The Booker Prize Podcast, Episode 6: Longlist reaction

In this episode of The Booker Prize Podcast, we’re joined by Frederick Studemann, literary editor of the Financial Times (and one of the judges for this year’s International Booker Prize), to bring you a Booker Prize 2023 longlist reaction – hot off the press. Listen in as Fred, James and Jo share their opinions of the longlist as a whole, offering a flavour of each of the 13 books that make up this year’s Booker Dozen: it’s speed dating meets the Booker Prize.

Transcripts of The Booker Prize Podcast are generated using both speech recognition software and human transcribers, and as a result, may contain errors.

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James Walton: 

Hello and welcome to the Booker Prize Podcast with me, James Walton. 

Jo Hamya: 

And me, Jo Hamya. 

James Walton: 

And today with our special guest, Fred Studemann. 

Fred Studemann: 

Hello. 

James Walton: 

Fred is the literary editor of The Financial Times and is joining us for a special episode on the recently announced Booker longlist for this year. And we’re surrounded by all 13 of the books here, laid out on the table, and not all of them yet available to the public. Not meaning to sound smug or anything, but we’ve got them all. And the way we’re going to do it is we’re going to, because there’s 13 books, we won’t be able to give them as much time as they probably deserve, but we will give our instant reactions in, I’m afraid, a slightly speed dating approach. So, first of all, let’s just hear the full longlist, Jo. 

Jo Hamya: 

And the books are … 

James Walton: 

Da, da, da. Well, two days ago, da, da, da, da. 

Jo Hamya: 

A Spell of Good Things by Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀. Old God’s Time by Sebastian Barry. Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein. If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery. How to Build a Boat by Elaine Feeney. This Other Eden by Paul Harding. Pearl by Siân Hughes. All the Little Bird-Hearts by Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow. Prophet Song by Paul Lynch. In Ascension by Martin MacInnes. Western Lane by Chetna Maroo. The Bee Sting by Paul Murray. And The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng. 

James Walton: 

Thanks very much, Jo. Fred, what was your initial reaction to the longlist? 

Fred Studemann: 

Well, really very interesting, there’s several names that when I saw it I immediately recognised, and some of them I’ve read a couple. And I was not surprised to see them. My colleague on the books desk, Laura Battle, has been championing Sebastian Barry for months now and she’s threatened to eat all manner of headgear if it doesn’t make it through. So she’s still spared eating her hat. 

James Walton: 

Good. 

Fred Studemann: 

It’s interesting, we may come onto it, having said I recognise some names that I assumed might be in with a shout, it’s interesting to see the ones that, as ever, one thinks should have and didn’t. 

James Walton: 

Should we just do that straightaway? I don’t think we’re allowed to- 

Fred Studemann: 

Do you want to roll call? 

James Walton: 

I don’t think we’re allowed to use the word snub, but how about- 

Fred Studemann: 

No, I don’t think it is a snub. 

James Walton: 

What were you surprised not to see on the list? Rushdie, I suppose? 

Fred Studemann: 

Rushdie would be one. And also, but we can maybe talk about this as to whether as a judge one should take in other factors, which obviously given the terrible year that he’s had might be relevant in his case, but we’ve had, Eleanor Catton’s book, Birnam Wood, which we were very in favour of. Anne Enright, Zadie Smith, I haven’t read, I don’t know, have you read it? 

James Walton: 

No, it’s out now, I think we’re in the clear there, yeah. 

Fred Studemann: 

It’s not out yet, but I think copies are available. Deborah Levy would be another name that I think some people thought might be in with a shout. And as you probably all gather, Tom Crewe had a massive debut moment earlier this year. 

James Walton: 

Not been a good year for the Americans, we will maybe return to. 

Fred Studemann: 

No, I think that would be, to the second bit of my answer to your question would be, I noted with interest, if I’ve done my sums right, there are four Irish authors. And that’s really interesting I think because Ireland more generally, not just this year, and I don’t want to just group it around Sally Rooney, but has been having a real purple patch. 

I’ll tell you a funny … I was in Scotland a year or two ago, and you are now going to say that we’ve got a couple of Scottish authors on this longlist, but I was in Scotland and there was this element of grumpiness and like, “Why have the Irish got all the attention and what have they got that we haven’t got?” 

Because the other thing I think is interesting is they’ve gone for four debuts. So that may be the corollary to the answer of who isn’t on the list. So it feels fresh and different. It doesn’t feel bonkers, which would’ve been … 

James Walton: 

Maybe they should maybe put that on the posters, it doesn’t feel bonkers. Anything you … immediate reaction, Jo? 

Jo Hamya: 

I certainly thought it followed on from the spirit of last year’s longlist, which was also full of new names and quite wide-ranging. It does make me think about the idea of a Booker longlist in general, changing in function as time goes on of what it signals to the world. And yes, I think now we’re probably in a period of longlists heralding lesser known talent or talent that maybe hasn’t been particularly well acclaimed up to this point. 

James Walton: 

Interesting. I must say I was disappointed by Eleanor Catton, I thought that’s a fantastic book. A bit less surprised about Salman Rushdie, I know there was a case to be made, but I must admit, I think if there was an entry for a parody of a Salman Rushdie opening sentence, this would be a pretty good entry. ‘On the last day of her life when she was 247 years old, the blind poet, miracle worker and prophetess Pampa Kampana completed her immense narrative poem about Bisnaga and buried it in a clay pot sealed with wax.’ And that actually is the opening sentence of that book. And for me that was the primary appeal of that book really. It was almost nostalgic, seeing the old boy still doing it, rather than … 

Anyway, let’s move on to the books themselves in, I was going to say a bit more detail, but not loads given the time constraints. And we’ve broken them down into four batches of increasing randomness. 

