Nine Booker-nominated novels set in New York City

The Emperor’s Children by Claire Messud 

Longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2006, Claire Messud’s novel is a modern American classic – a sweeping portrait of one of the most fascinating cities in the world in the months just before and just after 9/11. 

In Manhattan, three 30-year-old friends – Danielle, Marina and Julius – are seeking their fortunes. But the arrival of Marina’s young cousin Bootie – fresh from the provinces and keen, too, to make his mark – forces them to confront their own desires and expectations. 

Writing in the New York Times, Meghan O’Rourke described The Emperor’s Children as ‘a formally nimble novel of formidable scale’ and ‘a masterly comedy of manners – an astute and poignant evocation of hobnobbing glitterati in the months before and immediately following Sept. 11’. 

Netherland by Joseph O’Neill 

Longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2008, Netherland explores friendship, belonging and NYC’s immigrant cricket scene. 

The novel’s protagonist is Hans, originally from the Netherlands and now settled in London, who recalls his time living in Manhattan with his family in the years just before and after 9/11. Hans makes friends with charismatic Chuck, a Trinidadian full of dreams and schemes, and who initiates Hans into the Staten Island Cricket Club. Hans comes to share Chuck’s sense of American possibility – until he glimpses the shadier side of his new friend’s ambitions. 

In a review for The New York Times, Dwight Garner described Netherland as, ‘the wittiest, angriest, most exacting and most desolate work of fiction we’ve yet had about life in New York and London after the World Trade Center fell.’ 

Trust by Hernan Diaz 

A literary puzzle about money, power and intimacy, Trust was longlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022. Spanning an entire century, the book begins in the 1930s, examining the radically different worlds of Brooklyn, on one side of the river, and downtown Manhattan and the Upper East Side on the other.  

Benjamin Rask is a legendary Wall Street tycoon; Helen Rask the daughter of eccentric aristocrats. Together, they have risen to the very top – but at what cost have they acquired their immense fortune? This is the mystery at the centre of ‘Bonds’, a successful 1938 novel that all New York seems to have read. But there are other versions of this tale of privilege and deceit. 

Trust elegantly draws these competing narratives into conversation with each other – and in tension with the perspective of one woman bent on disentangling fact from fiction. The result is a provocative and propulsive novel within a novel that becomes more exhilarating with each new revelation. 

The Booker Prize judges said, ‘There is a dazzling intelligence behind this novel, which challenges us to rethink everything we know both about the institutions on which nations are built and the narratives by which stories are told. Sly, sophisticated, insistently questioning, Diaz writes with assurance, determined to rob us of every certainty.’ 

A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara 

Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2015, Hanya Yanagihara’s novel is a gut-wrenching exploration of the limits of human endurance.  

Jude is a brilliant and successful lawyer living and working in New York City, yet he has a mysterious past that remains a secret to his friends. He suffers from chronic pain in his legs and back and struggles to overcome the psychological trauma of a childhood scarred by sexual abuse.  

The novel is deeply rooted in place, from the characters eating pho in Chinatown to Jude and Willem creating a life together in their Lispenard Street apartment. In an interview with Vulture, Yanagihara explained, ‘I wanted the narrative to have a sleight-of-hand quality: the reader would begin thinking it a fairly standard post-college New York City book (a literary subgenre I happen to love), and then, as the story progressed, would sense it was becoming something else, something unexpected.’ 

It’s a devastating book that has a lasting impact on everyone who reads it. Singer-songwriter Dua Lipa has written that, ‘it was one of the first books where I openly sobbed after reading. By the end of it I felt profoundly changed.’ 

Parrot and Olivier in America by Peter Carey 

The London Review of Books called Parrot and Olivier in America, ‘Peter Carey’s carefree novel, his couldn’t-care-less-what-the-critics-say novel, a novel written for his own delight.’ Shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2010, the book is loosely based on the life of Alexis de Tocqueville, the aristocratic French author of Democracy in America.  

Carey’s novel explores the unusual relationship between a traumatised French aristocrat and an itinerant English printer. Olivier has been sent to the New World – ostensibly to study its prisons but in reality to save his neck in case of a future revolution. Parrot has been sent to protect and spy on Olivier. The narrative shifts between the perspectives of master and servant as they become unlikely friends. 

Set mostly in 19th-century America, the New York in Carey’s novel isn’t one any of us would recognise. Ursula K. Guin reviewed it for the Guardian, explaining, ‘Its picture of the coarse, young United States of Andrew Jackson… is entertaining, if predictable. Carey, who lives in New York City, has great fun with the pigs rooting on Broadway and the vast, muddy wastes around unbuilt Times Square.’