on a cellular level due to the astonishing beauty of its details. There are very few books that can achieve a pitch of poetic intensity sustained across a whole novel. Starting with a wounded soldier on a French battlefield, this lyrical kaleidoscope of a novel is created from the scattered images and memories of four generations of a family.’

The impact of winning the prize is significant. Last year’s winner, Prophet Song by Paul Lynch, saw a 1500% increase in sales in the week following its win. Before its longlisting, the book’s publisher, Oneworld, had sold 4,000 copies in hardback. Over 100,000 hardback copies have now been sold in the UK. It reached number three in the Sunday Times bestseller listin the UK for hardback fiction. In Ireland, it stayed at number one across all books for several weeks after the win. 

Internationally, Oneworld has printed 170,000 export trade paperbacks, with exceptionally strong sales in Ireland, Australia and India; Grove Press has sold more than 90,000 hardbacks and eBooks in North America. Translation rights deals increased from two before Prophet Song’s longlisting to 13 before its win. A total of 33 deals have now been secured, with a number of publishers buying Lynch’s complete backlist too.

Premier: [email protected]/ Hannah Stockton, +44 (0) 7780 705 086