The first one hangs together quite well, which is the four Irish books. Obviously Ireland, as you’re suggesting. I think this cliche that Irish writing is having a golden age is a cliche because it’s true. I think there’s really a lot of great stuff coming out, big fan of Kevin Barry and Donal Ryan myself. Anyway. And they’ve obviously had a good record. Depending on your politics, the last Irish winner, Anna Burns, from Northern Island. And before that, Anne Enright, John Banville, Roddy Doyle. 

And also slightly controversially, certainly all Irish websites claim this, Iris Murdoch who was born in Dublin of Irish parents, but moved to England when she was a few weeks old, definitely counts as an Irish writer. 

Jo Hamya: 

Via Oxford. 

James Walton: 

Yeah, exactly. Irish Central, the biggest website for Irish Americans certainly claims her as the first Irish winner of the … Anyway. 

So let’s have a look at each of these. And what we’re going to do is introduce, give a brief flavour, and in a slightly speed datey style, any immediate reactions you have. 

So the first Irish novel that’s down is Paul Lynch’s Prophet Song, which is set in an increasingly totalitarian I think dystopian island. According to the back, it says here, ‘On a dark, wet evening in Dublin, scientist and mother-of-four Eilish Stack answers her front door to find the GNSB on her step. Two officers from the newly formed secret police are there to interrogate her husband, a trade unionist’. 

And sure enough, first bit is, ‘The night has come and she has not heard the knocking, standing at the window looking out onto the garden, how the dark gathers without sound, the cherry trees, it gathers the last of the leaves and the leaves do not resist the dark, but accept the dark and whisper. Tired now, the day almost behind her, all that still has to be done before bed, and the children settled in the living room. This feeling of rest for a moment by the glass’. 

And obviously the secret police are on the way. Does that sound of interesting? 

Jo Hamya: 

Oh, that sounds beautiful. 

Fred Studemann: 

Oh, this is one of those that I’m going to read. I haven’t read it yet. I would question the … I would’ve thought Ireland did have a secret service given … but let’s leave that bit. 

James Walton: 

Let’s not, I thought it wasn’t a dystopian island. Ireland is falling apart, the country’s in a grip of government turning towards tyranny. That’s a little harsh on what’s going on at the moment, is it? 

Fred Studemann: 

No, I was very genuinely curious, you can hear it from my accent, I spent the first six years of my life in Cork, so I always … And what’s funny is I think there’s another knock on the door coming with the next book that you’re about to … 

James Walton: 

No spoilers, please, Fred. 

The next one is the oldest Booker hand on the shortlist, which is Sebastian Barry, Old God’s Time. And this one, yes, you’re right, a knock on the door. ‘A recently retired policeman, Tom Kettle, is settling into the quiet of his new home, a lean to annex to a Victorian castle overlooking the Irish Sea. For months, he has barely seen a soul, catching only glimpses of his eccentric landlord and a nervous young mother who have moved in next door. Occasionally fond memories return of his family, his beloved wife, June, and their two children’. 

But then … ‘But when two former colleagues turn up at his door with questions about a decades old case, one which Tom never quite came to terms with, he finds himself pulled into the darkest currents of his past. A beautiful haunting novel in which nothing is quite as it seems’. 

It starts off, ‘Sometime in the sixties, old Mr. Tomalty had put up an incongruous lean to in addition to his Victorian castle, it was a granny flat of modest size, but with some nice touches befitting a putative relative. The carpentry at least was excellent and one wall was encased in something called beauty board. It’s veneer capturing light and mutating it into soft brown darkness’. 

I suspect the appeal of this will be how much you like Sebastian Barry anyway really? 

Jo Hamya: 

Well, I don’t know. So spoiler alert to our listeners, we got the longlist a little bit earlier ahead of time. 

James Walton: 

Yesterday. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah. And I ran to my local Daunt to see how many of them I could flick through. And I’ve read The Secret Scripture, but I’m not particularly au fait with Sebastian Barry’s work. But I did take this home on the basis of a sentence, I opened the page randomly, it came up. And the main character’s shame or maybe anxiety was flickering modestly like a candle. His prose is gorgeous. But more than that, I’m always really intrigued by the idea of a Booker novel that perhaps leans into the area of genre fiction. It’s not particularly what one associates with the Booker Prize, particularly a detective novel. Even though, you were talking about Eleanor Catton, I think there’s a case to be made for The Luminaries being a detective novel. I’m always very curious to read a Booker book that goes more in the direction of mass popular culture, perhaps the way that we were talking about Vernon God Little. 

James Walton: 

Yeah. Well, this does sound, like the old cop who’s … the case he could never quite get out of his mind, the cold case. 

Fred Studemann: 

I think it does explore a lot of familiar themes, this quite well trodden path in Irish writing, which is uncovering the stuff from the past that is bubbling up. 

James Walton: 

You’ve read the book? 

Fred Studemann: 

Yeah, so I should probably not say too much more. I would say, I enjoyed it. 

James Walton: 

No, no, no. You should actually, you probably should talk about it. 

Fred Studemann: 

I enjoyed it and it was very … it’s not quite, the genre, it moves in different ways compared to what you might expect from genre in that it doesn’t follow a necessarily set course. And I had different expectations of it when I read the blurb and then what was actually delivered and how it would come to me. So that was intriguing in how the narrative is delivered. 

James Walton: 

It’s got unicorns in it, I hear? 

Fred Studemann: 

Well, it’s all over, it ends up in America. I should actually stop. 

