13 things you need to know about the Booker Prize 2024 longlist

From funny books to thrilling books, fresh voices to Booker Prize veterans, here’s the lowdown on this year’s longlist

Written by Paul Davies

Published July 30, 2024

Make space on your bookshelves and check your credit card balance – it’s time to add 13 new books to your to-be-read list, as the Booker Prize 2024 longlist is announced.

In the view of our judges, the longlist, chosen from over 150 submissions, represents the very best of fiction published in the UK or Ireland between October 1, 2023 and September 30, 2024. The 13 nominated works are as follows:

From international bestsellers to undiscovered gems, there’s much that unites the longlisted books, including the fact that – unlike half of last year’s shortlist – none of them are written by an author named Paul. Read on for 13 things you need to know.

rize judges choose the long list of 13 books at the Chair of judges , Edmund De Waal's studio in South London. — The Booker Prize 2024 judges, Sara Collins, Edmund de Waal, Yiyun Li, Nitin Sawhney and Justine Jordan
*© Tom Pilston*

1 Fresh voices and first-timers

Three books on the longlist are debut novels – Headshot by Rita Bullwinkel, The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden and Wild Houses by Colin Barrett. But even before their first forays into long-form fiction caught the eyes of the Booker judges, the trio have been making waves in the literary world. Barrett’s short story collection Young Skins was highly acclaimed, and one of its stories, Calm with Horses, was adapted into an award-winning 2019 feature film starring Barry Keoghan; Rita Bullwinkel’s writing has appeared in White Review, BOMB, and McSweeney’s, where she is now editor. Dutch author Yael van der Wouden’s essay On (Not) Reading Anne Frank was listed as a notable in Best American Essays 2018, while her David Attenborough-themed advice column can be found at Longleaf Review. Should one of these writers win this year’s prize, they’ll be in good company. Debut novels have won the Booker six times, among them The God of Small Things by Arundhati Roy, Lincoln in the Bardo by George Saunders and, most recently, Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart.

2 Booker Prize alumni

At the other end of the scale, almost half of this year’s longlistees are no stranger to a Booker Prize nomination. Percival Everett, the author of over 20 novels, was shortlisted in 2022 for The Trees, while Samantha Harvey was longlisted in 2009 for The Wilderness. Hisham Matar (In the Country of Men) and Claire Messud (The Emperor’s Children) were longlist buddies in 2006, with Matar progressing to the shortlist that year. Rachel Kushner (The Mars Room) and Richard Powers (The Overstory) appeared together on the 2018 shortlist, losing out to Anna Burns’ Milkman. Powers had been longlisted four years earlier for Orfeo and would be shortlisted again in 2021, for Bewilderment. Could it be fourth time lucky for him in 2024?

3 Who am I? Where am I?

Exile, displacement, identity and belonging are among the big themes that loom large in several books on the 2024 longlist. Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional follows a woman who leaves her life behind to take refuge in an isolated nunnery in New South Wales. Percival Everett’s James is, according to its publishers, ‘a profound meditation on identity, belonging and the sacrifices we make to protect the ones we love’. Tommy Orange’s Wandering Stars is ‘an eloquent indictment of the devastating long-term effects of the dislocation and forced assimilation of Native Americans’, according to NPR. Claire Messud’s This Strange Eventful History tells the story of three generations of a Franco-Algerian family in their migrations around the world in search of an elusive wholeness. Hisham Matar’s My Friends follows two Libyan students caught up in a violent demonstration in London, and is described by the Guardian as ‘a book about exile and violence and grief’. As Chair of judges Edmund de Waal says, these are ‘books that navigate what it means to belong, to be displaced and to return’.

4 Small books, big ideas

Samantha Harvey’s Orbital – which centres around a team of astronauts on board the International Space Station – is the shortest book on the 2024 longlist, at an almost weightless 136 pages. Should it win the Booker Prize, it wouldn’t quite be the shortest ever winner. That honour goes to Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore, winner of the 1979 prize, which is just 132 pages. My Friends by Hisham Matar is the longest book on this year’s list, at 456 pages – still some way short of the longest ever Booker winner, Eleanor Catton’s The Luminaries, which tipped the scales at 832 pages in 2013.

