2020 Booker Prize Speculation

[Garry]

But I love a bloated monster, a good fire, and a comfy chair on a wet afternoon.

[Sam]

Paul wrote: "I would like to see the Booker introduce a rule that no book over 500 pages (ideally 300 pages but perhaps phase that in) is eligible going forward. Best way to send a signal that these bloated mon..."

Lol. I like that thought, but I am also enjoying the bloated monsters. Maybe a limit on total words per longlist would be better.

[Paul]

So if Mantel makes the list (or Ducks last year) everything else has to be a novella? I could live with that!

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer]

Or just announce the longlist now as:

Apeirogon
The Accomplice (to keep Lee Child happy)
The Mirror and The Light
Summer
Jack

And rather than another 8 also-rans we can also read the previous books in each series (2 x Mantel, 3 x Smith and 3 x Robinson).

[Paul]

But why does a prize need to feature the last three of those. They will get the repeat readers anyway and new readers are going to struggle (see entry under Testaments, The)

Maybe I will add excluding sequels from the Booker as well from my new rules.

[Irene]

bring on the bloated monsters, some books have to be long... (although I could live with the maximum 1 bloated monster in the longlist rule)

[Val]

Paul wrote: "Maybe I will add excluding sequels from the Booker as well from my new rules."
How about excluding sequels unless the previous books have won or been shortlisted? Reading just part IV of the Neapolitan quartet was a bit underwhelming and we could allow Baron Wenckheim's Homecoming from László Krasznahorkai previous win.

[MisterHobgoblin]

The Prize is for the best novel - whether long or short, whether sequel or not. What we need are judges who have some critical faculties and can judge a book to be a clunker when it is a clunker.

[Hugh, Active moderator]

A 500 page cap would have ruled out A Brief History of 7 Killings and The Luminaries, both of which were for me among the better winners of recent years. Nobody is forcing anyone to read them.

[WndyJW]

I used to love to settle into a long book, but now that I am having trouble settling on which book to read because I have been shamefully gluttonous in buying every book that appeals to me, I find that I am relieved to see page numbers under 250.

[Paul]

But A History of Four Killings could have worked just as well. And yes he Luminaries author is on record as having tweaked her original Golden Ratio plan to avoid the book being too long, so she just would have needed to play with the maths a bit more to get below 500 pages.

That’s the point of the new rule - authors can adjust their books accordingly.

[MisterHobgoblin]

I do think that writers of long novels should be asked (or be prepared to be asked) why their book deserves so much more of a reader's time than several short novels. But I'm quite prepared that they might give a plausible explanation. Two of my all time favourite novels: This Thing of Darkness and The Eighth Life - are long and benefit from being long. I do agree, though, that Seven Killings could have been shorter and I didn't particularly rate The Luminaries.

[Roland]

Antonomasia wrote: "Orchid & the Wasp fans: new book from Caoilinn Hughes in May, The Wild Laughter"

Great! That's one to look forward too…

[Emmeline]

I seem to remember reading an article a few years ago that said that people prefer reading long books (or that sales of long books were up, or something). Of course now I can't find it.

I don't think it specified whether literary fiction was included anyway. I can see settling into a long and relatively undemanding book, but long literary fiction often takes it out of me.

I feel like The Luminaries could have been reduced by at least half.

[WndyJW]

I don’t understand why we would expect an author to answer to anyone regarding the length of their books. Of course there are books that would be better if they were shorter, just as in some cases the author should have taken more time and given an idea the consideration and pages it deserved, and some books should never have been published in the first place.
Any book worth reading is worth the time it takes to read it. It seems the simplest approach is for readers annoyed by long books is to not read long books.

[Emmeline]

I personally don't mind reading long books if they are really wonderful and tightly written; the problem comes from being told various long books are wonderful and then finding them to be bloated monsters. I think it dovetails with the general impression that editors are no longer interested (no longer have time to) edit books, and some writers could really use being taken in hand.

For example, I found Eleanor Catton's star-map structure interesting but ultimately gimmicky when it resulted in an entire chapter about how to set moveable type, something that could have been explained in a paragraph, if it needed to be explained at all.

It's one thing with the 19th century serialists who were paid by the word, but nowadays...

[Hugh, Active moderator]

I think that the structure that Catton imposed on herself, particularly the rules on chapter length meant that it was impossible to pace it like a conventional narrative. The last 100 pages were dominated by white space and only took a very short time to read.

[Emmeline]

Hugh wrote: "I think that the structure that Catton imposed on herself, particularly the rules on chapter length meant that it was impossible to pace it like a conventional narrative. The last 100 pages were do..."

Yes I agree. It left me at least in the interesting position of skimming the early sections impatiently only to wish the last chapters were longer!