James Walton: 

Okay. But it has got unicorns and you can confirm the presence of unicorns? 

Fred Studemann: 

I may have seen a unicorn. 

James Walton: 

Gosh, you’re very cagey. Third Irish book, Elaine Feeney’s, How to Build a Boat, which is about a child on the autistic spectrum and his mother. And I believe Elaine Feeney has herself a child on the spectrum. And it starts, ‘Jamie said, “When I grow up, I will be as tall as these trees.” And he sprawled fast like a salamander along a trunk. He climbed to the first branch when Owen said, “Whoa, Jamie, careful.” And lifted the boy back to the ground. And Jamie said, “Did you know that resin from trees makes arrow tops and they’re so hard they can go right through you?” “No, I didn’t know that,” Owen said’. 

So I think from what I’ve read, he then comes up against forces of repression. 

Jo Hamya: 

That first paragraph puts me in mind of something like Lanny by Max Porter or The Trees by Alan Garner. 

James Walton: 

Do we like the sound of this? 

Fred Studemann: 

I’m intrigued, but again … Anyway, doesn’t matter. I know Elaine, so I feel I … 

James Walton: 

So, you like it very much. Okay. 

Fred Studemann: 

I’ll just reserve … I’ll just stand neutral. 

James Walton: 

And then another perhaps more established name, Paul Murray. Who I think was certainly nominated for the Booker with Skippy Dies, which is a big and terrific book about school boys. And this one I believe is a return to the big family, friends novel. 

And according to the jacket, ‘The Barnes family is in trouble. Dicky’s once lucrative car business is going under. But rather than face the music, he’s spending his days in the woods building an apocalypse proof bunker with a renegade handyman. His wife, Imelda, is selling off her jewellery on eBay and half-heartedly dodging the attentions of fast-talking cattle farmer Big Mike. While their teenage daughter, Cass, formally top of her class, seems determined to binge drink her way to her final exams’. 

Does sound like an Irish family saga this. 

‘And 12 year old PJ, in debt to local sociopath, Ears Morgan, is putting the final touches to his grand plan to run away from home. The presence is in meltdown, but the causes lie deep in the past. And it begins. In the next town over, a man had killed his family. He’d nailed the doors shut so they couldn’t get out. The neighbours heard them running through the room screaming for mercy. When he had finished, he turned the gun on himself’. 

Well, I’m in. 

Fred Studemann: 

Yes, I’ll take it off you now. 

James Walton: 

I must admit, I like him and I love the sound of this. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah, I do too. I’m reading for Imelda, I probably will. 

Fred Studemann: 

Yeah, I’m in. 

James Walton: 

Okay, good. Okay. So the most enthusiasm I think on the Irish were for Paul Lynch and Paul Murray, but with distinct interest in the other two. 

Jo Hamya: 

We love a Paul here. 

James Walton: 

Yes. Yeah, no, so everybody’s doing all right on … The Irish have got through their speed dating. 

Jo Hamya: 

So now we come to the next round of our speed dating with the debuts on this year’s Booker Prize longlist. And we’re starting off with Pearl by Sian Hughes. So the premise is that, ‘Marianne is eight years old when her mother goes missing. Left behind with her baby brother and grieving father in a ramshackle house on the edge of a small village, she clings to the fragmented memories of her mother’s love, the smell of fresh herbs, the games they played, and the songs and stories of her childhood. As time passes, Marianne struggles to adjust, fixated on her mother’s disappearance and the secrets she’s sure her father is keeping from her. Discovering a mediaeval poem called Pearl and trusting in its promise of consolation, Marianne sets out to make a visual illustration of it, a task that she returns to over and over but somehow never manages to complete’. 

And we’ve got our first paragraph, ooh, which has a little prologue ahead of it. So, The Wakes. ‘Adam and Eve and Pinchme went down to the river to bathe. Adam and Eve were drowned. Who do you think was saved? At the end of every summer, I take Susanna back to my home village for a sort of carnival called The Wakes. There’s a fancy dress parade and a few fairground rides. A whole ox is roasted on a spit in the playing field. When I was a child, there was a thing called the pram race. The rules of the race were a team of two men to push a pram to the next village and back, one running, one in the pram. They both had to drink a pint of beer at every pub along the way. Each two man team dressed as a mother and baby, one of them in a grotesque old nighty filled with balloon breasts with smeared on lipstick and hair in curlers. The other in a bib, bonnet and bath towel nappy’. What an image? 

James Walton: 

Yeah, that sounds all right to me. Small Cheshire villages might be having their moment as well because we had Treacle Walker, didn’t we? 

Fred Studemann: 

Yeah, curious, I believe she’s a published poet, and this is her first debut fiction. I’m always intrigued by that because that’s something I also learned from the International Booker is just different use of … that extra … 

James Walton: 

I’ve got a slight … published poet, so I’m always a little bit alarmed when they write novels. 

Fred Studemann: 

You think they should stay in their lane or something? 

James Walton: 

Yeah, absolutely. 

Fred Studemann: 

How dare you. 

James Walton: 

No, I don’t mean that. 

Jo Hamya: 

Crowding out the battlefield. 

James Walton: 

Poetic prose, it’s just one of my … 

Fred Studemann: 

Once they do memoir … 

James Walton: 

Yeah, no, poetic prose. I’m never entirely sure. But there’s also, isn’t there, a mediaeval poem, Pearl, that’s I think based on? Did it at university, yeah. 

Fred Studemann: 

I didn’t know that. I’ve never heard of [inaudible 00:17:02] 

James Walton: 

By the same person- 

Fred Studemann: 

This is the wonderful thing actually is you’re seeing things that you, I have to confess, one might have missed. 

