The 2024 shortlistees on the book that challenged their worldview

Sometimes a book comes along that gives you a metaphorical slap in the face. A book so powerful, it pushes you outside of your comfort zone and alters the way you see the world forever.  

For some, it’s a text that ignites a political or spiritual awakening; for others, it’s a book that provides a new perspective on history and which reshapes their understanding of the past.  

As we approach the Booker Prize 2024 winner ceremony, we asked this year’s shortlisted authors to share the books that have done just this. Whether exploring race, desire, or real-world events, these works left an impact long after the final page.   

Anne Michaels, author of Held 

My books require much research, so most of my reading is non-fiction, where a single fact can change everything and suddenly affirm you have finally reached the right depth. This research changes the way I think about the world, or confirms something so essential that a web of connections emerges, a magnification of mystery. But there are also books that change our relation to the world by strengthening our resolve, our courage. Books that witness war, that seek justice, that work their quiet defiance across generations. Poems that witness political oppression – spit in the eye of the oppressor, a message left for the others. Everyone will have their own list and mine is too long to even barely begin here… Nadezhda Mandelstam’s two-volume memoir, Hope Against Hope and Hope Abandoned; Etty Hillesum’s An Interrupted Life, the poems of Nâzım Hikmet…  

Charlotte Wood, author of Stone Yard Devotional 

That Deadman Dance by Noongar (West Australian Aboriginal) novelist Kim Scott, centres on first contact between British invaders and the Noongar people. With a lithely shifting point of view and a playful, optimistic lyricism, Scott’s novel was the first I read to challenge the pernicious myth that settler brutality towards Australia’s first inhabitants was historically inevitable; ‘just the way things were’. Meticulously researched, the novel brings alive the moment when a choice for respect and collaboration between the two cultures was entirely possible – and devastatingly rejected by the settlers. Scott is a literary master, one of Australia’s very best.   

Yael Van Der Wouden, author of The Safekeep 

Miranda July’s The First Bad Man. The most fascinating and unsettling and somehow still deeply recognisable exploration of desire and queer desire I’ve ever read. The main character’s longing is redirected through imaginary fantasies of others, or the fantasy that she could be someone else. And then there’s the form and language, which surprised me continuously. It made me feel weirder than I perhaps am and less alone than I thought I was.   

Samantha Harvey, author of Orbital 

Miracles by C.S. Lewis. It’s about the centrality of the concept of miracle to Christianity but also makes a soulful argument for the presence of miracles in our daily lives. As a non-Christian, and someone with no formal faith, I love how his writing lends me, and the world I perceive, a quivering sense of the divine. His faith is seductive and electric.   

Percival Everett, author of James 

Chester Himes’s novel Third Generation made me consider the politics of skin colour. I could see my own mother in the mother of the character and so formed a better understanding of people in general. 

Rachel Kushner, author of Creation Lake 

Great Jones Street by Don DeLillo was revelatory in the way it made life suddenly sing as an aggregation of its absurdities. To do this, DeLillo invented something like a new set of social and language rules, and I understood that I was reading the work of a real artist, someone doing something entirely unique.