Whether they are floating in space, on the run from slave owners in 19th-century Mississippi or battling a plague of mice in rural Australia, many of the characters in the novels on this year’s Booker Prize shortlist are preoccupied with the idea of ‘home’. They are longing for it, exiled from it, clinging to it, reflecting on it or trying to create a new version of it. The six books approach this theme in ways that feel original and timeless, and reveal much about the world we are living in today.    

The loss of home, the search for a place to be at peace and the question of belonging are fundamental to stories from ancient Greece all the way through to 21^st-century narratives about displacement and asylum. In writers’ imaginations, home may be a house, place, people, traditions, ideas, but whatever form it takes it is fundamental to how characters are perceived by themselves and others. Home may even be, as the Canadian author Anne Michaels shows in her poetic novel Held, a collection of objects – in her case, books: 

‘He joined her on the sofa where she was reading – when she came home, always one of her mother’s books, with her mother’s name, Anna, carefully written on the inside cover, and the date and city where Anna had bought it – Jane Eyre, The Horse’s Mouth, Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man – the bindings gone completely soft, re-read countless times  – to prove to herself she was home again.’

Many readers will recognise what Michaels is describing here. Indeed, when I look across the room where I am writing, I see shelves of books that have travelled with me through time, relationships and multiple places that I have called home. I have owned some of those copies longer than I have ever lived at one address and I have packed, unpacked, read and re-read them more times than I care to remember. 

The classic novels listed in Michaels’ passage above belong to the late mother of one of her characters and Held is not the only novel on the shortlist in which a person grieves for their mother. The same is true of the unnamed narrator of Stone Yard Devotional, the astronaut Chie in Orbital and Isabel, the young Jewish Dutch Holocaust survivor in Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep who, at the start of this indelible debut novel, is living alone in her family home and steadfastly preserving it in her mother’s memory. 

Some of these protagonists are dealing with recent bereavement, while others lost their mothers decades ago, but for each the reverberations are unending and are bound up with how they think about home. For the narrator in Charlotte Wood’s novel, grief following her mother’s death upended her world and sent her stumbling through her life, rootlessly, eventually settling in a convent in rural New South Wales, near her hometown. 

At the start of the novel, Wood’s narrator leaves behind her life in Sydney and goes to live at the convent. There she finds order and devotion which give structure to her days. At first, the atmosphere strikes her as ‘shockingly peaceful’, but affords her the breathing space to be able to reflect on her childhood. Her memories, conveyed in vignettes, are among the most impactful passages of any of the books on the shortlist. Often they involve cruelty in her childhood community, especially towards outsiders, such as refugees from Vietnam, and those who are marked out by poverty or illness. The place she describes has the classic elements of a small town, where being known offers possibilities and limitations which encapsulate both the comfort and claustrophobia of home. 

The narrator previously worked as a conservationist and this short, piercing novel is full of concern for the state of the environment. There is an ecological element to her concept of home which again is connected to her mother. She recalls: ‘My mother used to hold out a heap of garden soil in two cupped hands, marvelling, calling me over to sniff and feel the moist black clumps, to see a pink worm coiling from them. Sometimes it seemed she loved the earth itself more than the plants.’

Like Wood’s nuns, the homesick astronauts in Orbital exist at a remove from ordinary life, seeing the world from the extraordinary perspective of space. From their spectacular vantage point, they contemplate their relation to their planet, its paradoxical smallness and the immensity of what will be lost if we keep failing to look after it. ‘Before long, for all of them, a desire takes hold,’ writes Harvey, the sole English writer on the shortlist. ‘It’s the desire – no, the need (fuelled by fervour) – to protect this huge yet tiny earth. This thing of such miraculous and bizarre loveliness. This thing that is, given the poor choice of alternatives, so unmistakably home.’

The astronauts’ time in space is a combination of humdrum routines – nearly every day is the same – and overwhelming experiences which transform their idea of home: ‘Everything that speaks of being in space – which is everything – ambushes them with happiness, and it isn’t so much that they don’t want to go home but that home is an idea that has imploded – grown so big, so distended and full, that it’s caved in on itself.’

What if you were never free, even in the place where you had lived since birth and which you knew as your home? And what if you knew that your ancestors had been deracinated from their homes on another continent and enslaved in this new world? These are two of the questions that drive Everett’s James, a retelling of Mark Twain’s 1884 classic but now controversial The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of an enslaved Black man in the American South on the eve of the Civil War.

The eponymous James is referred to by his owners as ‘Jim’ and must guard secrets about his true self, including the fact that, unbeknownst to them, he can read and write. His private world, where he writes himself into being, is a second life and an alternative home to the one he is denied by slavery. Everett leaves you in no doubt about James’ agony and fury at the injustice of his fate as the twice-Booker Prize shortlisted novelist conveys his protagonist’s interior life in a way that Twain never did. In a US election year, Everett’s novel shatters some of America’s founding myths all over again and, from the wreckage, constructs a voice that feels at once rescued from history and utterly contemporary.  

When James discovers that he will be sold to a new owner in New Orleans, and separated from his wife and daughter, he is forced to flee, leaving his home and the people he loves. Everett is unsparing in his depiction of the violence of slavery but hilarious in exposing its absurdity, as in the scene when another character, who through a series of unexpected events ropes James into performing in a minstrel show, tells him: ‘You’re black, but they won’t let you into the auditorium if they know that, so you have to be white under the makeup so that you can look black to the audience.’

Names, like homes, are integral to a person’s identity. For James, reclaiming his name is an act of resistance, while Wood’s narrator is unnamed, perhaps as a symbol of the austerity to which she has reduced her life. Then there is Sadie Smith, the pseudonym that the 34-year-old American spy who narrates Rachel Kushner’s Creation Lake goes by while infiltrating an eco-activist group in France, as way of concealing her identity. Kushner’s characters have often had ambivalent relationships with names, right back to the young woman protagonist in The Flamethrowers who is referred to as Reno because that’s the name of her hometown.

Sadie’s work, initially with the US government but now for a shady, private group, has unmoored her and she purports to have little interest in home, living in a perpetual state of exile and forming fake bonds with people who she intends to betray eventually. The question of who is deceiving who, however, turns out to be less straightforward than it at first seems, something Sadie might have understood if she had a firmer sense of self and home.

From the American girl living in pre-revolutionary Cuba in her debut, Telex From Cuba, through the women prisoners in The Mars Room, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2018, to Sadie and her cave-dwelling target in Creation Lake, Kushner’s books are peopled by individuals for whom home is an unstable concept. She takes these examples to an extreme to pose questions about the way many of us live, work and survive today. Furthermore, in a world where millions of people are being uprooted by war and environmental crisis, relationships with home are increasingly complicated. Home and exile are inexhaustible subjects and the novels on this year’s Booker Prize shortlist tell essential, new stories that explore the changing nature of the human struggle to belong.