Booker Prize 2024

Wir haben eine Longlist:

Colin Barrett - Wild Horses

As Ballina prepares for its biggest weekend of the year, the simmering feud between small-time drug-dealer, Cillian English, and County Mayo's enforcers, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, spills over into violence and an ugly ultimatum.

When the reclusive Dev answers his door on Friday night he finds Doll - Cillian's teenage brother - in the clutches of Gabe and Sketch. Jostled by his nefarious cousins and goaded by his dead mother's dog, Dev is drawn headlong into the Ferdias' revenge fantasy.

Meanwhile, seventeen-year-old Nicky can't shake the feeling something bad has happened to her boyfriend Doll. Hungover, reeling from a fractious Friday night and plagued by ghosts of her own, Nicky sets out on a feverish mission to save Doll, even as she questions her future in Ballina.

ASIN/ISBN: 022409985X

Rita Bullkwinkel - Headshot

Headshot ist die Geschichte der acht besten Teenager-Mädchen-Boxer in den Vereinigten Staaten, erzählt über die zwei Tage eines Meisterschaftsturniers und strukturiert als eine Reihe von Face-Offs. Während die Vergangenheit und Zukunft der Mädchen kollidieren, wird die spezifische Freude und Gewalt des Sports mit elektrischer Energie zum Leben erweckt, und ein Porträt von Wunsch, Neid, Perfektionismus, Wahnsinn und schiere körperliche Lust, das jede dieser jungen Frauen zum Kampf motiviert.

ASIN/ISBN: 1914198727

ASIN/ISBN: 3351041993

Percival Everett - James

The Mississippi River, 1861. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson’s Island until he can formulate a plan.

Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father who recently returned to town. Thus begins a dangerous and transcendent journey by raft along the Mississippi River, towards the elusive promise of the free states and beyond. As James and Huck navigate the treacherous waters, each bend in the river holds the promise of both salvation and demise.

With rumours of a brewing war, James must face the burden he carries: the family he is desperate to protect and the constant lie he must live. And together, the unlikely pair embark on the most dangerous, and life-changing, odyssey of them all . . .

ASIN/ISBN: 103503123X

ASIN/ISBN: 3446279482

Samantha Harvey - Orbital

A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.

ASIN/ISBN: 1529922933

ASIN/ISBN: 3423284234

Rachel Kushner - Creation Lake

Sadie Smith – a thirty-four-year-old American undercover agent of ruthless tactics and bold opinions – is sent by her mysterious but powerful employers to a remote corner of France. Her mission: to infiltrate a commune of radical eco-activists influenced by the beliefs of an enigmatic elder, Bruno Lacombe, who has rejected civilisation, lives in a Neanderthal cave, and believes the path to enlightenment is a return to primitivism.

ASIN/ISBN: 1787334384

Hisham Matar - My Friends

Khaled and Mustafa meet at university in Edinburgh: two Libyan eighteen-year-olds expecting to return home after their studies. In a moment of recklessness and courage, they travel to London to join a demonstration in front of the Libyan embassy. When government officials open fire on protestors in broad daylight, both friends are wounded, and their lives forever changed.

Over the years that follow, Khaled, Mustafa and their friend Hosam, a writer, are bound together by their shared history. If friendship is a space to inhabit, theirs becomes small and inhospitable when a revolution in Libya forces them to choose between the lives they have created in London and the lives they left behind.

ASIN/ISBN: 0241409497

Claire Messud - This Strange Eventful History

June 1940. As Paris falls to the Germans, Gaston Cassar - honorable servant of France, devoted husband and father, currently posted as naval attache in Salonica - bids farewell to his beloved wife, aunt and children, placing his faith in God that they will be reunited after the war. But escaping the violence of that cataclysm is not the same as emerging unscathed. The family will never again be whole.

A work of breathtaking historical sweep and vivid psychological intimacy, This Strange Eventful History charts the Cassars' unfolding story as its members move between Salonica and Algeria, the US, Cuba, Canada, Argentina, Australia and France - their itinerary shaped as much by a search for an elusive wholeness, as by the imperatives of politics, faith, family, industry and desire.

ASIN/ISBN: 0349127069

Anne Michaels - Held

1917. On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory - a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night, his childhood on a faraway coast - as the snow falls.

1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near another river - alive, but not still whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and endeavours to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts whose messages he cannot understand.

So begins a narrative that spans four generations, moments of connection and consequence igniting and re-igniting as the century unfolds. In luminous moments of desire, comprehension, longing, transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later.

Held is a novel like no other, by a writer at the height of her powers: affecting and intensely beautiful, full of mystery, wisdom and compassion.

ASIN/ISBN: 1526659115

ASIN/ISBN: 3827014956

Tommy Orange - Wandering Stars

Following its unforgettable characters through almost two centuries of history, from the horrors of the Sand Creek Massacre of 1865 to the aftermath of a mass shooting in the early 21st century, Wandering Stars is an indelible novel of America's war on its own people.

It is also the tender, shattering story of many generations of a Native American family, struggling to find ways through displacement, addiction and pain, towards home and hope.

Readers of Orange's classic debut There There will know some of these characters and will be eager to learn what happened to Orvil Red Feather after the Oakland Powwow. New readers will discover a wondrous novel of poetry, music, rage and love, from one of the most astonishing voices of his generation.

