The Booker Prize 2019 Short List

Yesterday the Short List for the 2019 Booker Prize was released and it features some very well known authors and some highly anticipated novels. I myself am very happy to see this many women on the list (4 out of 5!) as well as a quite diverse range of authors. Let's go through them!

Margaret Atwood's The Testaments

Of course this book is highly anticipated, as it is the sequel to her iconic The Handmaid's Tale which has found new relevance in the past few years both because of its Hulu TV adaptation and because of the advances made by the political Conservatives in the US to curtail women's rights. This novel is being kept tightly under wraps until its publication on the 10th of September, but The Guardian has a sneak peek!

In this brilliant sequel to The Handmaid's Tale, acclaimed author Margaret Atwood answers the questions that have tantalized readers for decades.

When the van door slammed on Offred's future at the end of The Handmaid's Tale, readers had no way of telling what lay ahead for her—freedom, prison or death. 
With The Testaments, the wait is over. 

Margaret Atwood's sequel picks up the story fifteen years after Offred stepped into the unknown, with the explosive testaments of three female narrators from Gilead. 

"Dear Readers: Everything you've ever asked me about Gilead and its inner workings is the inspiration for this book. Well, almost everything! The other inspiration is the world we've been living in." —Margaret Atwood

Lucy Ellman's Ducks, Newsburyport

Ducks, Newsburyport has been on my list for a while now. It sounds like it captures perfectly what is going on in many of our minds these days. News, especially bad news, is coming at us from all angles as we continue to neurotically try and maintain some semblance of normality. I do feel like Ellman's novel might be a lot to handle, especially since it's a 1000 pages, so I'm saving this one for when I have a few days.

LATTICING one cherry pie after another, an Ohio housewife tries to bridge the gaps between reality and the torrent of meaningless info that is the United States of America. She worries about her children, her dead parents, African elephants, the bedroom rituals of “happy couples”, Weapons of Mass Destruction, and how to hatch an abandoned wood pigeon egg. Is there some trick to surviving survivalists? School shootings? Medical debts? Franks ’n’ beans?

A scorching indictment of America’s barbarity, past and present, and a lament for the way we are sleepwalking into environmental disaster, Ducks, Newburyport is a heresy, a wonder—and a revolution in the novel.

It's also very, very funny.

Bernardine Evaristo's Girl, Woman, Other


While the previous two novels are set in America, both dystopian and frighteningly real, Girl, Woman, Other is set solidly in modern Britain. I hadn't heard much about Evaristo's novel before it was put on the long list, and now short list, for the Booker Prize, but I'm definitely curious to read its 'new kind of history'!

Teeming with life and crackling with energy - a love song to modern Britain and black womanhood

Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years.

Joyfully polyphonic and vibrantly contemporary, this is a gloriously new kind of history, a novel of our times: celebratory, ever-dynamic and utterly irresistible. 

Chigozie Obioma's An Orchestra of Minorities

I first heard about this novel when I finished Circe and was looking for other Greek Mythology adaptations. What attracted me to An Orchestra of Minorities was the sense that it truly took to the spirit of The Odyssey, namely the wandering of the lost, the desperate search for a home that feels further and further away. I can't wait to dig into this one!

A heart-breaking and mythic story about a Nigerian poultry farmer who sacrifices everything to win the woman he loves, by Man Booker Finalist and author of The Fishermen, Chigozie Obioma.

A contemporary twist on the Odyssey, An Orchestra of Minorities is narrated by the chi, or spirit of a young poultry farmer named Chinonso. His life is set off course when he sees a woman who is about to jump off a bridge. Horrified by her recklessness, he hurls two of his prized chickens off the bridge. The woman, Ndali, is stopped in her tracks.

Chinonso and Ndali fall in love but she is from an educated and wealthy family. When her family objects to the union on the grounds that he is not her social equal, he sells most of his possessions to attend college in Cyprus. But when he arrives in Cyprus, he discovers that he has been utterly duped by the young Nigerian who has made the arrangements for him. Penniless, homeless, we watch as he gets further and further away from his dream and from home. 

An Orchestra of Minorities is a heart-wrenching epic about destiny and determination.

Salman Rushdie's Quichotte

I have had my ups and down with Rushdie, the down being when I had to study him at university, and the up being when I was bwled over by his previous novel, The Golden House. Since my last reading experience with him had been good, I added Quichotte to my reading list pretty quickly. I have the feeling that similarly to The Golden House, Quichotte will be an evisceration of the American Dream.

In a tour-de-force that is both an homage to an immortal work of literature and a modern masterpiece about the quest for love and family, Booker Prize-winning, internationally bestselling author Salman Rushdie has created a dazzling Don Quixote for the modern age.

Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, a courtly, addled salesman obsessed with television, who falls in impossible love with a TV star. Together with his (imaginary) son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand, gallantly braving the tragicomic perils of an age where “Anything-Can-Happen”. Meanwhile his creator, in a midlife crisis, has equally urgent challenges of his own.

Just as Cervantes wrote Don Quixote to satirise the culture of his time, Rushdie takes the reader on a wild ride through a country on the verge of moral and spiritual collapse. And with the kind of storytelling magic that is the hallmark of his work, the fully realised lives of DuChamp and Quichotte intertwine in a profoundly human quest for love and a wickedly entertaining portrait of an age in which fact is so often indiscernible from fiction.

So, which one of these have you read so far? And do you have your heart set on any particular winner?