The Booker longlist is one I have anticipated, but in the past few years it has not inspired me to read from it. The prestigious literary award is given each year to the best novel written in English and published in Britain or Ireland. This year, however, when I really need a few good books, the list holds promise for me.
I’ve already read Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun, and I have Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle on my library list. I will add Frances Spufford’s Light Perpetual where the author imagines how the lives of five children killed by a German V-2 rocket in 1944 might have turned out had they survived the bombing.
Richard Powers, author of the Overstory, has a powerful new story in Bewilderment, to be published in the United States in September. “The novel is set in the near future amid Earth’s slow deterioration. It follows a widowed father of a most unusual and troubled nine-year-old boy, as he turns to an experimental neurological treatment in order to save his son.”
Perhaps you’ll find something too. The full longlist includes:
- Anuk Arudpragasam’s A Passage North
- Rachel Cusk’s Second Place
- Damon Galgut’s The Promise
- Nathan Harris’ The Sweetness of Water
- Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun
- Karen Jennings’ An Island
- Mary Lawson’s A Town Called Solace
- Patricia Lockwood’s No One Is Talking About This
- Nadifa Mohamed’s The Fortune Men
- Richard Powers’ Bewilderment
- Sunjeev Sahota’s China Room
- Maggie Shipstead’s Great Circle
- Francis Spufford’s Light Perpetual
her Brief Lives on its list of summer reads, and Rumaan Alam in her article for the New York Times –
Hotel du Lac Her best-known work (which received the Booker Prize in something of an upset) is about a romance novelist on holiday in Switzerland.
The No Charge Book Bunch 