Study for Obedience, Sarah Bernstein
This is the haunting tale of a woman going to live in a “cold and faraway land” as housekeeper to her recently divorced brother, who lives in a rural mansion near a village where the inhabitants seem to regard incomers with inexplicable hostility. There are veiled echoes of real-life genocidal atrocities, but Bernstein’s story justifies its form without external reference, and was described by The ’s literary editor, Cal Revely-Calder, as having “a parable’s radiance”.
If I Survive You, Jonathan Escoffery
A Jamaican family trying to hold body and soul together in Miami is at the centre of this debut novel. A catalogue of bad decisions and thwarted ambitions – especially those of Trelawny, the youngster, as he takes on a series of hilariously unsavoury jobs – the book tackles the immigrant experience of racism and rootlessness with style, pathos and humour.
How to Build a Boat, Elaine Feeney
The Irish poet’s second novel takes us inside the head of Jamie O’Neill, a 13-year-old boy whose off-kilter way of looking at the world finds little favour at school until a couple of rebellious teachers take him under their wing. It’s a rare Booker choice in seeming fine-tuned to warm your cockles, but it’s also unconventional in style, with Feeney conveying the thought processes of her neurodivergent hero in boldly impressionistic prose.
This Other Eden, Paul Harding
A Pulitzer Prize-winner acclaimed for breathing life into historical fiction, Harding has based his third novel on the (true) story of the 1911 eviction of an interracial community from its home on Malaga Island, off the coast of Maine. Harding’s evocation of an Eden full of gloriously eccentric inhabitants is gorgeous, and his portrayal of the serpents who came to destroy the idyll subtle – yet no less likely to induce righteous anger.
Pearl, Siân Hughes
Hughes is one of three British debut authors on the longlist, and the underdog, published by the tiny Indigo Press. Depicting a woman’s life lived under the shadow of her mother’s disappearance when she was eight, Pearl draws on the themes and images of the medieval poem of the same name, as well as on Hughes’s own experiences of post-partum psychosis. The Booker judges have called it “at once quiet and hugely ambitious”.