Jo Hamya: 

Next up we’ve got If I Survive You by Jonathan Escoffery. And it’s, ‘1979. Topper and Sanya flee to Miami as political violence consumes their native Kingston, Jamaica. But they soon learn that the welcome in America will be far from warm. Trelawny, their youngest son comes of age in a society which regards him with suspicion and confusion, greeting him with the puzzled question, what are you? Their eldest son Delano’s longing for a better future for his own children is equaled only by his recklessness in trying to secure it. As both brothers navigate the obstacles littered in their path, an unreliable father, racism, a financial crisis and Hurricane Andrew, they find themselves pitted against one another. Will their rivalry be the thing that finally tears their family apart?’. 

And our first paragraph is, ‘It begins with what are you hollered from the perimeter of your front yard when you are nine, younger probably. You’ll be asked again throughout junior high school and high school, then out in the world, in strip clubs, in food courts, over the phone and at various menial jobs. The askers are expectant, they demand immediate gratification. Their question lifts you slightly off your pre-adolescent toes, tilting you, not just because you don’t understand it, but because even if you did understand this question, you wouldn’t yet have an answer’. 

James Walton: 

I’ve got a, just as a slight prejudice against poetic prose, slight prejudice in favour of second person actually. I like second person narration a lot. So, I’m in. The controversy about this is that is it short stories or is it a novel, isn’t it? If you wanted to … But it’s interlinked short stories, that’s fine, of course. 

Fred Studemann: 

Does that matter? 

James Walton: 

Not to me, but just watch for a few articles coming up I bet. 

Jo Hamya: 

Isn’t there another Booker novel that had a similar controversy? 

James Walton: 

History of the World in 10 and Half Chapters? 

Fred Studemann: 

I’m intrigued by this. I had marked this one out as one that we needed to have a look at because it’s not out in the UK yet, so I’m very excited by this. And I’m less bothered by anything about whether it’s short stories or not. 

James Walton: 

I’m not at all. Do feel free to cut that. I wasn’t mentioning it because I was bothered, I was mentioning it because it’s a thing that got mentioned. 

Jo Hamya: 

I don’t know, James, I think I have to slightly disagree with your whole bit against poetic prose. I think it’s- 

James Walton: 

It’s coming back. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah, just let me get that bee out of my bonnet. I think it’s great grounds for invention. Look at modernism. 

James Walton: 

No, it’s a prejudice that can be conquered by the book of course. But if it says on the dust flap, a former poet brings all their gifts of poetry to bear on this wonderful tale, I think, “Oh God.” But then sometimes they actually do, so that’s fine. 

Jo Hamya: 

I think that was a stunning first paragraph. 

James Walton: 

Yeah, so do I. 

Jo Hamya: 

And actually it seems to be endorsed by many a Booker writer, Marlon James, Percival Everett. 

So next up we’ve got Western Lane by Chetna Maroo. And before I read, I do have to say, you’re not supposed to judge a book by its cover, but this is so groovy, it reminds me of a disco ball. It’s two sleeping girls curled up in this hollow, and then there are tiles which spring out from them that are orange and purple and grey. And I just think if I went into a bookshop, this would be the first thing I’d pick up. So well done. 

‘11 year old Gopi has been playing squash since she was old enough to hold a racket. When her mother dies, her father enlists her in a quietly brutal training regimen and the game becomes her world. Slowly she grows apart from her sisters, her life is reduced to the sport guided by its rhythms, the serve, the volley, the drive, the shot, and its echo. But on the court she’s not alone, she’s with her pa, she’s with Ged, a 13-year-old boy with his own formidable talent, she’s with the players who have come before her. She’s in awe’. 

James Walton: 

So this has got an interestingly, almost defiantly long opening sentence, has it? 

Jo Hamya: 

No, opening paragraph I think, the first sentence is reasonable length, James. 

‘I don’t know if you’ve ever stood in the middle of a squash court on the tee and listened to what is going on next door. What I’m thinking of is the sound from the next court of a ball hit clean and hard. It’s a quick low pistol shot of a sound with a close echo. The echo, which is the ball striking the wall of the court, is louder than the shot itself. This is what I hear when I remember the year after our mother died and our father had us practising at Western Lane two, three, four hours a day’. 

James Walton: 

That sounds really good to me. And in obviously instant judgments. The Mighty Walzer by Howard Jacobson, which is my favourite of his novels, is set in the world of table tennis, of adolescent table tennis. And it is terrific. And the way a sport that you half know is brought to life as well as all the other stuff that’s going on and the reason why they’re playing it. 

Fred Studemann: 

Well, I dipped in just briefly before we met, and I read on actually because it just swept you in. So I’m intrigued by that. I’m conscious that I’m saying yes to everything. Are we allowed to say … 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes, we are, one of the remits of this podcast is we are occasionally allowed to say no. No, I would definitely go for it on the basis of those. I think- 

Fred Studemann: 

You like the cover, you’re gone for the- 

Jo Hamya: 

No, it’s not even the cover, I’m just a fan of using a physical conceit to drive sentences forward. And so I really like this idea of the rhythm of a tennis ball going back and forth across the court being something that formally influences the novel. Or even the idea of the game of squash formally structuring the novel. So definitely I’m hugely intrigued in that. 

James Walton: 

I might just note in passing that there is a big trend in nonfiction at the moment, particularly commercial nonfiction, is that people get over grief by taking up something. 

Fred Studemann: 

I thought it was going on nature walks. 

James Walton: 

It can be anything. 

Jo Hamya: 

Isn’t that just an extension of flaneuring? I’m so sick of reading books about flaneuring. 

