10 of the best genre-bending Booker Prize-nominated novels

The beauty of the Booker Prize is that you never know what you’re going to get. Titles nominated over the decades have included thrillers, autofiction, crime, children’s stories, science fiction and more. But some books are not content to be merely one thing; their writers prefer to switch between genres, play with forms, and generally turn the reader’s expectations upside down. Here are some of the most surprising and innovative genre-bending works from the Booker Prize. 

All That Man Is by David Szalay (shortlisted, 2016) 

Here is a book that makes us ask what a man is: but also what a novel is. Szalay’s fourth novel – which saw him recognised as one of the best British novelists of his generation – is made of nine stories involving nine different men. But what gives the book the unity a novel needs is that the men get older as the novel proceeds, from interrailing teenagers to a middle-aged man who has ‘the depressing feeling he is able to see all the way to the end of his life’. ‘The aim’, Szalay said, ‘was to create the impression of a whole life elapsing’.  

It’s also unified by the question of what makes a man – a question with which all the characters are wrestling. The rather functional title was Szalay’s second choice, after he couldn’t get permission from the rock group Led Zeppelin to name the novel after one of their lyrics: ‘In the days of my youth I was told what it was to be a man’. 

Szalay’s style is so efficient that each story feels like a full novel: rich in comedy, tension, embarrassment and precisely evoked secondary characters. In this sense, it is one of the best-value novels in the Booker Library.  

The men here are all wondering what to do next: their stories end at moments of decision. They grapple with the things men are supposed to do: sex, travel, work – so when these things run out, the man in the final story feels ‘he is not properly living’. It is provocative, intelligent and a deeply entertaining page-turner – all that a novel can be. 

Summertime by J.M. Coetzee (shortlisted, 2009) 

Double Booker-winner Coetzee could have become the first triple-winner with this exceptional genre-bending novel, if he hadn’t been up against the unstoppable might of Hilary Mantel’s Wolf Hall. Summertime pretends to be a biography of its own author – written by a biographer after his death.  

It’s a stunning performance, and frequently funny (contrary to Coetzee’s dour reputation) as when one sexual partner recalls ‘John Coetzee’ trying to persuade her to make love to Schubert’s string quintet. It’s a comedy of embarrassment, too, since much of the book consists of people telling Coetzee’s biographer what a loser he was. ‘He looked out of place, like a bird … There was a seediness about him too, an air of failure.’  

Summertime blends Coetzee’s clear, readable style – the story flows effortlessly – with chewy ideas, as Coetzee the writer creates the biographer, who in turn shapes how we see Coetzee the character through his selections and omissions. 

Of course, a novel can reveal as much about the author, under the surface of the pages, as any biography. So Summertime is also a self-lacerating memoir, where people’s attacks on Coetzee are also Coetzee’s worst impulses on how he sees himself. ‘He is nothing, was nothing,’ says one character; ‘an unimportant little man,’ declares another. And though these are insults, there is also truth – even pride – in them: when a man is a writer, Coetzee is saying, the man is irrelevant: only the words, only the writing, matters, because that is what will last. 

number9dream by David Mitchell (shortlisted, 2001) 

For sheer imaginative energy, there are few novels in the Booker Library to rival the head-spinning inventions of this book. It opens at a breakneck pace, with an action-movie-style scene of a young man, Eiji, breaking his way into a secret location to find out about his father, with a twist on every page. It can’t be real, can it? No – it’s a fantasy in Eiji’s head, and the rest of the novel switches between reality and dreams, bringing in elements from films, video games and other popular culture. 

First among these are The Beatles and John Lennon – the title comes from a Lennon-composed Beatles song, and references to the musician pop up regularly. Eiji hears the song ‘Imagine’ playing, and the whole book is a sort of homage to Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood – also named after a Beatles song. There is so much freewheeling invention here that the effect is intoxicating, and if you don’t like one of the side-stories that emerges (the ‘goatwriter’ is a particular love-it-or-hate-it element among Mitchell fans), don’t worry – there’ll be another one along in a few pages. 

After number9dream came Mitchell’s Booker-shortlisted masterpiece Cloud Atlas (2004), which was if anything even more tricksy. He followed this run of invention and ambition with a more modest fourth book: Black Swan Green (longlisted, 2006), a coming-of-age story based on Mitchell’s childhood. ‘I thought it was about time I wrote my first novel,’ he said. 

The Night Watch by Sarah Waters (shortlisted, 2006) 

If Martin Amis’s Time’s Arrow tells its story entirely in reverse, then this novel takes a different playful approach to time. The Night Watch is a Second World War story told in three parts: but it starts at the end, in 1947, then goes back to 1944, and finally ends at the beginning, in 1941. In the postwar scenes, the characters – ambulance worker, typist, ex-prisoner – are still reeling from the war’s devastation, thinking, ‘What just happened?’ – a response cleverly recreated in the reader’s head as we begin to piece the story together. ‘People’s pasts are more interesting than their futures,’ Waters points out. 

The Night Watch plays with expectations, too, by taking a traditional wartime story and bringing in characters not often seen – three are gay women and one is a man of unclear sexuality. ‘There are lots of stereotypes about the war,’ said Waters, ‘but they’re all really heterosexual – women and GIs and dances.’ The war provided opportunities for lesbian women: ‘Suddenly they could do all these things they covertly enjoyed doing.’ This is a book that benefits from, and deepens on, rereading, as the reader picks up echoes and consequences the second time around. This makes it perfect for the rereading that accompanies a Booker judging process. 

The Night Watch was Waters’s second Booker shortlisting, after the twisty Fingersmith, and she was shortlisted again in 2009 for her ambiguous ghost story The Little Stranger. Both are ideal reads for anyone interested in genre-bending books. 

In a Strange Room by Damon Galgut (shortlisted, 2010) 

All of Damon Galgut’s Booker–shortlisted books – The Good Doctor (2003), and his winner The Promise (2021) – have something unsettling and otherworldly about them, but this novel is his most genre-bending by far. For one thing, it comes in three parts, each describing a journey, and each of which was originally published as a piece of memoir by Galgut. But by bringing the pieces together and publishing them as a novel, it recognises that there is a difference between historical facts and the sort of truth fiction provides.  

‘Memory is fiction,’ says Galgut. He emphasises this in the novel by drawing a distance between the Galgut who is narrating the book, and the Damon who is the central character. With one person as both hero and narrator, we get sentences like this: ‘Happy and unhappy, he falls asleep in the end, and dreams about, no, I don’t remember his dreams.’ And the journeys themselves are masterpieces of storytelling art: direct, propulsive and powerful tales about people Damon encounters on his travels, from a new lover to an old friend contorted by addiction. 

The title comes from a passage in William Faulkner’s As I Lay Dying: ‘In a strange room you must empty yourself for sleep. And before you are emptied for sleep, what are you. And when you are emptied for sleep, you are not. And when you are filled with sleep, you never were.’ Galgut deliberately leaves out the next lines – ‘I don’t know what I am. I don’t know if I am or not’ – which sum up the playfulness, the complexity and the beauty of this extraordinary, one-of-a-kind novel.