The Crossed Keys Chronicle

As I write this, we are now only hours away from the release of the Booker Prize shortlist for 2026. I gave it my best shot to read all thirteen of the longlist entries before the reveal and I feel like I've done all I can at this point. I have at least started twelve out of the thirteen, which is the maximum number currently available for sale in the US right now — The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis doesn't come out until sometime in October. I am only a few pages into Switzy by Emma Cline, but I don't expect I'll finish it by the Tuesday deadline.

Let's do a quick whirlwind tour of the remaining books that I did complete in time.

The Renovation

The Renovation by Kenan Orhan is the first one up. We follow a Turkish émigré named Dilara, her husband, and her aging, Alzheimer's-suffering father, who are now all living in Italy. Dilara has hired contractors to renovate her home's second bathroom to help it be more suitable for her father, only to find that instead of a bathroom, they have connected her home to a prison cell back in her native Turkey. The story alternates between her acceptance of this strange fact and flashbacks to the family's time in Turkey as her father came under harsher and harsher scrutiny by the regime.

I totally get the concept of magical realism and I've enjoyed some books featuring it as their central premise, but I just didn't love that part of this book. The fact that it was a literal portal between Italy and Turkey and that she eventually started even interacting with the other prisoners there just didn't work for me. The other parts of the book, though — related to the feelings of abandonment on having to leave the country of one's birth, combined with losing her most direct link to her past with her continually declining father — were very affecting and definitely the high parts of the book. Given the fact this has made it on the National Book Award fiction longlist, I have a sneaking suspicion it will move on to the Booker Prize shortlist as well.

All Them Dogs

The next entry that I finished was All Them Dogs by Djamel White. This tells the story of a young Irish gangster named Tony Ward, who has returned home some five years after murdering a rival gang member and having to flee to London. Tony's first order of business after returning home is to reestablish himself in the local gang structure by proving his worth to a crime boss named Flute. What follows could have been a minor story arc on a season of the Sopranos, though swapping Italian accents for Irish ones and a significantly higher dose of homoeroticism. As is often the case with mob/gangster stories, I didn't find Tony or really any of the main characters to be sympathetic and I certainly wasn't rooting for him in any way. I was decidedly neutral about the book until the last few pages, which did tip me slightly over into the "like" camp. If you are looking for an Irish-themed gangster book, it's probably not a bad shout. I'd be very surprised if this one made it onto the shortlist, though.

The End of Everything

The End of Everything by M. John Harrison is meant to be the genre pick of the list, which I’m all in favor of sci-fi being recognized, but I found nothing to take away after reading this. It’s stated premise, is that in the near future a kind of alien invasion has taken place, but its scope and outcome is very undefined with the exception of weird things coming out of the sea. I simply couldn’t follow what plot there was to speak of in this book, and what I did understand had some especially brutal acts of causal violence. This is one I don't have a good sense of for the shortlist, but I don’t think it makes it.

John of John

The final completion on my list is John of John by Douglas Stuart. This book follows John-Calum Macleod, a young man who, after completing art school but with no prospects after graduation, returns home to the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides of Scotland, where he lives with his father, the devout Presbyterian lay preacher John, and his maternal grandmother Ella. John and Cal have a strained relationship, with John often verbally and even physically attacking Cal out of anger over how Cal has long hair and doesn't dress respectfully enough for the preacher. John is a particularly unlikable character. It's revealed early on that despite being so outwardly pious and "Christian," John has had a near-lifelong same-sex relationship with a nearby neighbor named Innes. This eventually led to the dissolution of his marriage when she found out, leaving Cal to live with John and Ella growing up. Cal himself is gay, but due to his fears of what his father would say or do to him, he of course can't ever tell John that. I rather enjoyed this novel — unlike a lot of other prestige literary fiction, there was a through line of a plot — and I thought the ending was also properly well earned. I think, based on a lot of the criticism and reviews I've read, that this one will definitely be on the shortlist, and until recently might have been the odds-on favorite to win the actual prize this year.

Now on to my DNFs.

The Vivisectors

The first of which was The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams. This was billed as an odd romance story set in a university town, which has an unusual arrangement where a group of specialized gardeners help control the natural world from overrunning the city. I made it about 30% of the way through this book, but I just wasn't connecting with it. From some of the blurbs and reviews I had skimmed, I thought maybe there would be a more spooky or supernatural angle to the overgrowth and ruin taking over the city, but at least to the point where I stopped reading, none of that was apparent to me. What I actually got was long discussions of a particularly politically active student who had recently been involved with some incidents at the university. Maybe one day, if I am really looking for something to read, I'll come back and try and finish this, but only time will tell. Despite my feelings on it, I think there is a lot of consensus that this book will make it on the shortlist.

The Disappearers

The final DNF was my most disappointing, The Disappearers by Marlon James. The buzz around this book is undeniable, with the NYTimes review even going so far as saying it's possible that it's the book of the century, which seems like insane hyperbole, and yet basically every other TikTok, BookTok, or YouTube video will say something very similar. So I am very sad that I wasn't compelled to finish it. James is well known as an incredible writer, but I found it very difficult to get through the Jamaican patois dialog and the visceral and extensive depictions of violence. I know that this component is one of the main factors in everyone saying this book is a classic and has such resonance, but it was all too much for me to continue on through the nearly 600 pages of total length. This book is the biggest lock for the shortlist I can think of, and I would also be gobsmacked if it doesn't win the actual prize as well.

