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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
Read
Long Division by Kiese Laymon and immediately you feel the revelry in the prose. Itâs folkloric, modern, rendered with warmth and humour, and always coming back to the subject of love â what we do for it, who we become for it. Sometimes anything, sometimes anyone. It poses questions about the distorting power of expectation, when there is too much, when there is none â and questions about our participation in that distortion. And then, more love, the gorgeous speculative corners of this book a testament to how the fabric of space and time even bend to that need.
The Days of Afrekete
Enjoy reading in the garden this summer. Picture: Getty HOLIDAYS will feel slightly different this year with foreign jaunts looking unlikely (at least at present). Whether you are heading off to explore Scotland at large – or relaxing in your own back garden – our round-up of recent fiction and non-fiction releases is designed to help you while away a lazy afternoon (or two).
THRILLERS
Hostage by Clare Mackintosh (Sphere, £14.99) Fasten your seatbelts. Hostage is a white-knuckle ride that takes the classic locked-room thriller airborne. This gripping read by police officer-turned-author Clare Mackintosh is set on board the inaugural non-stop flight from London to Sydney. If all goes to plan, the 20-hour service will make history. But when a flight attendant receives a note with a chilling ultimatum from an anonymous passenger, the intent is clear: the plane will never reach its destination.