James Walton: 

No, there’s a lot of her husband died and she took up wild swimming or a child died and they took up ceramics. 

Fred Studemann: 

I can tell you on good authority, there’s lots of people that go to Wales. 

Jo Hamya: 

Our final debut is Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow’s, All the Little Bird-Hearts. ‘Sunday Forrester lives with her 16-year-old daughter Dolly in the house she grew up in. She does things more carefully than most people. On quiet days she must eat only white foods. Her etiquette handbook guides her through confusing social situations. And to escape she turns to her treasury of Sicilian folklore. The one thing very much out of her control is Dolly, her clever, headstrong daughter now on the cusp of leaving home. Into this carefully ordered world step Vita and Rollo, a couple who move in next door, disarm Sunday with their charm and proceed to deliciously break just about every rule in Sunday’s book. Soon they are in and out of each other’s homes. And Sunday feels loved and accepted like never before. But beneath Vita and Rollo’s polish lies something else, something darker. For Sunday has precisely what Vita has always wanted for herself, a daughter of her own’. 

Sounds a bit Rosemary’s Baby, doesn’t it? 

James Walton: 

The second neuro diverse book of the list by the sounds as well. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah. So we’ve got our first paragraph headed, well, I think this section is headed, ‘Fire can be mistaken for light’. And it’s headed, ‘The Lake District’. ‘It was only three years ago that I saw Vita for the first time. The day began as all my days always did then, greeting a daughter for whom adolescence meant allowing me increasingly smaller glimpses of herself. I woke her before showering and dressing, then predictably had to wake her for a second time before going downstairs. I was in a longstanding white food routine that summer, and my meals typically comprised various breakfasts, toast, cereal or crumpets. 

On days when food does not have to be dry scrambled eggs or omelettes, can also count as white. I cannot tell if it is a day on which an egg is a white food until I hold one in my hand. It is a small but real joy to me that as an adult I can decide without explanation whether eggs qualify as white and therefore edible on any given day. Without being told I’m making a show …’ Oh, how odd. Sorry. ‘Without being told I’m making a show of myself, that I am hysterical, attention seeking and to be ignored until I eat something that is violently coloured’. 

James Walton: 

I believe the author herself is neuro diverse in this case, is that … 

Jo Hamya: 

There’s a very … it tripped me up, a sentence break, and then a new clause that begins, ‘so on any given day, full stop, and then without being told I’m making a show of myself’, it’s just not where I would’ve put a full stop. But I wonder if in a way the prose is supposed to reflect neuro divergent thoughts. 

James Walton: 

I suspect it probably is. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yeah, I can see that appealing to a lot of people, especially younger readers who are a lot more at ease with talking about any neuro divergencies that they have. 

Yeah. So as I say that, that full stop quite suddenly and then the vault into a sentence without really any preparation, it was almost like reading the middle of a sentence instead of the beginning of one. What do you make of that, guys? 

Fred Studemann: 

Well, it’s difficult, it’s interesting you said that because when you were reading I noticed there was that moment where you were recalibrating. And it suggests that maybe as one goes in, there’s going to be more to come. I just don’t know, I haven’t read a lot around this. But you’ve mentioned that the author is neuro diverse and it’s going to deal with those issues. Perhaps there’s going to be a bit more using language, using grammar to reflect that. So I’d be interested to, we don’t have the time now, but if you’d been able to read a bit more we could have maybe seen, is that where she’s taking it? 

James Walton: 

And that’s the problem, to be honest, as we know, we agonised about how to cover 13 books in a single podcast, and this was the slightly unsatisfactory compromise we came up with. It’s working quite well for most of the books I think. But I think for that one in particular, it’s very unfair to … if it’s going to use that and develop it, then we should … And I’d be interested to see how it did. 

Jo Hamya: 

So now we’ll move on to Fred’s pile of novels. 

Fred Studemann: 

Which category am I in? I’ve forgotten now. 

James Walton: 

You’re in the, this is where starts to get random, Irish pretty good, debut pretty good, you are on globe-trotting. 

Fred Studemann: 

That’s very suitable, yeah. The FT is very global, and I’m very global, Cork to God knows where. So I’m going to start with Paul Harding, This Other Eden, which comes garlanded with great praise for him and his past works, including from The FT. Not that I was aware of that. 

‘The profoundly moving story of an island refuge and a community of outcasts living on borrowed time. Set at the beginning of the 20th century and inspired by historical events, This Other Story tells the story of Apple Island, an enclave off the coast of the United States where waves of castaways in flight from society and its judgement have landed and built a home. Full of lyricism and power, This Other Eden explores the hopes and dreams and resilience of those seen not to fit in a world brutally intolerant of difference. 

Let’s go in. If it’s all right with you, I will ignore the prologue from the Maine Coast Heritage Trust, which is quite long, or are you all- 

James Walton: 

Deal. No. 

Jo Hamya: 

[inaudible 00:29:02] 

Fred Studemann: 

I want to go straight in. ‘Benjamin Honey, American, Bantu, Igbu, born enslaved, freed or fled at 15, only he ever knew, ship’s carpenter, aspiring orchardist arrived on the island with his wife, Patience, nee Rafferty, Galway girl in 1793. He brought his bag of tools, gifts from a grateful captain he had saved from drowning or plunder from a ship on which he had mutinied and murdered the captain, depending on who said, and a watertight wooden box containing 12 jute pouches. Each pouch held seeds for a different variety of apple’. 