5 USA! USA!

As with Irish writers and the Booker Prize 2023, one country is particularly well represented on this year’s longlist. It features six American writers: Rita Bullwinkel, Percival Everett, Rachel Kushner, Tommy Orange, Richard Powers and Claire Messud (although Messud, born in Connecticut, spent her childhood in Australia and Canada, and appeared on the 2003 Granta Best of Young British Novelists list – so are we allowed to claim her for the UK?). Six Americans featured on the Booker Prize longlist most recently in 2022, and the eventual winner that year was from… Sri Lanka.

6 Crime pays

One of the misconceptions associated with the Booker Prize is that it looks less fondly on genre fiction and favours hard-to-categorise, so-called ‘literary’ fiction. Yet the 2024 longlist includes works rooted in the most popular fiction genre of them all: crime. Colin Barrett’s Wild Houses has been described as an ‘exhilarating thriller’ (TLS) and a ‘deftly told caper’ (Guardian), while Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake ‘fuses a spy thriller with philosophical meditation’ according to The Bookseller. Their inclusion on the longlist is no surprise when you consider that criminal enterprise is at the heart of many Booker-nominated works, including those by Ottessa Moshfegh, Graeme Macrae Burnet, Patrick McCabe and Julie Myerson.

7 Who’s laughing now?

The Booker Prize 2024 longlist is shot through with black humour, but don’t take our word for it. ‘Gripping, painful, funny and horrifying’ is how the Guardian described Percival Everett’s James, while also praising the book’s ‘deft humour, comic set pieces and great lightness of touch’. The cover blurb for Rita Bullwinkel’s Headshot describes it as ‘funny, propulsive, obsessive and ecstatic’, while Rachel Kushner’s publishers summarise Creation Lake as ‘a work of high art, high comedy and irresistible pleasure’. The Chicago Review of Books observed similarities between Colin Barrett’s Wild Houses and the dark humour of early Guy Ritchie films and Martin McDonagh’s In Bruges. What do you mean you didn’t know Booker Prize books could be funny? Throughout its history, the prize has championed the comic as much as the tragic, from golden oldies such as Kingsley Amis, Iris Murdoch and Beryl Bainbridge to the smart wit of more recently nominated authors, including 2023 shortlistee Paul Murray.

Author Rachel Kushner — Rachel Kushner
*© Chloe Aftel*

8 Return to Oz

Remember when it seemed as though there was an Aussie on the Booker Prize longlist every year? Australia boasts an impressive Booker Prize track record, with Peter Carey scooping the prize in 1988 and 2001, after Thomas Keneally had become the first Australian winner in 1982. Adelaide-born DBC Pierre (2003) and Australia-raised Aravind Adiga (2008) have also both won. Remarkably, Charlotte Wood is the first Australian to appear on a Booker Prize longlist since South African-Australian author J.M. Coetzee in 2016, who was also the winner of the 1983 and 1999 prizes (before he was an Australian citizen). But she can take heart from the fact that this year marks the tenth anniversary of the last Australian winner: Tasmania’s Richard Flanagan.

9 Topping the charts

Winning the Booker Prize turns books into bestsellers: fact. In the week following Paul Lynch’s 2023 win for Prophet Song, the novel experienced a UK sales increase of 1,630%, and the book’s UK publisher Oneworld has printed 230,000 copies since its win. But a number of authors on this year’s longlist are already very familiar with the bestseller lists. Over a million copies of Richard Powers’ 2018 Booker Prize-shortlisted The Overstory have been sold around the world, while Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent (2016) was a huge word-of-mouth hit, topping the UK charts and selling 200,000 hardbacks – before being adapted into a successful Apple TV+ series. Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room was a number-one bestseller in 2018, and Time magazine’s number-one fiction title of the year. Tommy Orange’s debut novel There There was a New York Times bestseller and 2019 Pulitzer Prize finalist. Prior to their Booker Prize 2024 longlisting, Held by Anne Michaels and James by Percival Everett were already international bestsellers. Michaels’ work has been translated into 50 languages. A side note: the 2024 longlistees have written over 100 books between them – around 50 of which have been written by Percival Everett, Anne Michaels and Richard Powers.

