Booker prize reveals globe-spanning longlist of ‘engrossing stories’ - The Guardian

Thirty-one years later, the British author has made the longlist for the £50,000 award with Klara and the Sun, his first novel since winning the Nobel prize in literature.

Ishiguro’s story of an AF, or “artificial friend”, which is bought as a companion for a 14-year-old girl, is one of 13 novels in the running for this year’s Booker, the most prestigious books prize in the UK.

Sally Rooney, who was nominated for the Booker for her 2018 novel Normal People, was overlooked by judges for her third novel, Beautiful World, Where Are You, which is out in September.

Judges also failed to longlist Don DeLillo’s short novel The Silence.

Director of the Booker Prize Foundation Gaby Wood said that while recent Booker longlists have “drawn attention to various elements of novelty in the novel: experimentalism of form, work in unprecedented genres, debut authors”, this year’s list was “more notable for the engrossing stories within it, for the geographical range of its points of view and for its recognition of writers who have been working at an exceptionally high standard for many years”

Galgut is joined on the longlist by fellow South African author Karen Jennings, whose novel An Island, following an old lighthouse keeper who finds the unconscious body of a refugee on his beach, is published by small independent press Holland House Books

The Pulitzer-winning Powers, meanwhile, is joined by fellow Americans Patricia Lockwood, chosen for her buzzed-about debut No One is Talking About This, in which real life intrudes on the world of a woman known for her viral social media posts, Maggie Shipstead’s story of a female aviator who disappears in 1950 while attempting to fly around the world, Great Circle, and Nathan Harris’s first novel The Sweetness of Water, set at the end of the American civil war

The longlist is completed by Canadian author Mary Lawson’s A Town Called Solace, set in Northern Ontario in 1972, when eight-year-old Clara’s sister Rose goes missing

Williams and his fellow judges – chair Maya Jasanoff, the historian; writer and editor Horatia Harrod; actor Natascha McElhone; novelist and professor Chigozie Obioma – read 158 books to come up with their longlist of 13