Read extracts from the International Booker Prize 2024 shortlist

Published: April 9, 2024

Read an extract from the opening chapter of each title on the International Booker Prize 2024 shortlist

This year’s shortlisted books cast a forensic eye on divided families and divided societies, revisiting pasts both recent and distant to help make sense of the present. Read an extract from all six titles here.

An extract from Not A River by Selva Almada, translated by Annie McDermott

Rippling across time like the river that runs through it, Not A River is the finest expression yet of Selva Almada’s compelling style and singular vision of rural Argentina

An extract from Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, translated by Michael Hofmann

Jenny Erpenbeck’s intimate and devastating story of the path of two lovers through the ruins of a relationship, set against the backdrop of a seismic period in European history

An extract from The Details by Ia Genberg, translated by Kira Josefsson

In exhilarating, provocative prose, Ia Genberg reveals an intimate and powerful celebration of what it means to be human

An extract from Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong, translated by Sora Kim-Russell and Youngjae Josephine Bae

Hwang Sok-yong’s epic, multi-generational tale threads together a century of Korean history, from the Japanese colonial era, through Liberation, right up to the twenty-first century

Front cover of What I'd Rather Not Think About

An extract from What I'd Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma, translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey

What I’d Rather Not Think About is Jente Posthuma’s deeply moving exploration of grief, told through brief, precise vignettes and full of gentle melancholy and surprising humour

An extract from Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior, translated by Johnny Lorenz

In Itamar Vieira Junior’s fascinating and gripping story about the lives of subsistence farmers in Brazil’s poorest region, an act of shuddering violence binds two sisters together forever