ASIN/ISBN: 1787304566

ASIN/ISBN: 3446280014

Sarah Perry - Enlightenment

Thomas Hart and Grace Macaulay have lived all their lives in the small Essex town of Aldleigh. Though separated in age by three decades, the pair are kindred spirits—torn between their commitment to religion and their desire to explore the world beyond their small Baptist community.

It is two romantic relationships that will rend their friendship, and in the wake of this rupture, Thomas develops an obsession with a vanished nineteenth-century astronomer said to haunt a nearby manor, and Grace flees Aldleigh entirely for London. Over the course of twenty years, by coincidence and design, Thomas and Grace will find their lives brought back into orbit as the mystery of the vanished astronomer unfolds into a devastating tale of love and scientific pursuit. Thomas and Grace will ask themselves what it means to love and be loved, what is fixed and what is mutable, how much of our fate is predestined and written in the stars, and whether they can find their way back to each other.

ASIN/ISBN: 0063352613

Richard Powers - Playground

Rafi and Todd are two polar opposites at an elite high school where they bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game. It sets them up for life: Rafi will get lost in literature, while Todd’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough.

Elsewhere, Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs; Ina Aroita grows up in naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home.

All of these people meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, marked for humanity’s next great adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out into the open sea. As the seasteaders close in, how will Evie play the ever-unfolding oceanic game? Will Ina engage in acts of destruction? Todd and Rafi, now estranged, still find themselves in competition: Todd unravels while working on an idea to redraw the boundaries of human immortality, while Rafi and the residents must decide if they will greenlight the new project on their shores and change their home forever.

Set in the world’s largest ocean, Playground explores that last wild place we have yet to colonize and interweaves profound themes of technology and the environment, and a deep exploration of our shared humanity in a way only Richard Powers can.

ASIN/ISBN: 1529154316

ASIN/ISBN: 3328603719

Yael van der Wouden - The Safekeep

It's 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is well and truly over. Living alone in her late mother's country home, Isabel's life is as it should be: led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel's doorstep-as a guest, there to stay for the season...

Eva is Isabel's antithesis: sleeps late, wakes late, walks loudly through the house and touches things she shouldn't. In response Isabel develops a fury-fuelled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house-a spoon, a knife, a bowl-Isabel' suspicions spiral out of control. In the sweltering peak of summer, Isabel's paranoia gives way to desire - leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva - nor the house in which they live - are what they seem.

ASIN/ISBN: 0241652308

Charlotte Wood - Stone Yard Devotional

Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of the Australian outback.

She doesn't believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident.

But disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signalling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who disappeared decades before, presumed murdered. And finally, a troubling visitor plunges the narrator further back into her past . . .

ASIN/ISBN: 1399724355

Bereits gelesen:

Percival Everett - James (sehr stark)

Tommy Orange - Wandering Stars (sehr gut, allerdings ein klein wenig im Schatten des Vorläufers There There, zu dem dieser Roman gleichzeitig ein Sequel und ein Prequel ist)

Samantha Harvey - Orbital (eher so mittel, ein wenig langweilig und prätentiös. Im Booker-Longlist-Video heißt es "a love letter to our planet" und da ist bereits das Problem, weil der Roman versucht, die Faszination der Erde aus der Perspektive der Astronauten zu beschreiben, aber wie soll man dafür eine spannende Sprache finden, dieser Roman findet sie nicht).

EDIT (außerdem gelesen):

Rita Bullwinkel - Headshot (strukturell verspielt, interessantes Setting mit den Mädchen-Boxkämpfen, hat mir gefallen)

Yael van der Wouden - The Safekeep (starkes erstes Drittel, dann fällt der Roman ab, insgesamt zu konstruiert und melodramatisch)

Colin Barrett - Wild Houses (phasenweise gut lesbarer literarischer Thriller mit einer interessanten Hauptfigur, dem es aber irgendwie an Originalität und Subtext mangelt; recht einfach und wenig überraschend gestrickt).
Hisham Matar - My Friends (Das erste Buch, das es mindestens mit James aufnehmen kann. Eine Geschichte über Migration und Revolution aus der Distanz des von Libyen nach London immigrierten Autors. Thematisch gewichtig, literarisch stark, relativ langsam und subtil erzählt.).
Charlotte Wood - Stone Yard Devotional (ruhig und kontemplativ, aber sehr stark)

Herr Palomar schrieb:

Frage an die Leser, die das Buch schon kennen:

Wie würdet ihr die Chances des Buches, auf die Shortlist zu kommen, einschätzen?

Bis auf James habe ich momentan noch keine Idee, welche Art von Büchern auf die Shortlist passen könnte (die anderen Favoriten wie Powers und Kushner erscheinen ja erst im September), und gefühlt gibt es sehr viele "Dark Horses". Ich denke, The Safekeep hat eine Chance. Mir scheint, der Roman entwickelt sich zu einem Publikumsliebling, weil er vielleicht näher an die Unterhaltungsliteratur kommt als die meisten anderen Nominierten. Der Roman ist viel süffiger und flotter als die introspektiven Romane wie Headshot und Orbital.

Für mich persönlich hat der Roman qualitativ kein Shortlist-Potential. Wie das die Jury einstuft, keine Ahnung.

Setting und Sujet fand ich schon shortlist-tauglich (die Autorin trägt da ein paar beliebte literarische und historische Motive zusammen).