Journey to some seriously unusual spaces and places in Booker Prize history with these unforgettable novels
Location can be an essential component when it comes to creating a captivating story, and a carefully constructed setting can help you feel truly immersed within the world of a book. Through vivid description and carefully chosen detail, an author can transport readers to places that feel immediate and fully realised, allowing them to experience a world far removed from their own.
These 10 Booker Prize- and International Booker Prize-nominated books do just that. They make striking use of setting, placing their characters in environments that shape every aspect of the story. From a menacing prison colony and an isolated convent to the confines of a boxing ring and the International Space Station, these novels will take you to fascinating, if not always welcoming, places across time and space.
On Earth As It Is Beneath is set in a forgotten prison in a remote corner of Brazil, where life has taken a sadistic and deadly turn. The penal colony was built on land where enslaved people were once tortured and murdered, and was designed as a facility where inmates could be rehabilitated but never escape. Decades later, the prison’s operations are winding down, but a new horror has been unleashed on its remaining occupants.
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2026, this stark and unsettling novel exposes an institution that has purposely been hidden from view. In an interview with the Booker Prizes, author Ana Paula Maia explained, ‘The more I reflected on the prison system in Brazil and other parts of the world, the more I realised that beyond the application of laws to criminals, in the end, we are all imprisoned in this world, with walls that may or may not be visible’.
Reviewing the novel in the Economic Times, Aastha Raj said that ‘Ana Paula Maia’s novel demonstrates how literature can illuminate spaces society prefers to ignore. By focusing on the daily mechanics of punishment and the fragile threads of humanity within it, she crafts a narrative that is both local and universal.’
Longlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2026, Women Without Men follows five different women as they escape the strict confines of their culture. These women – who include a sex worker, a teacher and a middle-class housewife – come together in a garden outside Tehran where they seek to define their own lives, even transforming into elements of nature itself.
This slim novel is set in a society where reliance on men is paramount to survival, but where some women have chosen to forge their own paths instead. An unusual and verdant garden on the outskirts of the city becomes a safe space where each of the characters can explore their desires freely.
Originally published in Persian in 1989, the book has been banned in Iran for over three decades, and author Shahrnush Parsipur was imprisoned for writing it.
Writing for the Conversation, Hind Elhinnawy said the women’s retreat is ‘not an escape’ but a ‘feminist rupture that marks a refusal to live within a world that insists on defining them. It is a choice to build, however precariously, a space where those rules collapse.’
Winner of the Booker Prize in 2024, Orbital revolves around the lives of six astronauts and cosmonauts on the International Space Station. Taking place over 24 hours, the book details the everyday activities of the four men and two women, along with their reflections on broader existential topics such as love and loss, and the meaning of life.
The novel, set in a place very few of us will ever experience, offers a new perspective on our planet through Samantha Harvey’s vivid descriptions of Earth’s beauty. In an interview with the Guardian, Harvey said that she spent time watching footage from the International Space Station on her computer during lockdown, which inspired her. ‘It was enormous consolation to me to be able to go to space every day, virtually in my imagination.’
Bethanne Patrick, writing in the Los Angeles Times, said, ‘Harvey manages to bring readers back down to Earth, astounded that they’ve travelled so far in such a short period of time, having finished their own orbit through the realms of her rich imagination.’
Also longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024, Headshot brings readers inside a boxing ring to experience the heat and pain as eight teenage girl boxers fight it out to become the best in the United States. Each chapter is structured around a single match, and author Rita Bullwinkel reveals the hidden troubles and insecurities that each girl faces as she attempts to defeat her opponent.
Headshot takes place over two days, set during a championship tournament at a sweat-soaked gym in Nevada called Bob’s Boxing Palace. In an interview with the Booker Prizes, Bullwinkel explained she wanted to remember how she felt when she ‘obsessively competed in every sport [she] could find,’ adding that ‘I would often drive, or have my parents drive me, to tournaments that felt very similar to the tournament in this book. My hope is that boxers, and lovers of boxing, will find authenticity in this book’.
Reviewing the novel for the Guardian, author and journalist Benjamin Myers said ‘Bullwinkel’s writing is as poignant and visceral as the sport demands, her words inhabiting the thoughts and bodies of her characters.’
Time Shelter won the International Booker Prize in 2023, with its radical premise that defies time. In the novel, an unnamed narrator and an enigmatic psychiatrist open a clinic in Switzerland where patients with Alzheimer’s can be transported back to happier moments in their lives.
Each floor of the clinic is meticulously transformed into a decade from the patient’s past, with the two main characters sourcing a wide range of objects and nostalgic items to accurately represent each time period. They artificially create locations and eras that are long gone, aiming to bring a sense of peace to patients. But as the rooms within the clinic become more convincing, an increasing number of healthy people seek refuge there, hoping to escape the horrors of modern life.