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer]

A review of my wildcard tip for the longlist

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Tom]

I just finished The Glass Hotel by Emily St. John Mandel and loved it - perhaps even more than Station Eleven. Do you guys think this has Booker potential?

[Neil]

I think I also liked it more than Station Eleven and one of the reasons is that the writing seems more mature. It could be Booker material.

[Tom]

Neil wrote: "I think I also liked it more than Station Eleven and one of the reasons is that the writing seems more mature. It could be Booker material."

Her writing has really come a long way. After reading Station Eleven, I went back to The Lola Quartet and put it down about 1/3 of the way in because I didn't care at all about any of the characters. Meanwhile, the thing I loved most about The Glass Hotel was how deeply I cared about these characters. What makes that even more impressive is how little time it takes for her to build that interest, as she doesn't spend many words on backstory.

[Nicole D.]

I, personally, will be disappointed to see The Glass Hotel make the list.

However, I adored Apeirogon and am already projecting it to be the winner, so if it's anything like my wildly uninformed pick of last years winner, On Earth We're Briefly Gorgeous, it won't even be nominated.

Here's my review.

https://thereadersroom.org/2020/05/06...

This was a stunner. I've not read McCann before (I know) and will now read all his stuff. One thing reading Booker has shown me is that I love Irish authors.

[Dylan]

I haven't read all the heavyweights released thus far but I do think 'The Glass Hotel' should make an appearance (at the very least, on the longlist).

I was surprised Vuong didn't make it last year - especially because 'My Sister, the Serial Killer' did. Still strange in my opinion.

I'm hoping the GY's prediction of 'The Accomplice' proves incorrect even if there may be some weight of logic behind the prediction.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer]

I hope I am wrong also as The Accomplice is not very good.

Aperiogon on the other hand is outstanding and I also see it as a winner (well Mantel should win but as the best alternative). But then I also was convinced Ocean Vuong would make the longlist if. It shortlist last year.

My review of Aperiogon finishes “There may be books in 2020 which give an equally brilliant literary treatment to an equally powerful story and with an equally important message. If so then 2020 will be a vintage year for literature.”

My review

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

I would not discount Hamnet

[Dylan]

Sadly Hamnet's release has been continuously pushed back here in Canada. (It was set to release in May when I ordered it; now it's to release on July 21st.)

[Paul]

I have a feeling Mantel has zero chance of winning the Booker this year given the panel.

One judge will be pointing out that if you want what is ultimately genre fiction, however well written, you should look outside of the literary fiction establishment. Jack Reacher and his peers, he will argue, are every bit the equal of Mantel’s Cromwell, and indeed that is why he was invited to be a judge.

Another, the Chair will point out that prizes should be about promoting diverse voices, not a member of the English literary ‘royalty’ writing yet another book about England’s royal history. Indeed that’s exactly why she was chosen to replace last year’s star struck Chair.

[Robert]

Paul wrote: "I have a feeling Mantel has zero chance of winning the Booker this year given the panel.

One judge will be pointing out that if you want what is ultimately genre fiction, however well written, you..."

Why does this make me oddly happy

[Hugh, Active moderator]

I hope you are wrong. It would be a travesty not to include Mantel on the list.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer]

It would (just like in the Stella year) lead to new prizes being set up given the Booker would lose credibility.

Just re-read Wolf Hall - the writing is magnificent.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer]

Here is what Lee Child is currently reading
My thoughts...

He clearly loves language
Not mentioned but his real issue with literary fiction is it’s lack of commerciality
You would think a literary bestseller would appeal.
Could we see a follow up for the author of Snap!


“Currently I’m holed up with my family at our mountain hideout in Wyoming – a state physically larger than the United Kingdom, with the population of Leicester spread thinly across it. We have to drive 10 miles before we see a paved road, which runs through a region listed by the Census Bureau as uninhabited. We get snow eight months of the year. We bought the place specifically for social distancing, back when that meant something different. Now it has turned out very useful. We got here from New York five days ago, and have seen no other humans since then, not even at a far distance through a window.

This year I’m a Booker judge, so I have plenty of reading to do, and I’m loving it so far. The best kind of recommendation is when a friend slaps a book against your chest or presses it into your hands and says, “You have to read this”. Booker submissions are exactly that. Publishers, with limited slots allowed, think long and hard and send a book with the implicit message, “This is the one”. Early conclusions: the English language is a wonderful thing, and this year’s novelists are as good as any at using it.

Everything in my diary is now cancelled until at least the middle of July, so for the first time since I was about three, I have absolutely no fixed points in my immediate future. At first I felt weird and unmoored, but quickly came to enjoy the newly liberated hours. As well as the book-every-day-or-two Booker commitment, I’m reading other things too, most recently a pre-pub galley of Belinda Bauer’s Exit, her new one. She’s such an interesting writer – a restless intelligence that always goes its own way, but always comes up with something that feels both surprising but inevitable. Next up will be an advance copy of John Connolly’s new book, Dirty South – another restless mind worth following anywhere.

