Booker Prize 2026 Shortlist: What to Know About the Six Novels

And so, the 13 books of the Booker longlist were reduced to six. Compared to previous iterations, this year’s longlist had an emphasis on the weird and wonderful. There was Makenna Goodman’s Helen of Nowhere, for example, with its comic monologue structure set over the course of a house viewing; Missouri Williams’ The Vivisectors with its Lemony Snicket-esque academic setting, where battalions of gardeners fight back against encroaching greenery; and Luke Kennard’s Black Bag, in which an actor is paid to partake in a social experiment which sees him loitering around the place wearing nothing but a black bag. Of these three bonkers books, Kennard’s was the only one to make the shortlist — a shortlist which has, unjustly, shed a lot of the longlist’s more eccentric tendencies.

The judges this year — namely, Raymond Antrobus, Mary Beard (chair), Jarvis Cocker, Rebecca Liu and Patricia Lockwood — have assembled a disparate shortlist that encompasses historical fiction, science fiction, satire, social realism and metafiction. We glide from the islands of the Outer Hebrides to the medieval court of a reluctant king, from the homophobic streets of Kingston to a bar and grill in Massachusetts. There is also a considerable amount of Booker royalty on the list: both Marlon James and Douglas Stuart have previously won the prize, while Elizabeth Strout can now boast three nominations to her name, and M. John Harrison previously judged the prize in 2022. That just leaves Rebecca Perry and Luke Kennard, both of whom, interestingly, made their names as acclaimed poets before turning to literary fiction.

If the Booker could be won by sheer hype alone, James’s The Disappearers would have this year’s prize in the bag. A few weeks out from critic Dwight Garner’s now-infamous New York Times review, where he proclaimed it to be “the novel of the decade and possibly of the century thus far,” readers seem to be consuming the 613-page tome with relish. Bookshops in New York are reportedly struggling to keep it stocked and it even briefly sold out on Amazon following Garner’s incandescent review. 

What has really helped James’s novel shift so many copies, however, is that it is so clearly a masterpiece. Focusing on a group of gay men in 1980s Jamaica who gather to rehearse a play, James has constructed a sprawling narrative that spans decades and features so many characters that the book opens with a dramatis personae. Following a bloody, homophobic attack on the men during rehearsals, the novel transforms into an extended work of reportage, with transcripts and letters piecing together the lives of those involved in the aftermath. Perhaps the novel’s greatest strength is its ability to persuade you to overlook its inconsistencies, including the implausibility of its transcribed sections, in which characters speak in polished prose rather than dialogue and appear to possess knowledge of events they could not possibly have witnessed. 

In any other year, The Disappearers would be an obvious winner. But James has already won the Booker once before, for 2014’s A Brief History of Seven Killings. Could his previous success come into play with the judges this year? Awarding him the prize would not simply mean crowning another winner, but inducting James into an exclusive pantheon of four previous two-time winners: Margaret Atwood, Peter Carey, J. M. Coetzee and Hilary Mantel. He would certainly be in good company.

Much the same could be said of Douglas Stuart, who is shortlisted this year for John of John. Having won the Booker in 2020 for Shuggie Bain, Stuart returns to familiar territory, exploring themes of isolation, queerness and, quite plainly, misery. Set on Harris in the Outer Hebrides, the novel follows young John-Calum Macleod as he returns to the island he grew up on, after a time away studying at university in Edinburgh. On the island, he frequently comes to blows with his religious father, who cannot see past the ways the mainland has changed his son. One can hardly imagine what he might do if he discovers his son’s queerness. 

As with his previous novels, Stuart deftly compensates for the deficiencies of his prose with a thoroughly readable yarn. How he has twice made it onto the Booker shortlist, however, remains as great a mystery to me as the whereabouts of the crew of the Mary Celeste. His books so often remind me of those misery memoirs from the 2000s that had a sad, sepia-toned child on the cover, proclaiming that they’d been sold off for cigarettes. But Shuggie Bain has sold over 1.5 million copies, so what does this critic know?

Another shortlistee whose work I can appreciate more, despite often not loving, is Elizabeth Strout. In The Things We Never Say, Strout departs from the shared universe of her Lucy Barton novels, of which she has produced five in the past decade. Instead, the novel focuses on a brand new character, Artie Dam, and takes place in an unnamed town in Massachusetts rather than Strout’s familiar Maine. Dam is a schoolteacher who hides his depression from everyone around him. Early in the novel, we learn that he has been workshopping methods of suicide that could feasibly be interpreted as fatal accidents. Before he fully loses his will to live, however, he learns of a family secret that changes everything.