And so the Booker Prize longlist roundup comes to an end. I will endeavor to finish the last two at some point in the future, and if there are any out-of-left-field omissions or selections for the shortlist, I'll be sure to comment on that in a future post. Has anyone else been reading along with the list? Does anyone have a favorite that isn't The Disappearers? (If it were up to me, my pick would be May We Feed the King.) But let me know who you think will take the grand prize.

I was recently going through the list of Booker Prize nominated works from recent years past and I noticed one book that I had seen come up on lists before but never really looked into what it was about. That book was Klara and the Sun by Kazuo Ishiguro and after taking a look at the synopsis I realized that not only did it sound interesting, but it was more topical than ever.

In this book we follow the story of Klara, who is an AF, or Artificial Friend, a solar-powered robot whose main goal is to provide friendship and companionship to children. Through bits and pieces in the book we can infer that the story is taking place in a near-future dystopia where children are especially isolated and in general do all their learning remotely, only occasionally getting together in essentially play groups.

When we first meet Klara, she is learning about the world by watching the cityscape outside the large window of the AF storefront. From there she sees a number of things that her robotic brain interprets in ways that are interesting, and later important to the story, including a piece of construction equipment called a Cootings Machine and Beggar Man and his dog, who she believes are resurrected by the power of the Sun. It's also where she comes into contact with Josie, the 14-year-old main human protagonist. They have an interaction through the window one day, and eventually a few weeks later, Josie does make her promised return to the store, and after some convincing of Mother, they purchase Klara and bring her home.

Once home, we learn a little more background about the world we're in. There is some sort of elective procedure, genetic editing it sounds like, that parents can have done on their kids, which ultimately makes them much smarter and more capable than normal kids, leading them to be called "lifted". It does seem like it's not without its risks, though: Josie's sister Sal didn't survive the procedure, and Josie herself is often very weak and ill.

The rest of the story is Klara navigating her new life as Josie's AF and the family dynamic of Mother and Josie's neighbor Rick, who is "unlifted," which will leave him at a huge disadvantage in life despite his obvious aptitude at making and flying drones. As they try and navigate Josie's continual health issues, Klara puts her faith in the Sun to come up with a solution to the family's issues.

I really enjoyed this novel and it's fascinating to read a story of what we'd now call AI, but written in a time before LLMs were introduced to the world. Klara is portrayed as caring and compassionate, but often her understanding of the world about simple factual things like the Cootings construction machine is completely of her own design. It is, though, a little ironic that devotion to the Sun and her pact-making with it could actually be interpreted a little like how modern LLMs have their hallucinations. She saw the Beggar Man brought back to life in her way of understanding, and combining that with the fact her body is solar-powered, she confidently created a mechanism that she believed was real. And given the fact she never fully explained what she thought was happening to any human, she was never gently redirected to update her worldview. Which to be fair can be said of many humans these days as well.

Klara and the Sun didn't even make the shortlist of the Booker Prize the year it was nominated, but Ishiguro himself is a Nobel laureate in Literature, so I suppose there is no accounting for taste. I think it would have been a well-deserved winner though, and I highly recommend it for anyone looking for a more compassionate version of AI in their life.

Despite the ever-increasing prevalence of BookTok and algorithmic recommendations on Amazon and Goodreads, I am constantly surprised how often the best way to find a new, interesting-sounding book is just to visit a new-to-me bookstore. A few weeks ago, on a trip to NYC, I stopped in at McNally Jackson Books and found a few such books, one of which I picked up was The Greatest Possible Good by Ben Brooks.

The premise of the book sounded similar to my favorite show ever, Arrested Development, where a wealthy family has a catastrophe and they have to pick up the pieces of their lives. In this story, we encounter a very well-off British family named the Candlewicks, led by the patriarch Arthur. His teenage daughter, Evangeline, has a very activist streak to her, leading very small acts of rebellion at her private school, while reading lots of progressive literature. The family's lives are upended one day when Arthur goes missing for the span of 72 hours. While on a random evening walk, he falls some 20 feet into an abandoned mineshaft, breaking his leg, and is trapped there until his eventual rescue.

After his release from the hospital and during his recovery, Arthur has a complete change of personality and he becomes enamored with the idea of Effective Altruism. EA, as it's often known, was a concept popularized in the last decade or so by some British philosophers, which in the early 2020s enamored a certain set of the San Francisco tech elite and may have indirectly caused a minor cryptocurrency bankruptcy or two. The main principle of the idea boils down to the notion that if you have any money that is in excess of what you truly need to live comfortably, it's your moral imperative to donate the rest to causes that can do the most good on a per-dollar basis. Arthur becomes obsessed with this idea, and without consulting his wife or the rest of his family, he takes all the money from selling the family’s timber business and donates it to a bunch of EA causes. This obviously causes a bit of friction between himself and his wife, which leads to them getting a divorce.

Things do not get better for the family after that point either. I had a feeling that the story wouldn't be a laugh a minute given that one of the blurbs on the back compared the novel favorably to The Bee Sting, which is a book I truly love but is incredibly depressing. This book doesn't get to those levels of sadness, but towards the end I did eventually find it to be incredibly dour. I also didn't have positive feelings towards any of the family members, so I had a hard time rooting for any of them to break themselves out of their destructive loops.

In the end, I don't think I'd recommend The Greatest Possible Good unless someone really enjoyed fiction that mentioned EA in it. If you want a comedy about this kind of thing, I always suggest Arrested Development or Schitt's Creek, and if you want the actual depressing version, then definitely check out The Bee Sting by Paul Murray, who is an incredible author to check out regardless.