The longest for the 2019 Booker Award have been announced. Competition for the £50,000 international award is high. This year the favorites include The Testament, Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale; Oyinkan Braithwaite’s brilliant debut, My Sister, The Serial Killer and Salman Rushdie’s beautiful Quichotte. From the Guardian:
Most readers will have to wait until September to find out what happens in Margaret Atwood’s sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, but the Booker judges have deemed The Testaments worthy of a place on the 2019 longlist for the £50,000 literary prize.
This is the sixth time the Canadian novelist has been nominated for the Booker, and her first nomination since she won the UK’s most prestigious literary prize for The Blind Assassin in 2000.The Testaments is set 15 years after the end of her dystopian classic The Handmaid’s Tale. Out on 10 September, the novel’s contents remain a closely guarded secret – with this year’s judges, chaired by Hay festival director Peter Florence, only saying in their statement: “Spoiler discretion and a ferocious non-disclosure agreement prevent any description of who, how, why and even where. So this: it’s terrifying and exhilarating.”
Here’s the full longlist:
- The Testaments by Margaret Atwood (Vintage, Chatto & Windus)
- Night Boat to Tangier by Kevin Barry (Canongate Books)
- My Sister, The Serial Killer by Oyinkan Braithwaite (Atlantic Books)
- Ducks, Newburyport by Lucy Ellmann (Galley Beggar Press)
- Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo (Hamish Hamilton)
- The Wall by John Lanchester (Faber & Faber)
- The Man Who Saw Everything by Deborah Levy (Hamish Hamilton)
- Lost Children Archive by Valeria Luiselli (4th Estate)
- An Orchestra of Minorities by Chigozie Obioma (Little Brown)
- Lanny by Max Porter (Faber & Faber)
- Quichotte by Salman Rushdie (Jonathan Cape)
- 10 Minutes 38 Seconds in This Strange World by Elif Shafak (Viking)
- Frankissstein by Jeanette Winterson (Jonathan Cape)
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