Read extracts from the Booker Prize 2023 longlist

From family dramas to scientific breakthroughs to competitive sport, the Booker Prize 2023 longlist offers a breadth of remarkable fiction

This year’s Booker Dozen features quality fiction from four continents, four Irish writers and four debut novelists. But if you need help navigating the list, we’ve selected extracts from each book to whet your appetite.

Read the Booker Prize 2023 longlist: an extract from A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀

A dazzling story of modern Nigeria and two families caught in the riptides of wealth, power, romantic obsession and political corruption

Read the Booker Prize 2023 longlist: an extract from Old God's Time by Sebastian Barry

In his beautiful, haunting novel, in which nothing is quite what it seems, Sebastian Barry explores what we live through, what we live with, and what may survive of us

An extract from Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein

In her accomplished and unsettling second novel, Sarah Bernstein explores themes of prejudice, abuse and guilt through the eyes of a singularly unreliable narrator

An extract from If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery

An exhilarating novel-in-stories that pulses with style, heart and barbed humour, while unravelling what it means to carve out an existence between cultures, homes and pay cheques

Read the Booker Prize 2023 longlist: an extract from How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney

With tenderness and verve, Elaine Feeney tells the story of how one boy on a unique mission transforms the lives of his teachers, and brings together a community

An extract from This Other Eden by Paul Harding

Full of lyricism and power, Paul Harding’s spellbinding novel celebrates the hopes, dreams and resilience of those deemed not to fit in a world brutally intolerant of difference

Read the Booker Prize 2023 longlist: an extract from Pearl by Siân Hughes

Siân Hughes contemplates both the power and the fragility of the human mind in her haunting debut novel, which was inspired by the medieval poem of the same name

Read the Booker Prize 2023 longlist: an extract from All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow

Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow’s lyrical and poignant debut novel offers a deft exploration of motherhood, vulnerability and the complexity of human relationships

An extract from Prophet Song by Paul Lynch

A mother faces a terrible choice, in Paul Lynch’s exhilarating, propulsive and confrontational portrait of a society on the brink

Read the Booker Prize 2023 longlist: an extract from In Ascension by Martin MacInnes

Exploring the natural world with wonder and reverence, this compassionate, deeply inquisitive epic reaches outward to confront the great questions of existence, while looking inward to illuminate the human heart

An extract from Western Lane by Chetna Maroo

Chetna Maroo’s tender and moving debut novel about grief, sisterhood, a teenage girl’s struggle to transcend herself – and squash

An extract from The Bee Sting by Paul Murray

A patch of ice on the road, a casual favour to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil – can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life?

Read the Booker Prize 2023 longlist: an extract from The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng

Based on real events, the three-time Booker Prize-nominated Tan Twan Eng’s masterful novel of public morality and private truth examines love and betrayal under the shadow of Empire