This year s Booker longlist is so sensible it feels almost radical
For once, the judges have ignored experimental fiction and plumped for novels that are - shock, horror - a pleasure to read
27 July 2021 • 12:01am
Down to the last 13: (from l to r) Kazuo Ishiguro, Damon Galgut, Rachel Cusk, Maggie Shipstead and Nadifa Mohamed
Credit: Telegraph designers
Phew. The Booker longlist has been announced for 2021 and after years of technical trickery and an over-willingness to engage in identity politics, we have a longlist of 13 novels that is so sensible, it feels almost radical.
There are no graphic novels, no 200-page poems, no brain-scrambling first-person narratives. Instead, here is a longlist featuring several big hitters – Kazuo Ishiguro; Damon Galgut; Richard Powers; Rachel Cusk – that combines meaty contemporary issues with novels that are, whisper it, by and large a pleasure to read. Perhaps emboldened by the relief and approval that met last year’s winner, the