We’re remote, but we have just enough internet for streaming, so I’m watching the fifth season of Last Tango in Halifax, a series I admired from the beginning. It’s boldly written, characterized and acted. My gold-medal praise is “Damn, I wish I had written that”, which Halifax doesn’t quite reach, but it hits the silver-medal level, which is that I would love to take the writer to dinner and pick her brains.

Musically, I’m mining YouTube for Jeff Beck and David Gilmour, playing their Stratocaster guitars. Generally I’m sceptical about Fender instruments, but the Strat is a unique and wonderful guitar, and one of the twentieth century’s most iconic artefacts. In the hands of Beck or Gilmour it’s lyrical and immense – practically an orchestra on its own. For me, growing old has led to a vague and inchoate feeling best described as “I wish I had paid more attention at the time”, and now at least I can catch up, with all these unclaimed hours, one after the other, into the uncertain future.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer]

And from the same TLS article another judge names some books - one of which - the Zhang - I was surprised did not make the Women’s longlist but was I think then told was published too late (I had read an ARC); another (Djinn) was for me the unexpectedly good book on the longlist (provided you did not abandon early on), another (the Hensher) which has been tipped for the Booker.

Emily Wilson in lockdown ...


With my children’s schools closed, as well as the university, the libraries, and almost everything else in Philadelphia where I live, I am fitting in my reading, writing and work around math worksheets, art projects, bike rides and at-home dance parties. My younger kids and I have been watching the brilliant Nickelodeon cartoon epic, Avatar: The Last Airbender, for the umpteenth time. The human threat of the imperialist Fire Lord is quite different from the dangers posed by Covid-19, but watching the show while the whole world confronts a common enemy, I feel particularly moved by Avatar’s commitment to international collaboration across cultural differences, and to friendship and forgiveness as values that trump the narcissistic “hero’s quest”. The characters – even the cool, scary Fire Nation people, and more surprisingly, even the grown-ups – feel human and believable. In our house, the favourite is the hilarious, toe-picking, straight-talking blind earth-bender, Toph, who can feel the movement of distant ants over the ground, and demolish or build vast pyramids or walls with a stomp of her foot.

For my between-times reading, I am constantly grateful for the opportunity to switch off the news for a little while and be immersed in fiction, which takes me to a multitude of different worlds. I am reading only current novels this year, because I am a judge on the Booker Prize panel. This week I was absorbed and moved by C. Pam Zhang’s How Much of These Hills is Gold, about a pair of second-generation Chinese-American siblings in the American West, in the era of gold-prospecting and railway construction. I was also gripped by Philip Hensher’s A Small Revolution in Germany, about political idealism and disillusionment, and Deepa Anappara’s Djinn Patrol, a surprisingly playful book on the grim subject of child poverty in India.

In my minimal work time, I am engaged in my translation of the Iliad. I’m now in the throes of Book 5, in which Diomedes confronts the gods on the battlefield. The idea of theomachy – in which a mortal human being grapples with immortal, unkillable, superhuman forces – takes on a new resonance now that far-shooting Apollo, god of plague, has afflicted our world with Covid-19. I began working on this translation at a time when the theme of sudden premature violent death, afflicting vast numbers of the population and bringing down prosperous cities and cultures, seemed relatively distant from my lived reality. Now, I feel haunted in new ways by the poem’s awareness that people can die far from home, far from their loved ones; that wealthy, beautiful, successful cities can be totally destroyed; that the squabbles of a privileged few can cost numberless people their lives, as well as their culture’s prosperity. It isn’t escapism, but there is a kind of comfort in the sense of being in an imaginary poetic landscape that feels so heartbreaking, so human and so truthful.

[Paul]

It is probably wishful thinking on my behalf but I do hope Mantel makes the longlist but not the shortlist (*) as I think it would send a powerful signal against the over-hyped, celebrity author centred, big publisher marketing budget led, under-edited, un-diverse, English "glorious" history obsessed nature of much of contemporary UK literary culture.

* that sends a more powerful signal as it meant the judges didn't just not longlist it to give others a chance, but decided after reconsideration it wasn't that good. See under Rooney, S.

[Emmeline]

I'm with you Paul. Which is unfair, because I haven't read Mantel since The Giant, O'Brien when I was about fourteen and I don't really follow prizes much, but my feelings when I do follow the Booker is that they overdo it on tedious doorstoppers.

A better example (since we don't see eye to eye on Rooney ;-) ) is Margaret Atwood making the longlist but not the shortlist of the Giller Prize last year.

