Strange worlds in Booker shortlist
Margaret Atwood makes the cut with her sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, while Nigerian writer Chigozie Obioma is in the running for the second time
Anovel about daily life in middle America, executed in one sentence that runs to a thousand pages; the postmortem meditation of an Istanbul prostitute on her life; the revisiting of Don Quixote’s epic journey, transposed to Trump’s America: these are just three of the stories that have made the cut for 2019’s Booker Prize shortlist.
The line-up, announced in London on Tuesday morning, of four women and two men includes two former winners — Margaret Atwood for The Testaments, her sequel to The
Handmaid’s Tale that is due out this week, and Salman Rushdie for Quichotte — as well as a 33year-old Nigerian writer shortlisted for the second time for his second novel.
Chigozie Obioma’s An Orchestra of Minorities is narrated by the guardian spirit of a young poultry farmer. British-Nigerian Bernardine Evaristo’s Girl, Woman, Other portrays 12 women living across the UK, whose roots extend from Ethiopia to the Caribbean.
Peter Florence, chair of the judges, praised the “extraordinary ambition” of the shortlisted books: “There is an abundance of humour, of political and cultural engagement, of stylistic daring and astonishing beauty of language.”
This year marks the first time the fiction prize will be sponsored by Crankstart, the foundation established by venture capitalist Michael Moritz and his wife, Harriet Heyman, a former novelist. The winner will be announced in London on October 14.
Ducks, Newburyport — melancholy monologue Lucy Ellmann
A complex novel hailed as a “modernist masterpiece ”— everyday experience rendered in a dizzying stream-of-consciousness style. The narrator is left nameless in a book in which the naming of things — in alliterative lists, in acronyms, in panicky outbursts
— is paramount. Ellmann’s heroine, a middle-aged, harassed Ohio mother and housewife, frets and rages about the state of the world as she sees it.
Quichotte — metafictional mission in a Chevy Cruze Salman Rushdie
A Don Quixote-inspired quest across the US showcases Rushdie’s virtues and vices. Themes of penitence and redemption are drawn from the maudlin, tragicomic cast of
Quichotte, a group of Indian immigrants trying to make sense of their new country. Sweeping in scale, its simplest elements achieve its most moving effects with majestic paragraphs composed of cascading sentences.
10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World — lush, rich, lucid Elif Shafak
The final thoughts of a murdered Istanbul prostitute in a rich, sensual novel from Turkey’s most widely read female novelist. It is a vibrant evocation of a hidden Istanbul in the mid-20th century; touching, idiosyncratic friendships and the complex inner lives of the female characters for which Shafak has long been known.
An Orchestra of Minorities — songs of innocence and experience Chigozie Obioma
An intricately wrought story about a young man caught in the jaws of fate offers a microcosm of the larger implosion of Nigerian society. The novel is narrated by the chi (guardian spirit) of Chinonso, a young poultry farmer from Umuahia, Nigeria, and it takes the form of a testimony delivered by Chinonso’s chi pleading for leniency from Chukwu, the creator.
Girl, Woman, Other — a celebration of soul sisters Bernardine Evaristo
Here are the stories of 12 women, stretching from present-day London across the past century and the length of the country, as we watch the complicated unfurling of their lives. In a hybrid of prose and poetry, the Anglo-Nigerian author explores the nature of Britishness and race, with the label “black” immediately becoming ridiculously simplistic and reductive. /©