Booker prize 2024: the six shortlisted books reviewed by our experts

From a longlist of 13, six novels have been shortlisted for the 2024 Booker prize. Our academics review the finalists ahead of the announcement of the winner on November 12.

The Safe Keep by Yael van der Wouden

The Safe Keep, a novel about the expropriation and theft of Jewish property during the second world war, revisits a dark chapter of Dutch history.

Before being deported, Dutch Jews were stripped of their homes and belongings, and forced to flee Amsterdam with what little they could carry. Van der Wouden’s debut novel shines an ironic light on the act of keeping or maintaining things that were to be reclaimed by their rightful owners, but which were lost or stolen in the war.

The trauma of this history hangs over the lives of three siblings grieving the loss of their mother.

Isabel, the novel’s lonely protagonist, lives alone in the family house, keeping it in order as her late mother would have wanted. All the while she suspects that their maid is stealing from the kitchen. But following the arrival of her brother’s girlfriend, Eva, Isabel discovers the truth of the house and attempts to right historical wrongs.

By Manjeet Ridon, Associate Dean International, Arts, Design and Humanities

James by Percival Everett

James is an incredible re-writing of Mark Twain’s 1884 American classic The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn. Everett has reclaimed Twain’s “Jim” from the peripheries, boldly placing him centre stage.

Just like the original book, it’s set in the pre-civil war plantation south. It’s 1861, war is brewing, and James hears that he may be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his family. He goes on the run with the resourceful young white boy, Huck Finn.

This is a literary, writerly and scholarly novel. Everett expertly weaves black literary criticism and theory into his narrative, while also making artful allusions to the books that shaped American scholarly and literary traditions. This weaving, however, is done with a light and engaging touch.

James’s story will change you. You will start to question all the other classic novels you’ve read and wonder whose story is being suppressed. What if, you’ll ask yourself, they could be fleshed out and heard properly? It would, perhaps, be a much richer tale to tell.

By Emily Zobel Marshall, Professor in Postcolonial Literature

Read more:
James by Percival Everett: an enthralling reimagining of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of formerly enslaved Jim

Held by Anne Michaels

In Held, war seeps into the very bones of the text. Always looming, like a traumatic dark cloud, this is a novel about the adjustment and readjustment to life after conflict, its all-consuming nature and the indelible marks it leaves behind. Yet there is a sensual homeliness about the novel that offers warm, safe spaces among the shadows of the past.

Nostalgia, captured in snapshots or literal photographs in many instances, creates, confers and confirms memories. History is the ghost that haunts the characters’ present, whether through conflict, grief or remembrance.

This is a beautifully sensory novel about humanity, existence, and memory over the “long exposure of time”. The distance between people manifests across eras and places, but the novel also grasps at the closeness of human relationships. The characters are not still, they represent a peace that holds us in a quiet nostalgic reverence for the past. They are each held not only by individual bonds and relations, but by the silent claim that history’s spectre makes on us all.

By Sarah Trott, Senior Lecturer in American Studies and History

Orbital by Samantha Harvey

Samantha Harvey’s Orbital skilfully exposes the human cost of space flight, set against the urgency of the climate crisis. While a typhoon of life-threatening proportions gathers across south-east Asia, six cosmonauts hurtle around Earth on the International Space Station.

Their everyday routine of tasteless food and laboratory work is in stark contrast to the awesome spectacle of the blue planet, oscillating between night and day, dark and light, where international borders are meaningless.

While they teach laboratory mice to orient themselves in micro-gravity, they rigorously document their own bodily functions to satisfy some “grand abstract dream of interplanetary life” away from “the planet held hostage by humans, a gun to its vitals”. These are humans, Harvey tells us, “with a godly view that’s the blessing and also the curse”. Harvey has written a novel for the end of the world as we know it. The hope it offers is that we might learn to know it differently.

By Debra Benita Shaw, Reader in Cultural Theory

Stone Yard Devotional by Charlotte Wood

This is a quietly extraordinary novel. The narrative is stripped to bedrock and yet, paradoxically, is as complex and fertile as the compost that forms one of its primary metaphors.

The narrator, unnamed and middle-aged, leaves Sydney, Australia, and her job at a threatened species centre. She leaves her home, her husband and friends, to go to a small religious community retreat in the outback where she grew up. Three visitations disturb the nuns: a plague of mice, the return of the bones of a murdered sister and the reappearance of a former schoolmate.

Here the narrator confronts her memories of grief, loss and guilt and addresses the question of how to live in the world. How can we recognise our responsibilities to each other and to the natural world of which humans are inescapably a part? What really matters?

Praying, one of the nuns tells the narrator, is “admitting yourself to otherness … it’s hard labour”. With its attention to the work of contemplation, Wood’s novel itself takes on the devotional quality of prayer.

By Diana Wallace, Professor of English Literature

Creation Lake by Rachel Kushner

Sadie Smith is an American spy tasked with infiltrating Le Moulin, a utopian commune in southwest France accused of perpetrating violent acts in its quest to protect the environment. A nuanced, often hilarious novel about community, the tale is narrated by a character who is a self-serving individualist.

Sadie may be ready to lie and deceive for the right amount of money. Yet she’s also able to listen and even question her own beliefs as she religiously reads the emails sent to Le Moulin by its eccentric mentor, Bruno Lacombe, who lives in a cave and praises the lifestyle of the Neanderthal.

But Le Moulin’s apparent utopia is deeply flawed. The leader, Pascal, is an upper-class Parisian more interested in becoming a guru than challenging the rampant sexism, classism and ageism in his commune. Kushner offers us a sharp look at the European identity from the point of view of an outsider, and doesn’t shy away from the uncomfortable.

By Inés Gregori Labarta, Lecturer in Creative Writing

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