‘Honey collected the seeds during his years as a field worker and later as a sailor. He remembered being in an orchard as a child, although not where or when, with his mother or with a woman whose face over the years had become what he pictured as his mother’s. And he remembered the fragrance of the trees and their fruit. The memory became a vision of the garden to which he meant to return. No mystery, it was Eden. Years passed and he added seeds to his collection. He recited the names at night before he slept, Ashmead’s Kernel, Flower of Kent, Duchess of Oldenburg and Warner’s King, Ballyfatten, Catshead. 

James Walton: 

This is based on an interesting true story, I did read up a bit about. 

Fred Studemann: 

Oh right, okay. 

James Walton: 

Malaga Island off Maine, which I think had been settled by, I want to say runaway slaves, ex-slaves. Anyway, people from all over as that mixed thing. And then in 1912 it was more or less wiped out by the state of Maine and the people were taken away. And dodgy scientific experiments were carried out on the people there. 

That sounds a very interesting story to me. I’ve got a prejudice on this one too. It just seems to be slightly needy about the idea that we’re the best generation ever, how terrible people were in the … You know what I mean? A bit. Please tell us we’re the best people who ever lived, please. We wouldn’t have made these mistakes. There’s something- 

Fred Studemann: 

Yeah, it never happened with us. 

James Walton: 

Which I find a little bit easy. 

Fred Studemann: 

Jo, what do you think? 

Jo Hamya: 

Sounds like there’s an unreliable narrator in there. But if that’s the case, I always expect something a bit more exciting, something that pulls me up and makes me wonder. And whilst it is very beautiful, it does so far seem slightly tame. But then again, Harding is a Pulitzer winner, so what do I know? 

Fred Studemann: 

So, we move on to Ayọ̀bámi Adébáyọ̀, A Spell of Good Things, which was published earlier this year. The writer is from Nigeria and part of a whole new generation that is coming through in Nigerian literature and is getting a lot of attention. 

‘Adébáyọ̀ unveils a dazzling story of modern Nigeria and two families caught in the riptides of wealth, power, romantic obsession and political corruption. Eniola is tall for his age, a boy who looks like a man, his father has lost his job, so he spends his days running errands for the local tailor, collecting newspapers and begging, dreaming of a big future’. 

Goes on to describe then, there’s a girl who is a golden girl, who’s the perfect child of a wealthy family and now an exhausted young doctor in her first year of practise. And she’s beloved by Kunle, the volatile son of family friends. So it sets up a quite complex scene I think, but very vivid. 

And the first paragraph is, ‘After one of her apprentices read the notice of meeting out loud to her, Karao threw it across the room into a dustbin. Some politician’s wife wanted to give a talk to the Tailoring Association and their president had agreed to welcome the woman to their next meeting. And of course the president thought it meant something to mention that this politician’s wife was the daughter of a tailor. Karao was almost sure this was a lie. Those people would claim to be your kinsman if it would help them get into power. It irritated her that they would waste time listening to this woman campaigning for her husband. This was not why she paid her Tailoring Association dues’. 

James Walton: 

I’m in. 

Jo Hamya: 

You’re in. 

James Walton: 

I do like a modern Nigerian novel actually as well, particularly of a sociological political climate, which it sounds as if this is. 

Jo Hamya: 

It sounds fabulous, but one of these days, and this might be actually spitting in an entire tradition of African literature, I would love to read an African novel, and maybe even particularly an Nigerian novel, that wasn’t also at the same time a commentary on an entire nation. 

James Walton: 

It does sound like a state of the nation book, this. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes. I would just love to read a local … concerned purely within the structures of a particular family dynamic or existential crisis African novel 

Fred Studemann: 

For that reason I’m afraid I’m in. I’m going to disagree with you on this. I loved that. Right. Shall we quickly move on to the last one of mine in the global category. Tan Twan Eng and I should declare Twan was a fellow judge on the International Booker and we’re mates now. This is a wonderful novel, The House of Doors, I have read it, beautifully presented, seeing you like … it is wonderful. 

Jo Hamya: 

Yes, I have it at home, it’s gorgeous. 

Fred Studemann: 

And it’s called The House of Doors and the publisher’s blurb is as follows. ‘It is 1921, and at Cassowary House in the Straits Settlements of Penang, Robert Hamlyn is a well-to-do lawyer and his steely wife, Lesley, a society hostess. Their lives are invigorated when Willie, an old friend of Robert’s, comes to stay. Willie Somerset Maugham is one of the greatest writers of his day, but he’s beleaguered by an unhappy marriage, ill health and business interests that have all gone badly awry. He’s also struggling to write. The more Lesley’s friendship with Willie grows, the more clearly she sees him as he is, a man who has no choice but to mask his true self’. 

Then I’ll go straight to the first paragraph. Needless to say, the book does begin with a line from Somerset Maugham. ‘Fact and fiction are so intermingled in my work that now looking back on it, I can hardly distinguish one from the other’. 

And then the book itself, having told us that it’s largely set in Penang, Malaysia in the 1920s, it actually opens with the character, Lesley, in South Africa in 1947. ‘A story like a bird of the mountain can carry a name beyond the clouds, beyond even time itself. Willie Maugham said that to me many years ago. He has not appeared in my thoughts in a long time, but as I gaze at the mountains from my stoop on this autumn morning, I can hear his thin dry voice, his diction, precise, correct like everything else about him. In my memory, I see him again on his last night in our old house on the other side of the world, the two of us on the veranda behind the house, talking quietly, the full moon, a coracle of light adrift above the sea. Everyone else in the house had already retired to bed. When morning came, he sailed from Penang and I never saw him again’. 

Jo Hamya: 

I have to fess up and say, I’ve already got this at home. And I bought it purely because I seem to be having a good year with historical fiction. And I love the idea of a meta-fiction of a story within a story and the mixing of real life into an imagined narrative. And I’m a child of auto-fiction, so that appeals to me. I think it sounds absolutely gorgeous. 