[Paul]

Atwood and Giller is an excellent comparison.

[MisterHobgoblin]

Paul wrote: "that sends a more powerful signal as it meant the judges didn't just not longlist it to give others a chance, but decided after reconsideration it wasn't that good."

I like your thinking but I don't agree. I don't think Booker juries usually operate on consensus in that way - I think long-listing could suggest that one or two of the judges were championing it and that three of them blocked it at shortlist stage. Not listing it at all - especially after the previous two won - would send a message of seismic proportion.

And please note that this may be a wonderful book - but I'll never know because I even if I were locked alone in a prison cell with this book, I'd be counting the bricks.

[Hugh, Active moderator]

Booker juries often seem so perverse, varied and idiosyncratic that nothing they decide is a seismic shock...

[Hugh, Active moderator]

Paul wrote: "Although if they award this one a third Booker prize that would top the list of shocking decisions for me."
It would go straight into my top 10 winners

[WndyJW]

Mine too, Hugh, all 3.

There is room in my personal library for classics, Shakespeare, Greek dramatists, novelized retellings of Shakespeare and the Greek dramas, mid-century British women writers, experiential fiction, some avant-garde novels (just a few,) gothic ghost stories, novels evocative of place, meditative novels, epistolary novels, novels that are character studies, modern fiction and historical fiction that brings the past to life. I love it all.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer]

You may have seen the news that the Turner Prize is cancelled this year (replaces by bursaries to some chosen artists).

The Booker Prize have just reacted to say they are still going ahead.

[Hugh, Active moderator]

The Booker is much easier to do virtually. The Turner without an exhibition would be very different...

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer]

It feels like about time to start some speculation on the longlist.

A book that was published this week and seems to be getting a lot of early praise (plus being tipped for Booker and next year’s Women’s Prize) is Brit Bennett’s The Vanishing Half.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer]

There was quite a bit of discussion earlier in the thread about Caoilinn Hughes and Wild Laughter. That is now being published this week - my review here (the publisher had asked them to be kept until immediately before publication).

https://www.goodreads.com/review/show...

[Robert]

Hmmm
Apeirogon
Hamnet
The bass rock

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer]

That Reminds Me

[Paul]

I always struggle a bit with the anglophone version due to the narrow language-eligibility criteria. I'd read 40-50 eligible novels for the International Booker but only 10 that qualify for this.

Vesna Main's new novel Only a Lodger . . . And Hardly That: A Fictional Autobiography is wonderful (at the 2/3rds point) - from the Goldsmiths in 2019 to the Booker?

The Mermaid of Black Conch: A Love Story

The River Capture should be there and I hope to see Saving Lucia

and I'd second That Reminds Me and Apeirogon - both should be certainties.

Given I like to invoke his views on how to write how about (I haven't read) The Sunken Land Begins to Rise Again

One more I haven't read - Rainbow Milk

And hasn't Hilary Mantel got a new book out this year? Surprised that hasn't been mentioned as she has Booker form.

[Hugh, Active moderator]

For me Apeirogon and The Mirror and the Light have to be there, and would be very surprised not to see Hamnet too. I would also love to see Saving Lucia recognised. Another book which deserves to cross over from the Women's Prize is Djinn Patrol on the Purple Line, and in general I would like to see a more diverse geographical spread than we have seen in most years since Americans were allowed. I have not read many of the other candidates.

[Robert]

Hugh wrote: "For me Apeirogon and The Mirror and the Light have to be there, and would be very surprised not to see Hamnet too. I would also love to see Saving Lucia recognised. Another book which deserves to c..."

Considering recent events I think this year there will be an effort to have a diverse shortlist ( ideally to diversify the publishers as well since PRH tends to dominate) I know the important thing is that the book is a good read but I think indie publishers do have an edge.

[Gumble's Yard - Golden Reviewer]

The diversity comment is an interesting one - I think with Margaret Busby as chair it was already guaranteed.

I could see (and would welcome) Cassava/Jacaranda/Peepal featuring but are other indies really diverse? It would be an interesting exercise to work out how many black authors for example have been published by some of our forum favourites - I have a feeling the answer might be uncomfortable.

[Emmeline]

I find the diversity question so, so loaded, I guess because race is one thing and "privilege" another. Taking Fitzcarraldo (I know, not largely eligible for this booker, but one of our forum favourites)... are they "diverse?" Recent books include a Palestinian author (but one with a PhD from a London university, which doesn't exactly smack of oppression), a gay author (son of Sir William somebody) and a Mexican author (who seems to have spent some time writing in Berlin, which also doesn't smack of oppression). On some level, our "diverse" authors almost always seem to be bringing us closer to a non-white/cis/straight/native-English-speaker reality but filtered through other levels of privilege that often pass unnoticed.