Reading between the lines of the Booker longlist

This week brought the much-anticipated release of the Booker longlist, and with it, the usual scramble to make sense of what it means. The consensus so far is that this year’s list combines a few heavy hitters – Douglas Stuart, Marlon James, Elizabeth Strout – with a clutch of less obvious picks. But is the search for a unifying theme ever the right way to read a longlist? In this week’s Bookmarks, we put that question to critic John Self, and speak to judge Patricia Lockwood about the selection process.

Plus, Gaël Faye – whose book Jacaranda is out now – recommends three favourite recent reads.

Every year, within 48 hours of the Booker longlist dropping, a ritual kicks in: critics rush to find the theme – not just “here are 13 good books” but “here is what this list tells us about fiction right now”.

This newspaper and the Times both read the list as a triumph of nerve – the Times’s Johanna Thomas-Corr called it “one of the most original and mischievous selections in years”; our own Justine Jordan said the longlist was “keen to experiment”. The Telegraph’s Claire Allfree interpreted that same experimentation as a case of style over substance, arguing the panel had let “feverish, off-kilter prose” crowd out anything with real heft.

Critic John Self is wary of how quickly reactions can calcify into an overarching analysis. “People tend to project their own appetites, likes and dislikes on to these things,” he says. Readers pining for mainstream fiction will be “lamenting the lack of mainstream while not accepting that Douglas Stuart and Elizabeth Strout are actually two of the most mainstream and widely read authors out there”, he continues.

The hunt for a line to take, Self suggests, isn’t always compatible with a process that inevitably brings together a range of views. “With judges as different as Jarvis Cocker and Mary Beard on the same panel, there’s clearly a little bit of tension between the more mainstream and more eccentric selections,” he says. “It’s obviously the product of many people with many different tastes.”

“At the same time, as journalists we want to have a sense that there is a pattern behind what’s being delivered to us, so I think it’s understandable,” he adds.

If the panel as a whole pulls in different directions, how do the individual judges navigate sifting through the submissions? “I had three feelings that I would wait for [while reading]: one was the no, one was the yes, and one was the glow,” author and 2026 Booker judge Patricia Lockwood says. That “glow”, the feeling that a book could be a winner, “would happen almost immediately, and by my own lights it was never wrong”.

“We had traffic lights – green, amber, red – and I also made my own notes, which were sometimes rapturous and sometimes not very charitable,” she continues. “Those will remain private until after I die, like Mary Astor’s Purple Diaries.”

If there is one point of near consensus in the responses to the announcement, it’s an apparent snub: Ben Lerner’s Transcription is the book critics expected – and fans wanted – to see make the cut. But for reasons the judges will presumably be keeping close to their chests, it didn’t make it.

Lately, I’ve found myself returning to books that remind me how literature can hold history and intimacy within the same breath. The Convoy by Béata Umubyeyi Mairesse is one of them. Beginning with the rescue of a group of children during the genocide against the Tutsi in Rwanda, Umubyeyi Mairesse weaves together autobiography, documentary inquiry and a profound meditation on memory in prose of remarkable clarity and grace. It is a book that reminds us that storytelling is also an act of recovering traces, piecing together scattered voices, and restoring a place to those whom history has too often pushed to its margins.

I also reread The Years by Annie Ernaux, a book that profoundly shaped me when I first encountered it as a student. It was the first time I understood that an intensely personal experience could become a collective voice, and that the almost surgical precision with which one life is observed could illuminate the portrait of an entire era.

Finally, every year I return to Home by Toni Morrison. Its opening pages overwhelm me every time. The image of those horses standing upright, almost like human beings, stirs something in me that I struggle to put into words. Toni Morrison possesses the rare gift of leading us into the darkest depths of the human soul before bringing us, almost miraculously, back into the light.