Six books to learn now: the 2022 Booker Prize shortlist

This yr’s Booker Prize shortlist contains six authors throughout 5 totally different nationalities, and the oldest writer ever to be shortlisted. Alan Garner, whose guide Treacle Walker, a novella that explores themes of folklore and time, will flip 88 on the day of the prize ceremony on October 17.

Most of the novels are impressed by real-life occasions. NoViolet Bulawayo’s Glory is a satire that echoes Animal Farm, primarily based across the fall of Robert Mugabe, Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These explores the Magdalene Laundry abuses in Eighties Eire, and Percival Everett’s The Trees evokes the real-life lynching of Emmett Until in Mississippi in 1955. Shehan Karunatilaka’s The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, in the meantime, is ready through the Sri Lankan civil battle.

The ultimate title on the shortlist, Elizabeth Strout’s Oh William!, is the third novel within the writer’s Lucy Barton collection, and follows Lucy’s reflections on marriage following the dying of her second husband.

“These six books we consider converse powerfully about vital issues,” mentioned Neil MacGregor, chair of the 2022 judges. “Set somewhere else at totally different occasions, they’re all about occasions that in some measure occur all over the place, and concern us all. Every written in English, they exhibit what an abundance of Englishes there are, what number of distinct worlds, actual and imaginary, exist in that simple-seeming area, the Anglosphere.”

The winner of the 2022 Booker Prize, the UK’s premier fiction award for works written in English, will obtain £50,000.

Laura Battle is the FT’s deputy books editor

Be part of our on-line guide group on Fb at FT Books Café