Strout’s placement on the shortlist has been controversial. For some, The Things We Never Say has taken the place of the more deserving Switzy by Emma Cline. Certainly, Switzy has received a generous critical reaction and featured on most people’s shortlist predictions. The story of a retired executive who decides to end his own life at a clinic in Zurich has been praised as Cline’s finest work yet. When it came to novels about suicidal men, however, Strout pipped Cline to the post. This is a common frustration with literary prizes. Switzy would certainly have made for a memorable winner, whereas The Things We Never Say would be an underwhelming one, particularly given its competition. It is a compelling and masterfully written novel, but perhaps it is all a little too perfect.

Rebecca Perry’s May We Feed the King is the only debut novel on this year’s shortlist. I have seen a noticeable reluctance on the part of the Booker jury to embrace debuts in recent years. Ever since the 2020 edition, when four of the six shortlisted novels were the author’s first, there have been only five debut novels on the shortlists across the following six editions. Last year, there were none at all. Thankfully, Perry’s novel is good enough that the judges could hardly ignore it.

A banquet of a novel, it follows a curator who faithfully recreates quotidian historical scenes in manor houses, bringing the past to life for modern visitors. While preparing their latest commission, they stumble upon a record of an obscure king, thrust onto the throne by tragedy and evidently ill-equipped for the role. The novel then transforms into the story of this reluctant king’s reign, creating a novel-within-a-novel that is both deceptively playful and wonderfully inventive. It’s hard not to see Perry’s novel as a frontrunner. Despite its largely medieval setting, it has plenty to say about life right now, particularly the way in which facts can be treated as malleable and the extent to which history is shaped by interpretation.

In the po-faced world of literary awards, comic novels have often been relegated to the sidelines. It therefore feels refreshing to see Luke Kennard’s Black Bag earn a place on this year’s shortlist. It follows an out-of-work actor who agrees to take part in a social experiment, wearing a black bag over his body while sitting in lectures to gauge the reaction of the students. The novel, of course, only gets weirder from there, introducing a sex-mad love interest, a vast web of crypto-conspiracies and, eventually, the crumbs of a cult at whose centre Black Bag seemingly sits as a kind of god.

The last time the Booker awarded a truly comic novel was Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, which won in 2016. Since then, however, the prize has been somewhat agnostic towards books that are actually meant to make you laugh. Kennard’s dry tone and penchant for the absurd should make Black Bag the novel with the broadest appeal to readers who might otherwise be intimidated by the sort of books that arrive with “Booker shortlist” emblazoned on the cover. It’s clever and knowing, and never cloying in the way that comic novels by British writers can often be. 

The shortlist is rounded out by The End of Everything by M. John Harrison. Harrison’s inclusion comes during something of a renewed interest in his life and work. He has been publishing fiction since 1966, meaning he was already a working writer before four of his fellow shortlistees were even born. Having spent many years as a pioneering science fiction writer, he published Climbers in 1989, his first work of literary fiction. Since then, his work has continued to resist easy categorisation, blurring the boundaries between science fiction, fantasy and literary fiction into something that is unmistakably Harrison.

The End of Everything, therefore, is a book that’s fiendishly hard to describe. Set in the aftermath of a society-ending event, in which strange alien creatures known as iGhetti have brought civilization to its knees, it follows a man called Philip Tennent as he trawls the beaches of England’s south coast. There, he eventually comes across an “artefact,” seemingly a form of life related to the iGhetti, which he takes under his wing in much the same way Elliott does with E.T. There are few solid descriptions of the creatures, or even of what exactly happened to bring about the end of everything. It is a novel that asks a lot of its reader and, for those encountering Harrison for the first time, has often been met with profound confusion. Harrison winning the Booker would be a glorious moment, roundly welcomed by the literary establishment. But is The End of Everything simply too weird to win?

At the time of writing, much of the chatter around the Booker seems to have narrowed to two possible outcomes: James winning for The Disappearers or Perry winning for May We Feed the King. Both would be worthy winners. But, if you’ll allow me a moment of conspiracy, let’s consider something. 

The last time Mary Beard sat on the panel of a major literary fiction prize was the 2014 Baileys Prize, which famously saw Eimear McBride’s experimental and difficult A Girl Is a Half-formed Thing claim the prize over far more popular works such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie’s Americanah and Donna Tartt’s The Goldfinch. It has since become something of an industry legend that Beard refused to back down during the final jury discussions, pushing hard for McBride’s book to take the prize.

It makes me wonder: with her apparent penchant for boundary-pushing work, could this be the year the Booker goes to M. John Harrison? The narrative is certainly there — Harrison claiming the Booker in the sixth decade of his career and finally receiving the public recognition he deserves. But perhaps, like most readers, I just enjoy a good plot.