Simon Ings, writing for the Times, described Georgi Gospodinov as having ‘terrific fun’ in the prize-winning novel. ‘This is not a realist novel,’ he added. ‘It is very much a genre-busting novel of ideas.’
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2024, Stone Yard Devotional explores one woman’s desire to free herself from her unsatisfying career and disillusionment of her marriage by joining a religious community. There, she reflects on her past relationships and the transgressions that haunt her.
The book is set in a convent in the stark landscape of Monaro in rural New South Wales, Australia, the same region where author Charlotte Wood spent her childhood. It’s a place Astrid Edwards, writing for the Times Literary Supplement, described as ‘a beautiful, windswept plateau known for its bitter cold, rocky outcrops and elemental plains’.
Reviewing the novel in the Guardian, author and Children’s Booker Prize 2027 judge Frank Cottrell-Boyce said, ‘There is a tradition of novelists using the pressure-cooker environment of a convent for thought experiments or satire…But the nuns at Stone Yard are too busy keeping everything spruce and orderly to go in for wire taps or erotic shenanigans. The pressure here comes from outside…’.
The Employees follows the lives of the human and humanoid crew aboard the Six-Thousand Ship, which sits millions of miles away from Earth, in a near-distant future. After acquiring a selection of alien objects from a newly discovered planet, the employees of the ship unexpectedly begin to feel a yearning and become emotionally attached to these curious articles. To find out why, corporate mediators are sent on board to interview the employees; tensions begin to rise as the crew start to question both their identities and purpose in the world.
Shortlisted for the International Booker Prize in 2021, The Employees is set within a sterile and enclosed workplace, and composed entirely of a series of short ‘statements’ which form the experimental narrative. Through these testimonies, Olga Ravn explores sentience, and the nature of humanity.
In an interview with the Booker Prizes, Ravn explained how the unusual setting was the result of her work with artist Lea Guldditte Hestelund who suggested a location ‘somewhere between a spaceship and an Alexander Wang flagship store’. ‘I wanted a space that was completely confined, with no exit, and I also wanted to see what would happen if human beings were taken out of their ecology, away from Earth.’
Reviewer and Booker Prize 2024 judge, Justine Jordan, writing in the Guardian, said, ‘The Employees is not only a disconcertingly quotidian space opera; it’s also an audacious satire of corporate language and the late-capitalist workplace, and a winningly abstracted investigation into what it means to be human.’
This metaphysical thriller follows five different characters as they contend with a centuries-old war between two groups of immortals. A young girl called Holly Sykes, who possesses semi-psychic abilities, is the connecting link between these characters as they deal with the fallout of the supernatural conflict.
The Bone Clocks is set in a series of different time periods and locations, ranging from 1984 to 2043 and takes place across the world in England, Iceland, Iraq, the United States and Ireland. Longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2014, the novel includes many relevant issues we face today, including climate change, war, and the advancement of technology.
In an article for the New York Times Sunday Book Review, Pico Iyer commented on Mitchell’s prowess when world-building: ‘Other writers may be more moving, and some may push deeper, but very few excite the reader about both the visceral world and the visionary one as Mitchell does.’
Life of Pi won the Booker Prize in 2002, selling millions of copies and capturing imaginations worldwide – all with a very unusual premise at its heart. Piscine (Pi) Molitor is a young boy and the son of a zoo manager in India. As the story begins, the Molitor family is travelling on a freight ship from Asia to North America. But when the ship unexpectedly sinks, Pi becomes stranded on a lifeboat with an assortment of animals, including a hyena, a zebra, an orangutan, and a Bengal tiger named Richard Parker.
Most of the action takes place on a lifeboat adrift at sea, as Pi contends with his unique and life-threatening circumstances. He is rescued after 227 days afloat, barring one excursion to a surreally depicted carnivorous island.
Gary Krist from the New York Times Book Review said that ‘Life of Pi could renew your faith in the ability of novelists to invest even the most outrageous scenario with plausible life’.
Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2010, Emma Donoghue’s novel is set within the confines of a single room. It has one locked door and a skylight, and it measures 10 feet by 10 feet. Five-year-old Jack lives with his Ma in this room.
Jack loves watching TV, but he knows that nothing he sees on the screen is truly real – only him, Ma and the things in the room. That is, until the day Ma admits there is another world outside. Told from the perspective of young Jack, this psychological thriller follows mother and son as they attempt to escape the room and its sinister owner, seeking safety beyond its four walls.
Aimee Bender from the New York Times Sunday Book Review said, ‘Jack’s eyes remake the familiar’. ‘It is invigorating, watching him learn, and the way Donoghue reveals the consequences of Room through her attention to detail is tremendous’.
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