James Walton: 

It had me at, ‘it is 1921 in the Straits of Penang’, and then, not only that, he brought in Somerset Maugham, who I’ve read some of his stuff and obviously was a massive figure in his day, not so much now. Completely enormously wealthy from his writing, wasn’t he, I did read- 

Fred Studemann: 

Well … but the book partly deals with that, it alludes to it, and I won’t give it away too much, but he made a lot of money and then didn’t all go so well. 

James Walton: 

No, he’s fascinating, yeah, absolutely. Maybe of all of them. 

Fred Studemann: 

And it does a great job, that sounds a bit dismissive, of actually restoring Somerset Maugham actually from a modern readership, because he would be one of those figures who has sadly drifted out. 

James Walton: 

A complete name, just a name. 

Fred Studemann: 

And it brings him back. And as well as just, without being too heavy-handed, directs you towards some of his work. And one of the key elements in the plot is one of his central works. [inaudible 00:37:41] 

James Walton: 

And yeah, you do tend to think of him as, I don’t know, a writer with a long cigarette holder and a dressing gown. But I read actually for, we used to do a thing at the Cheltenham Festival called the Cheltenham Booker Prize, which would pick a year and work out what the best book of that year was before the Booker Prize existed. And one of them, I had to read Of Human Bondage, which is enormously long, but it’s very painful and full of … he’s not just this posh toff. 

Fred Studemann: 

Oh no, no, and that comes out, it’s much more complex. 

James Walton: 

Yeah, very complex and very interesting. 

Fred Studemann: 

And I think the other thing is it does, it’s not uncomplicated, this is partly a story from the veranda and it is sundowners and it is the Imperial twilight, but this author manages to handle that in a very good way. 

James Walton: 

And a book that mentions being on a veranda early doors, absolutely marvellous. 

Jo Hamya: 

And so now we’re going to remedy the complaints of the Scottish people with a category of novels from Scottish authors. 

James Walton: 

No, no, it’s not even that I’m afraid, Jo, I was struggling a bit by this point. It’s authors who live in Scotland. 

Jo Hamya: 

Oh, authors who live in Scotland. Christ. 

James Walton: 

One of whom is Scottish and one of whom I think is Canadian. Authors who live in Scotland, perfectly solid category. 

Jo Hamya: 

We start with Sarah Bernstein’s Study for Obedience. And Sarah Bernstein was also included on this year’s Granta Best of Young British Novelists. 

‘A young woman moves from the place of her birth to the remote northern country of her forebears to be a housekeeper to her brother, whose wife has recently left him. Soon after her arrival a series of inexplicable events occurs, collective bovine hysteria, the demise of a ewe and her nearly born lamb, a local dog’s phantom pregnancy, a potato blight. She notices that the local suspicion about incomers in general seems to be directed with some intensity at her. And she senses a mounting threat that lies just beyond the garden gate. And as she feels the hostility growing, pressing at the edges of her brother’s property, she fears that should rumblings in the town gather themselves into a more defined shape, who knew what might happen, what one might be capable of doing’. 

Our first paragraph goes, ‘It was the year the sow eradicated her piglets, it was a swift and menacing time. One of the local dogs was having a phantom pregnancy. Things were leaving one place and showing up in another. It was springtime when I arrived in the country, an east wind blowing, an uncanny wind as it turned out. Certain things began to arise, the pigs came later, though not much. And even if I had only recently arrived, had no livestock care taking responsibilities, had only been in to look safely on one side of the electric fence and knew they were right to hold me responsible. But all that, as I said, came later. 

Thoughts, feelings? 

James Walton: 

I’m discovering prejudices I never realised I had ever. Unnamed countries. What’s the point of them? No, obviously a country, but it is an actual country. And it’s like those 18th century books, I was born in the town of W-. Tell us the name of the town, it doesn’t matter. I believe it turns out that she’s Jewish, and there’s memories of the Holocaust in this unnamed place. A bit of puzzlement in the reviews I read as to what on earth the country could be. It seems to be understandably unnamed because it doesn’t really fit any of them. I don’t know about this one, I must say. 

Fred Studemann: 

Yeah, I’m puzzled a bit, I’ll be honest. 

Jo Hamya: 

So this is another of the novels that I picked up in Daunt and took home. And I took it home mainly as a point of curiosity because of the drama around the Granta list. And I haven’t read any of Sarah Bernstein’s work before. And so I have read the first few pages of this and was actually quite unconvinced. 

But that being said, reading it again now I feel my mind slightly changing. Which is meant to be the hallmark of a Booker novel, re-readability and the ability to read something new into a book. So I think I’m going to take it off my shelf rather than run to a bookshop. 

And then our final longlisted novel is In Ascension by Martin MacInnes. ‘Leigh grew up in Rotterdam, drawn to the waterfront as an escape from her unhappy home life and volatile father. Enchanted by the undersea world of her childhood, she excels in marine biology, travelling the globe to study ancient organisms. When a trench is discovered in the Atlantic Ocean, Leigh joins the exploration team, hoping to find evidence of the earth’s first life forms. What she instead finds calls into question everything we know about her own beginnings. Her discovery leads Leigh into the Mojave Desert and an ambitious new space agency. Drawn deeper into the agency’s work, she learns that the Atlantic trench is only one of several related phenomena from across the world. Each piece linking up to suggest a pattern beyond human understanding. Leigh knows that to continue working with the agency will mean leaving behind her declining mother and her younger sister. And faces an impossible choice, to remain with her family or to embark on a journey across the breadth of the cosmos’. 

