Booker Prize 2026 Longlist part one
The Booker Prize is a prestigious literary award given every year to a work of fiction that is written in English and published in the United Kingdom. Every year they convene a panel of former winners, authors, artists and other luminaries to select a longlist of 13 titles, then a shortlist of 6, before finally selecting the winner. I've been aware of the Booker Prize for years by its very austere logo that often appears on book covers, and earlier this year I followed along on BookTok with the reveal of the International Booker Prize winner, soon to be rechristened the Bukhman International Booker Prize. With the recent announcement of this year's longlist, I decided to broaden my reading horizons and try reading as many of the longlisted books as I could. This goal is made a little tougher by the fact that not all of the selected books have been released in the US yet. In this review I'm going to give my quick impressions about the first three books from the long list that I've read thus far. I don't want to bury the lede here, but so far the judges and I aren't quite on the same literary page.
The first book I read and the one I have the most positive feelings about is The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout. This book follows a protagonist named Artie Dam, who is an 11th grade history teacher in Massachusetts. Early on we find out that despite Artie having a seemingly settled and happy life, he actually has recently decided that he wants to kill himself and he spends a lot of time thinking of a way to do it that would appear to be an accident. Still relatively early in the book, he legitimately slips overboard on the way to his sailboat and could have given up and allowed his drowning to happen, but he instead fights to stay afloat and is rescued by a random passerby. He comes out of this incident with a renewed vigor for life, only to soon after find out a major secret has been kept from him for decades.
As the title implies, the book deals a lot with the themes of how it's possible and maybe even easy to keep secrets from the people we love and also just from the world in general, through willful omissions. I think it's an interesting book, though its place in time, the lead up to the 2024 presidential election, and its reflections on that are still a little tough to have to rehash as we are all still living every day with the fallout of that event.
The second title I read was Palm House by Gwendoline Riley. The blurb says this book is about a slice of life between two friends, Laura Miller and Edmund Putnam, who live in London and are going through different things in their lives. Through the mercifully short book, we hear about the office political drama that Edmund is going through. A new editor has taken over the literary magazine that he's worked at for over 20 years, and Edmund isn't happy with the direction, so he's decided to quit and move on with his life. It's all presented as he's being forced out and he's the victim, when in fact that isn't actually the case. The portions of the story featuring Laura are mostly her trying to cheer up Edmund, or flashbacks to when she was a teen and she had a pretty inappropriate relationship with a minor celebrity. In minor spoilers for a book that was incredibly plot-light, Edmund is eventually triumphant as the other editor is dismissed from the magazine, and he takes on a controlling position again. I understand that some people enjoy these kinds of novels, but it really wasn't for me.
The final title I've read is Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman. This is the shortest of all the books on the long list at a slim 141 pages, and I'm not sad about that. The story is told in a set of 6 different essentially monologues that detail a professor whose academic career is being ended by a group of women in his department, which tangentially leads to his wife leaving him as well — she worked in the same department and also sided against him. The professor is a deeply unsympathetic character, so reading about all the devastation his life is going through isn't the worst thing to read. The rest of the book is told from a realtor who is showing the country house of the titular Helen, who may or may not be still alive in an assisted living home, but also may have been haunting the house and having a long conversation with the professor who she calls "baby" way, way too often. Again, I can appreciate that the book takes risks in its presentation style and its length, but again it just didn't work for me.
So after 3 books, I'm at a 33% hit rate so far. Based on the available synopses and some of the samples I've read, I'm pretty certain I won't be reading all 13 of the list. However, there are a few that will be out in the US soon that I do think sound interesting, so stay tuned in the future for another Booker roundup, or if I really enjoy one of them, a full-fledged review. The shortlist will also be released on September 22nd, so we'll also see if any of these three make it through or not.
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