10 Booker-nominated books for music lovers

Music can appear in different ways in books – it might be as straightforward as a character being a musician or composer, or a description of what they choose to listen or dance to. Or sometimes a novel’s title namechecks a particular song – Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars takes its name from a Portishead track, for example, and David Mitchell’s number9dream from a song by John Lennon.  

Musical choices will likely tell us something important about someone’s personality and the world they inhabit, or it’ll evoke a certain mood, emotion or moment in time. Music sometimes shapes stories in more subtle ways, too – depending on what the author or translator is listening to when they’re writing, say, or their own musical background and ambitions.  

Kazuo Ishiguro started out writing songs, rather than novels, while Shehan Karunatilaka has been described as someone who’d have been as at home on stage at Glastonbury as he was on the Booker Prize stage. Music has had a profound effect on Jon Fosse’s writing style: ‘I suddenly stopped playing and started writing, and when writing I somehow tried to recreate the mood or atmosphere created while playing music.’

Swing Time by Zadie Smith 

Longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2017, Swing Time is a dazzling and energetic story about friendship, music and identity.  

Two brown girls dream of being dancers – but only one, Tracey, has talent. The other has ideas: about rhythm and time, about Black bodies and Black music, what constitutes a tribe, or makes a person truly free. It’s a close but complicated childhood friendship that ends abruptly in their early 20s.  

But, as Sarah Shaffi writes in her guide to the author’s best books, this is a Zadie Smith novel and the past is never the past. Both characters can’t quite let go, even as they move on with their lives: Tracey becomes a West End dancer while the narrator goes to work for Aimee, a Madonna-like mega-celebrity who wants to open a school for girls in the Gambia (cue an exploration of the familiar Smith themes of class and privilege).  

For both the main characters, and for Smith, music is very important – it gives Swing Time its rhythm and propulsion. 

Time Shelter by Georgi Gospodinov, translated by Angela Rodel 

Winner of the International Booker Prize in 2023, Time Shelter introduces readers to a ‘clinic for the past’, run by an enigmatic therapist. The clinic offers a promising treatment for Alzheimer’s sufferers: each floor reproduces a decade in minute detail, transporting patients back in time to a familiar, safer, happier moment.  

Our judges described the book as an ‘inventive, subversive and morbidly humorous novel about national identities and the seductive dangers of memory and nostalgia’.  

Music – and its power to awaken memories – is an important theme. Sharing a playlist to accompany the novel, Gospodinov explained: ‘Music can be “heard” in many places throughout it. First, because music awakens memory. Researchers claim that musical structures leave our memories last. Until the very end, a piano plays in our heads […] In the clinics of the past, Gaustine and the narrator constantly use music’s superpower; various emblematic songs take us back to particular years.’  

Grace Notes by Bernard MacLaverty 

Shortlisted for the Booker in 1997, Bernard MacLaverty’s lyrical novel is about coming to terms with the past and the healing power of music. 

Arriving back in Belfast for her father’s funeral, Catherine McKenna – a successful young composer – remembers exactly why she left: the claustrophobic intimacies of the Catholic enclave, her fastidious, nagging mother, and the tensions of a city at war with itself. She remembers a more innocent time, when the Loyalists’ drums sounded mysterious and exciting. She remembers her shattered relationship with the drunken, violent Dave. She remembers the child she had with him, waiting for her back in Glasgow. 

In musical notation, grace notes are printed smaller in size. They’re not essential but rather a kind of musical ornamentation, the ‘notes between the notes’ as MacLaverty calls them in the novel. 

Compass by Mathias Énard, translated by Charlotte Mandell 

As night falls over Vienna, Franz Ritter, an insomniac musicologist, spends a restless night drifting between dreams and memories. He revisits his life: his travels to Istanbul, Aleppo, Damascus and Tehran; the various writers, artists, musicians, academics and explorers who populate this vast dreamscape.  

At the centre of these memories is an elusive, unrequited love – Sarah, a fiercely intelligent French scholar caught in the perpetual tension between Europe and the Middle East.  

As a review of Mathias Énard’s ‘strangely powerful work’ explains, ‘Orientalism is, here, the key idea – our narrator, Franz, has worked on the appropriation of Middle Eastern music by canonical westerners, as well as music written by Middle Eastern composers in the western tradition’. 

Énard’s immersive, nocturnal, musical journey was shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2017.  

Orfeo by Richard Powers 

Longlisted for the Booker in 2014, Orfeo tells the story of a musician journeying into his past as he desperately flees the present. 

One evening, 70-year-old avant-garde composer Peter Els opens his front door to find the police on his doorstep. His home microbiology lab – the latest experiment in his lifelong attempt to discover musical patterns in DNA strands – has come to the attention of Homeland Security. Panicked, Els flees and turns fugitive. In response, the government promises a terrified nation that the ‘Bioterrorist Bach’ will be found and brought to trial. 

The novel’s Booker nomination came as a surprise to its author, Richard Powers: ‘Orfeo was longlisted in the first year that Americans were eligible, which made for a distinctive surprise. The Booker had always taken place on a parallel Earth for us, until there we were in the middle of it. That’s why my longlisting came as a double bolt from the blue.’