"The Booker Prize 2026 longlist has now been announced – a selection of 13 superb works of long-form fiction, chosen from 163 titles written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026.
As Mary Beard, Chair of this year’s judges, says: ‘Great books have never been written to a single formula. We are confident that our longlist of books has something for everyone. There’s the funny and the unsettling (and in some cases the funny and unsettling); there’s dystopian fantasy and domestic drama; there’s the gritty and the magically mysterious; there are some that will please and some that may shock.’"
THE 13 NOMINATED BOOKS ARE:
The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout
Artie Dam is living a double life. He spends his days
teaching history to eleventh graders, expanding their young minds, correcting
their casual cruelties, and lending a kind word to those who need it most. He
goes to holiday parties with his wife of three decades, makes small talk with
neighbors, and, on weekends, takes his sailboat out on the beautiful
Massachusetts Bay. He is, by all appearances, present and alive. But inside,
Artie is plagued by feelings of isolation. He looks out at a world gone mad—at
himself and the people around him—and turns a question over and over in his
mind: How is it that we know so little about one another, even those closest to
us?
John of John by Douglas Stuart
Out of money and with little to show for his art school
education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry back home to the Isle of Harris
in the Outer Hebrides to find that little has changed except for him. As
lambing season turns to shearing season, the threads holding together the
community together become increasingly frayed, and nothing will remain as it
was before.
All Them Dogs by Djamel White
Tony Ward is back in Dublin. After five years in England,
where he fled after murdering a rival gang member, he returns to find that his
mentor is dead and his best friend has gone straight. Keen to reestablish
himself, he jumps at the chance to work for the enforcer of a local crime boss.
But Flute Walsh is a far cry from the boy Tony once knew. By turns savage,
erotic, and unexpectedly tender, All Them Dogs is a gripping
story of violence, lust, and greed that explores one man’s struggles to find
balance in an unsparing world.
ON ORDER, BUT NOT YET AVAILABLE IN THE JCLC
Black Bag by Luke Kennard
In Luke Kennard’s audacious new novel, a penniless and
out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr. Blend, a university professor
who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr. Blend’s students
react to someone zipped into an oversized bag, sitting at the back of the
lecture hall over a series of Fall lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon
has unexpected consequences.
The Renovation by Kenan Orhan
In Salerno, Italy, Dilara spends her days caring for her
aging father and her hypochondriac husband. Since leaving her native Istanbul,
she’s been unable to find a job―adrift, she becomes increasingly fixated on
domestic improvement, specifically on the renovation of a second bathroom. When
the work is completed, she enters and finds herself not in a bathroom but in a
prison cell, and a Turkish one at that.
The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley
Laura Miller and Edmund Putnam have been friends for a long
time. Theirs is a happy meeting of minds, with long evenings spent huddled in
an ancient pub by the Thames, where they share office gossip, reflect on their
teenage passions, and lament the state of the world. Recently, though, Putnam
has been harder to reach and Laura has her own problems. And as Putnam starts
to sink into despondency, she must try to bring him back. A novel of enduring
friendships and small mercies, The Palm House offers us
Gwendoline Riley’s trademark keen observation and wit, and leaves us with a
sense of possibility.
The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams
In a famed but crumbling university city overrun by nature,
where power is held in a fragile balance between academics and a contingent of
rogue gardeners, the reclusive narrator of The Vivisectors spends
her days propping up the career of her needy and fraudulent professor boss. Coursing
with icy suspense and told with violent precision, Missouri Williams holds
a mirror up to humanity’s most intimate contradictions and reflects them back
through a novel of profound, spiky spiritual reckoning.
The Disappearers by Marlon James SEPTEMBER 1ST
In 1988, eight men in Kingston, Jamaica, begin rehearsals
for a play. The men are strangers to one another and each has a different
reason for being involved. But they all share one inescapable truth: All of
them are gay―a “battyman” in Jamaican argot―and all of them must contend with
the dangers that such a truth lays bare. One night a mob savagely attacks them,
killing one of the men. For the survivors, their recovery is as much emotional
as it is physical.
Switzy by Emma Cline SEPTEMBER 8TH
A private plane cuts through the winter night, somewhere
over Greenland. David, a retired executive, sits back in his leather seat,
playing solitaire on his phone. Click. Click. Drag. Click. The notebook in his
jacket pocket is filled with familiar phrases, urgent reminders to himself, but
he struggles to recognize his own handwriting. A mystery, among many mysteries.
The world, once so knowable, has been rendered inscrutable. Hypnotic and
startlingly original, Switzy probes the depths of human
consciousness, revealing what a man is left with when the accomplishments and
compromises that have defined him, and the illusions he's relied on, vanish.
Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman SEPTEMBER
9TH
In the middle of the countryside, a realtor is showing a
disgraced professor around an idyllic house. She speaks not only about the
home's many wonderful qualities but about its previous owner, the mystifying
Helen, whose presence still seems to suffuse every fixture. Through hearing
stories of Helen's chosen way of living, the man begins to see that his own
story is not actually over—rather, he is being offered a chance to buy his way
into the simple life, close to the land, that's always been out of reach to
him. But as evening fades into black, he will learn that the asking price may
be much higher, and stranger, than anticipated.
May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry SEPTEMBER
29
A curator spends her days reconstructing the past—selecting
and carefully arranging furniture, fabrics, and replica food to bring medieval
rooms back to life. Whether it’s a feast with spilling platters or a table for
two littered with small hints of intimacy, it must appear as if the people have
just left the room. After accepting a commission to work on the private
quarters of a medieval palace, the curator becomes absorbed in the story of a
king almost forgotten by history. As she studies the traces he left behind, the
boundary between her own life and his begins to blur.
The End of Everything by M. John Harrison OCTOBER
13TH
Phillip Tennent makes his living at the tideline, collecting
artefacts that wash up from the Channel. It's been years since the crisis
changed everything, but its exact nature remains obscure. Government barely
functions, the seas are full of new creatures, an entire continent has been
mislaid. It feels like the end. Now Phillip has fished out of the water an
object he can't keep. A creature that keeps changing. An artefact he must take
inland, before it destroys everything he thinks he knows.
NOT YET AVAILABLE IN THE U.S.
The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis
Flora is visiting home in Mexico when the family dog leaps
up and bites her hand. She winds up in hospital where she undergoes several
surgeries under anaesthesia and meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman with
pneumonia, who collects pre-cinema toys and instruments. The two of them embark
on a series of dream-like conversations in the hospital corridors. Wilhelmina
puts on a magic lantern show for Flora, leaving her spellbound. When things take an unexpected turn, Flora
finds herself entrusted with an important mission. She returns to London, where
she resumes her job polishing silver at a jewellery shop, and strikes up a
strange friendship with Wilhelmina’s son, Max. As Flora dips in and out of her
imagination, she is increasingly aware it’s not only the magic lantern that
projects, and her perception of reality is subtly altered.
https://thebookerprizes.com/the-booker-library/features/everything-you-need-to-know-about-the-booker-prize-2026-longlist
Posts
