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‘He’s barely twenty years of age, but he goes shuffling down the hallway in his stocking feet with all the spryness of a care-home resident’

‘He tries to work out if his friend is telling the truth or if he’s lying. Though he would prefer him to be lying, he thinks that he’s probably telling the truth’

‘Meanwhile the dark slid itself onto her chest like a snake, organizing its weight into neatly stacked coils that might go on forever and bury her, crush her, if she didn’t leap out of bed just in time and, with deft skill, reopen the door’

‘‘White men,’ Lenny told him, those eyes sparkling, ‘that’s who. White men have it hardest these days’’

‘I don’t know what made her do that – it was only afternoon – but maybe she was possessed by the same feeling of shame as I was, and the sense that a part of our lives was coming to an end’

Douglas Stuart’s blistering and heartbreaking debut is an exploration of the unsinkable love that only children can have for their damaged parents

We want as many people as possible to enjoy the 13 longlisted novels, so we’ve got 52 books to share with creators who love to read and talk about books online

‘What we obviously had, even when things smoothed over, was a C-minus marriage, which makes it pretty hard to score much higher than a B overall on the rest of your life’

‘Yeva saw the way the high-heeled stranger peered at the piles of clothes strewn over the bench seat of the driver’s cabin, the crumpled up sleeping bag, the slimy yellowed mouth retainer on the dash. The woman’s face sank with pity over Yeva’s itinerant life’

From experimental form to narrative surprises, this year’s longlisted books are definitely worth talking about