10 Old stories, new perspectives

Many of the books on the 2024 longlist are steeped in history, from traumatic, multigenerational sagas, such as Wandering Stars, to thrilling historical reimaginings, such as James, which retells the story of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Huck’s slave companion Jim (the Guardian called it ‘a rescue mission to restore Jim’s humanity’). There are books that examine the haunting after-effects of war – including Held by Anne Michaels, which begins on a French battlefield in 1917, and This Strange Eventful History by Claire Messud, which opens with Paris falling to the Germans in 1940 and a French-Algerian family setting off in search of refuge. Sarah Perry’s Enlightenment features a more literal haunting: it revolves around a long-dead 19th century Romanian astronomer who has become a ghostly presence in an Essex manor house.

Author Charlotte Wood — Charlotte Wood
*© Carly Earl*

11 Publish and be damned successful

The publishers represented on this year’s longlist include a pair of indies – Daunt and Bloomsbury – while Pan Macmillan imprint Mantle is nominated for the first time. 2024 looks to be a particularly good Booker year for Jonathan Cape, an imprint of Penguin Random House, which boasts four titles on the list: Wild Houses, Orbital, Creation Lake and Enlightenment. Jonathan Cape has been part of Booker Prize history from the very beginning – its legendary publisher Tom Maschler was instrumental in setting up the prize with Booker McConnell Ltd in 1969 – and its Booker-winning authors include Salman Rushdie, Ian McEwan, Nadine Gordimer, Ben Okri, Anita Brookner and, most recently, Julian Barnes. This year marks the first longlisting for a Jonathan Cape title since 2019.

12 Relatable fiction

Personal relationships are central to several of the books on the longlist: The Safekeep, My Friends, Wandering Stars and Orbital explore the complex dynamics between friends, lovers, families and colleagues, all in exceptional circumstances. Stone Yard Devotional examines, in its publisher’s words, ‘the complicated beauty of female friendship’. James flips one of the best-known literary double acts upside down, transforming our view of their relationship. The list also features books that explore humankind’s relationship with the natural world. Playground raises important moral questions about the effects of taming one of the last remaining wildernesses. Stone Yard Devotional is set against a looming climate crisis – and may change the way you think about mice. Orbital asks readers to consider – with joy and wonder – our place in the universe. The Booker judges described it as ‘a love letter to our planet’.

13 Prize pedigree

Whichever of the 13 authors takes home the Booker Prize trophy on 12 November, Iris won’t be the first literary award on their mantelpiece. Charlotte Wood’s novel The Natural Way of Things won the (Australian) Prime Minister’s Literary Award for Fiction in 2016, while Samantha Harvey’s The Wilderness won the Betty Trask Award in 2009. In 2016, Sarah Perry’s The Essex Serpent won the Waterstones Book of the Year award and the British Book Awards’ Book of the Year prize. Hisham Matar’s memoir The Return won the Rathbones Folio Prize and Pulitzer Prize in 2017, among several other awards. Richard Powers’ The Overstory won the Pulitzer two years later, as well as the William Dean Howells Medal. Anne Michaels’ books have won dozens of international awards, including the Orange Prize, the Guardian Fiction Prize, and the Lannan Award for Fiction. Colin Barrett’s short story collection Young Skins won the Guardian First Book Award, while Tommy Orange’s debut novel There There won the PEN/Hemingway Award and the Center for Fiction First Novel Prize. Percival Everett’s accolades include the PEN Oakland/Josephine Miles Literary Award, the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction and the Windham-Campbell Literature Prize for Fiction.