The Booker Prize is the world’s most significant award for the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the UK or Ireland. As this year’s shortlist is revealed, we take a closer look at the six remarkable books and the stories behind them; their common themes and their many differences. 

The books shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2024 are: 

James by Percival Everett
Orbital by Samantha Harvey 
Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner
Held by Anne Michaels 
The Safekeep by Yael van der Wouden
Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

Women’s prize?

For the first time in the Booker Prize’s 55-year history, the shortlist includes five women – and just one man. Last year, there were two women on the shortlist – Sarah Bernstein and Chetna Maroo. The Booker was last won by a woman in 2019, when it was shared by Bernardine Evaristo (Girl, Woman, Other) and Margaret Atwood (The Testaments). Female writers have won the prize 20 times since its inception in 1969.

Familiar names… and a rising star

Three of this year’s shortlisted authors have been nominated for the prize before, and two of them know how it feels to be shortlisted: Pulitzer Prize-nominated Percival Everett was shortlisted for the Booker in 2022 for The Trees. Rachel Kushner was shortlisted for the Booker in 2018 for The Mars Room – the French translation of which won France’s Prix Médicis étranger a year later. Samantha Harvey was longlisted in 2009 for The Wilderness – the book won the Betty Trask Prize that year. 

While the other writers may be new to the shortlist, two of them are no strangers to literary prizes. Anne Michaels’ 1996 novel Fugitive Pieces was the winner of 12 international awards, including the Guardian Fiction Prize and Orange Prize for Fiction. In 2016, Charlotte Wood’s The Natural Way of Things won Australia’s $50,000 Stella Prize, and her books have been shortlisted for over a dozen other awards. 

The 2024 shortlist features just one debut novel: The Safekeep. Tel Aviv-born Yael van der Wouden is the first Dutch author to be shortlisted for the Booker Prize, although Dutch writer Lucas Rijneveld won the International Booker Prize in 2020 for The Discomfort of Evening, translated by Michele Hutchison. Van der Wouden, who teaches creative writing and comparative literature in the Netherlands, was raised trilingual; The Safekeep was written in English, although the Dutch edition, which she co-translated, was published first. Her other writing includes non-fiction – her essay ‘On (Not) Reading Anne Frank’ received a notable mention in The Best American Essays 2018 – and an online advice column, Dear David, in which she answers people’s problems posing as Sir David Attenborough.

Far from home

When it comes to setting, the six novels on this year’s shortlist are spread far and wide, from 220 miles above the earth to a cave network beneath the French countryside, from the battlefields of the First World War to a spiritual retreat in rural Australia, from America’s Deep South in the 19th century to a remote Dutch house in the early 1960s. 

The books explore big and timely issues: the ways in which we hide our real selves from those around us, and the contested nature of truth; the way traumatic histories – personal and collective – shape and restrict us, and follow us however far we go.

Is there a single theme that unites all six books? In their own unique ways, they all explore the gravitational forces exerted on us by the place we call home. Many of the protagonists have been uprooted: they may be in exile (Stone Yard Devotional), in hiding (James) or on a mission (Creation Lake, Orbital) – and most are looking, not forward, but back to where they’ve come from. Those who do manage to ground themselves at home may feel they are on fragile territory, their sense of security under threat from outsiders (The Safekeep) or old wounds (Held). This may be a shortlist about our essential human need to belong – in a world that makes so many people feel lost and unwelcome.

Small packages

Several books on this year’s shortlist are relatively short, compared to some of the more heavyweight selections of previous years. Four of the books are less than 300 pages long (James is 303 pages, so let’s round it down and call it five). Creation Lake tips the scales at 404 pages but – described by the Booker judges as a ‘page-turning spy thriller’ – arguably feels shorter. This year’s shortest book, Orbital, weighing in at a mere 136 pages, also covers the shortest timeframe of all the novels on the list. While Held follows four generations of a family across an entire century, Orbital covers just 24 hours aboard the International Space Station. The Booker judges described it as ‘brief yet miraculously expansive’. Orbital is just four pages longer than the shortest-ever Booker winner – Penelope Fitzgerald’s Offshore, winner of the 1979 prize.

International prize

Ten years after the Booker rules changed, making writers from any country in the world eligible for the prize (as long as their book is written in English and published in the UK or Ireland), two American authors appear on the 2024 shortlist: Percival Everett and Rachel Kushner. Two Americans also appeared on the shortlist in 2022 and 2023. The last American to win the prize was George Saunders in 2017.

Other countries represented on this year’s shortlist are Canada (Anne Michaels, hoping to be the first Canadian to win since Margaret Atwood in 2019), Australia (Charlotte Wood, hoping to be the first Australian winner since Richard Flanagan in 2014), the Netherlands (Dutch debutant Yael van der Wouden) and the UK. Should she win, Samantha Harvey would be the first British winner since Douglas Stuart in 2020.

Publishing pedigree 

The shortlist features five publishers and imprints with strong Booker credentials. Two of the six books are published by Jonathan Cape (Creation Lake and Orbital), with the others published by Viking (The Safekeep), Sceptre (Stone Yard Devotional), Bloomsbury (Held) and Mantle (James). 

Cape has published eight previous Booker winners, in 1974, 1976, 1981, 1984, 1991, 1998, 2007 and 2011. Bloomsbury last won the prize in 2017 with George Saunders’ Lincoln in the Bardo and Viking last won in 1995 with Pat Barker’s The Ghost Road. Sceptre titles have been shortlisted four times previously. Mantle, an imprint of Pan Macmillan, appears on the shortlist for the first time.