James Walton: 

So we have our first bit of science fiction maybe. 

Jo Hamya: 

‘One. I was born in the lowest part of the country, 22 feet beneath the sea. When my sister arrived three years later, we moved south into the city proper, Rotterdam’s northern district. The land was newly excavated, freshly claimed from the sea floor, dredged by ships and reinforced by concrete. Part of the street came loose, the ground underneath still soft. I remember burning incense, a brackish smell indoors as if every moment were a spell, a scene that had to be called into being’. 

James Walton: 

I don’t know. 

Jo Hamya: 

What. 

James Walton: 

It’s just, I don’t know about the opening bit. 

Jo Hamya: 

That was great, James. 

James Walton: 

No, it sounds like, no, hold on a minute, I didn’t say it wasn’t great, I just … but just, no, the blurb got me more than the opening sentence. 

Fred Studemann: 

Yeah, I’d agree, I was intrigued. And I’ve got a, you’re probably both going to sigh when I say I’m intrigued by all these weirdly undiscovered bits of … the deep trenches in nature- 

James Walton: 

Yeah, that sounds great. 

Fred Studemann: 

What was the, deep time they were all, there were all these non-fiction books about that. That totally caught my imagination a few years ago. And I was wondering if it was going to … how much it was going to go into that. 

James Walton: 

Here’s a hard question, I’ll leave dangling for everybody. How many Booker novels have taken place in outer space? In the meantime, we probably need to make some decisions then. We’ve come to the end of that dash, that speed dating dash through 13 novels of accomplishment and much effort from the authors and so on. And sorry about this, Fred, but the end bit is, and again, listeners, we do appreciate how random this is.,And we have not read all the books, but we are each going to choose one that really, really we like the sound of. And seeing as guests go first, Fred, what would you like to do? 

Fred Studemann: 

Okay, well, the first thing I’m going to do is make my life a little bit easier because I’ve got far too many choices that I’d want to make. I’m going to remove my past dates, the books that I’ve read, we’ve already moved on, we’re out of that relationship. 

Jo Hamya: 

The exes. 

Fred Studemann: 

The exes. 

James Walton: 

I like your persistence with the metaphor. And that’s The House of Doors and Old God’s Time. 

Fred Studemann: 

House of Doors and Old God’s Time, two fine books, would recommend that now, and now you’ve got me there because I’ve got several that I really … and the rules say I have to choose one, right? 

James Walton: 

Yeah. Rules, a bit over stated for the random nature of this podcast. 

Fred Studemann: 

Rules are rules, yeah. Okay, well, I had four on my hot list, which were Paul Murray, The Bee Sting; If I Survive You, Jonathan Escoffery; Prophet Song, Paul Lynch; and Elaine Feeney’s How to Build a Boat. But I am going to go for Prophet Song. 

Jo Hamya: 

Perfect. 

James Walton: 

And just to make it even harder, Jo, you can’t pick the same book as anybody else. 

Jo Hamya: 

Oh great. I’m going to follow Fred’s logic here and say that I’ve bought a fair few of these, therefore I’m … but I haven’t read them. I’m going to say that I’m in situation-ships with some of them. Those are The House of Doors, Old God’s Time and the Sarah Bernstein, which is Study for Obedience. 

So having already messed them about a bit. Out of the remainder, I would say that I’m really torn between, I’m actually quite surprised at myself, I’m torn between All the Little Bird-Hearts because I’m really keen to see how a neuro divergent sentence structure works. And I’m torn between In Ascension by Martin MacInnes. And this is what I love about Booker is that I think everything that I read for it is so outside my rather bougie lit woman tastes. 

And I’m going to go for In Ascension just because, as you say, James, I don’t know that I’ve ever read a Booker novel in space. And I really was so disappointed by Extrapolations. And I think I’m fairly curious to see how climate change literature is going to evolve over the next few years and how that subject is going to be handled broadly within publishing. 

James Walton: 

Okay. And I’m torn between A Spell of Good Things, If I Survive You and my top two, probably The Bee Sting and The House of Doors. But let’s face it, Somerset Maugham on a veranda in Penang, it’s got to be The House of Doors by Tan Twan Eng. 

Jo Hamya: 

Well, we’ve made our choices, and now it’s time for you to make yours. Please do get in touch, whether it’s through Twitter, the comment section of wherever you’re listening to this podcast or even email to tell us which one of the Booker dozen, or in this case, Booker 13, you’ll be taking home. 

James Walton: 

Well, thanks very much, Fred, for joining us today. It was great to have you. 

Fred Studemann: 

It was great to be here, gosh. 

James Walton: 

Really enjoyed having. And should say that the shortlist of six books will be announced on September the 21st. We’ll definitely have a podcast about that. And we’ll even have read the books by then. So that will be good. 

Jo Hamya: 

Imagine. 

James Walton: 

And the winner will be announced on November the 26th. 

Jo Hamya: 

That’s it for this week. If you haven’t already followed the show, please do and remember to leave a rating. 

James Walton: 

You can find us at thebookerprizes.com and on Twitter, Facebook, Instagram, TikTok and Substack at thebookerprizes. 

Jo Hamya: 

Join us next week where we’ll be discussing our book of the month for August, Loitering with Intent by Muriel Spark. Until then, bye. 

James Walton: 

Goodbye. 

Fred Studemann: 

Goodbye. 

James Walton: 

The Booker Prize Podcast is hosted by Jo Hamya and me, James Walton. It’s produced and edited by Kevin Meolo and the executive producer is John Davenport. It’s a Daddy’s SuperYacht production for the Booker Prizes.