Need A New Read? Take a Look At This Year’s Booker Prize Shortlist

Last year four out of six of the Booker Prize shortlist were books written by incredible Irish authors – and rightly so!

Irish author Paul Lynch has become the sixth Irish author to ever win the Booker Prize, and his novel Prophet Song picked up the prestigious award.

Unfortunately this year, there are no Irish authors on the shortlist but that doesn’t mean we shouldn’t be reading the books!

Take a look at the Booker Prize shortlist books that you should add to your bookshelf.

James – Percival Everett

This is a retelling of the American classic, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn from the enslaved Jim’s point of view. It has captured the hearts of people around the globe with a film currently being in the works to be produced by Steven Spielberg.

When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a man in New Orleans, separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson Island until he can formulate a plan.

Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father, recently returned to town.

As all readers of American literature know, thus begins the dangerous and transcendent journey by raft down the Mississippi River toward the elusive and too-often-unreliable promise of the Free States and beyond.

Orbital – Samantha Harvey

Ever wanted to know what it would be like to watch earth orbit in space?

Well then try this book which follows a group of astronauts in the International Space Station as they collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body.

Spending their days watching earth, they spend most of their time thinking about it millions of miles away from it.

The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is earth without humanity?

Creation Lake – Rachel Kushner

Creation Lake is a novel about a secret agent, a thirty-four-year-old American woman who is sent to do dirty work in France.

“Sadie Smith” is how the narrator introduces herself to her lover, to the rural commune of French subversives on whom she is keeping tabs, and to the reader.

Sadie has met her love, Lucien, a young and well-born Parisian, by “cold bump”—making him believe the encounter was accidental. Like everyone Sadie targets, Lucien is useful to her and used by her.

Sadie operates by strategy and dissimulation, based on what her “contacts”—shadowy figures in business and government—instruct. First, these contacts want her to incite provocation. Then they want more.

Held – Anne Michaels

This novel spans four generations of connections and consequences that ignite and reignite as the century unfolds.

We meet John in 1917, on a battlefield near the River Escaut. He lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory as the snow falls—a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night.

In 1920, John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near a different river. He is alive but still not whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and tries to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts with messages he cannot understand.

Weaving generations and memories throughout this is one of the books that will stay with you forever.

The Safekeep – Yael van der Wouden

This novel takes place in the post-war Dutch countryside. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is truly over.

Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel knows her life is as it should be—led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis brings his graceless new girlfriend Eva, leaving her at Isabel’s doorstep as a guest, to stay for the season.

Eva is Isabel’s antithesis: she sleeps late, walks loudly through the house, and touches things she shouldn’t. In response, Isabel develops a fury-fueled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house—a spoon, a knife, a bowl—Isabel’s suspicions begin to spiral.

In the sweltering peak of summer, Isabel’s paranoia gives way to infatuation—leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva—nor the house in which they live—are what they seem.

Stone Yard Devotion – Charlotte Wood

A woman abandons her city life and marriage to return to the place of her childhood, holing up in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of the Monaro. However, she doesn’t believe in God or prayer.

This sees her leading a recluse life. she finds herself turning again and again to thoughts of her mother, whose early death she can’t forget.

However, her secluded life is interrupted by three visitations.

With each of these disturbing arrivals, the woman faces some deep questions. Can a person be truly good? What is forgiveness? Is loss of hope a moral failure? And can the business of grief ever really be finished?

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