The longlist for the 2018 Man Booker Prize announced on July 24, 2017. Some titles are not yet available in the US.
The Man Booker Prize is a literary prize awarded each year for the best original novel written in the English language and published in the UK.
Snap
Belinda Bauer
FICTION Bauer Belinda
Fiction, Thriller, Suspense
Jack's in charge, said his mother as she disappeared up the road to get help. I won't be long. Now eleven-year-old Jack and his two sisters wait on the hard shoulder in their stifling, broken-down car, bickering and whining and playing I-Spy until she comes back. But their mother doesn't come back. She never comes back. And after that long, hot summer's day, nothing will ever be the same again. Three years later, Jack's fifteen now and still in charge ... alone in the house. Meanwhile across town, a young woman called Catherine While wakes to find a knife beside her bed, and a note reading I could have killed you. The police are tracking a mysterious burglar they call Goldilocks, for his habit of sleeping in the beds of the houses he robs, but Catherine doesn't see the point of involving the police. And Jack, very suddenly, may be on the verge of finding out who killed his mother. A twisty, masterfully written novel that will have readers on the edge of their seats.
Washington Black : a novel
Esi Edugyan
FICTION Edugyan Esi
Fiction, Historical Fiction
Washington Black is an eleven-year-old field slave who knows no other life than the Barbados sugar plantation where he was born. When his master's eccentric brother chooses him to be his manservant, Wash is terrified of the cruelties he is certain await him. But Christopher Wilde, or "Titch," is a naturalist, explorer, scientist, inventor, and abolitionist. He initiates Wash into a world where a flying machine can carry a man across the sky; where two people, separated by an impossible divide, might begin to see each other as human; and where a boy born in chains can embrace a life of dignity and meaning. But when a man is killed and a bounty is placed on Wash's head, Titch abandons everything to save him. What follows is their flight along the eastern coast of America, and, finally, to a remote outpost in the Arctic, where Wash, left on his own, must invent another new life.
Everything under
Daisy Johnson
FICTION Johnson Daisy
Fiction
Gretel, a lexicographer by trade, grew up on a houseboat with her mother, wandering the canals of Oxford and speaking a private language of their own invention.
The mars room
Rachel Kushner
FICTION Kushner Rachel
Fiction
"From twice National Book Award-nominated Rachel Kushner, whose Flamethrowers was called "the best, most brazen, most interesting book of the year" (Kathryn Schulz, New York magazine), comes a spectacularly compelling, heart-stopping novel about a life gone off the rails in contemporary America. It's 2003 and Romy Hall is at the start of two consecutive life sentences at Stanville Women's Correctional Facility, deep in California's Central Valley. Outside is the world from which she has been severed: the San Francisco of her youth and her young son, Jackson. Inside is a new reality: thousands of women hustling for the bare essentials needed to survive; the bluffing and pageantry and casual acts of violence by guards and prisoners alike; and the deadpan absurdities of institutional living, which Kushner evokes with great humor and precision. Stunning and unsentimental, The Mars Room demonstrates new levels of mastery and depth in Kushner's work. It is audacious and tragic, propulsive and yet beautifully refined."--
The water cure
Sophie Mackintosh
FICTION Mackintosh, Sophie
Fiction, Dystopian
The Handmaid's Tale meets The Virgin Suicides in this dystopic feminist revenge fantasy about three sisters on an isolated island, raised to fear men King has tenderly staked out a territory for his wife and three daughters, Grace, Lia, and Sky.
Warlight
Michael Ondaatje
FICTION Ondaatje Michael
Fiction, Historical Fiction
Decades after World War II, Nathaniel Williams reflects on his experiences in 1945, when his parents left him and his sister in the care of a mysterious neighbor.
The overstory : a novel
Richard Powers
FICTION Powers Richard
Fiction
A novel of activism and natural-world power presents interlocking fables about nine remarkable strangers who are summoned in different ways by trees for an ultimate, brutal stand to save the continent's few remaining acres of virgin forest.
The long take ; or, a way to lose more slowly
Robin Robertson
FICTION Robertso Robin
Fiction
A Canadian veteran of D-Day travels through New York, Los Angeles, and San Francisco, struggling with his memories of the war and experiencing firsthand America's postwar social and racial divisions. The story is told in verse and illustrations --|cadapted from cover description.
From a low and quiet sea
Donal Ryan
FICTION Ryan Donal
Fiction
"A new moving novel of three men, each searching for something they have lost, from the award-winning and Man Booker nominated author Donal Ryan. For Farouk, family is all. He has protected his wife and daughter as best he can from the war and hatred that has torn Syria apart. If they stay, they will lose their freedom, will become lesser persons. If they flee, they will lose all they have known of home, for some intangible dream of refuge in some faraway land across the merciless sea. Lampy is distracted; he has too much going on in his small town life in Ireland. He has the city girl for a bit of fun, but she's not Chloe, and Chloe took his heart away when she left him. There's the secret his mother will never tell him. His granddad's little sniping jokes are getting on his wick. And on top of all that, he has a bus to drive; those old folks from the home can't wait all day. The game was always the lifeblood coursing through John's veins: manipulating people for his enjoyment, or his enrichment, or his spite. But it was never enough. The ghost of his beloved brother, and the bitter disappointment of his father, have shadowed him all his life. But now that lifeblood is slowing down, and he's not sure if God will listen to his pleas for forgiveness. Three men, searching for some version of home, their lives moving inexorably towards a reckoning that will draw them all together"--
Sabrina
Nick Drnaso
GRAPHIC NOVEL Drnaso
Graphic Novels
"When Sabrina disappears, an airman in the U.S. Air Force is drawn into a web of suppositions, wild theories, and outright lies. Sabrina depicts a modern world devoid of personal interaction and responsibility, where relationships are stripped of intimacy through glowing computer screens. An indictment of our modern state, Drnaso contemplates the dangers of a fake news climate."--
In our mad and furious city
Guy Gunaratne
FICTION Gunaratn Guy
Fiction
Inspired by the real-life murder of a British army soldier by religious fanatics, Guy Gunaratne's In Our Mad and Furious City is a snapshot of the diverse, frenzied edges of modern-day London.