Booker Prize shortlist 2021: read The Telegraph's reviews of all six books
Whittled down from a longlist of 13, the 2021 Booker shortlist is forward-looking. None of the authors on it is a household name (yet). Neither Kazuo Ishiguro nor Rachel Cusk made the cut.
The historical-fiction heavy longlist has been rebalanced, with Richard Powers's Bewilderment, set in a near-future United States, under a quasi-fascist presidency, and Patricia Lockwood's Nobody Is Talking About This, about the strange psychological sensation of living an online life, offering tart commentaries on modern life, while Anuk Arudpragasam's A Passage North takes us on a journey through modern-day Sri Lanka.
The other three novels, however, immerse us in lost times and places: Maggie Shipstead's Great Circle sweeps across the 20th century, uniting the stories of an early female aviator and a listless 21st century starlet, while Nadifa Mohamed's The Fortune Men brings to life the polyglot Tiger Bay in 1950s Cardiff, and a real-life miscarriage of justice, and Damon Galgut's The Promise is an allegory for South Africa's post-apartheid failures through the saga of a white Afrikaner family.
A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam ★★★★★
"Krishan, a young, privileged Sri Lankan Tamil makes a train journey to the island’s north to attend the funeral of Rani, a shell-shocked Tamil woman who has for a time been his grandmother’s carer and whose death may have been a suicide. The journey provides the through-line unifying his excursions into Rani’s past, to the slow decline in his grandmother’s faculties, to his relationship with Anjum, a charismatic radical activist for whom politics takes precedence over any lover... The long sentences, the apparently free-associative paragraphs, the digressions into general subjects, all add up to something that is, for once, greater than the sum of its parts." Read the full review
The Promise by Damon Galgut ★★★☆☆
"In South Africa in the last decade of apartheid, a family of white Afrikaners, the (ironically named) Swarts, are mourning the death of Rachel, the matriarch. The promise of the title is, in its most literal form, the one that Rachel elicits from her soon-to-be-widower Manie, that Salome, the black woman who nursed her during her final illness, will be made the owner of the small house she lives in on the family estate. But the keeping of the promise is repeatedly deferred. The Swarts are unable to acknowledge what they owe Salome, and the unkept promise turns into a constant symbol of their moral decline." Read the full review
No One Is Talking About This by Patricia Lockwood ★★★★★
"Often filthy and irreverent, sometimes extremely funny, and ultimately surprisingly poignant, No One Is Talking About This offers proof of Lockwood’s particular genius. It's a novel about the way we live now that manages to be something more than just an exercise in the replication of our fragmented, fake-truth-addled, part IRL/part online existence... It’s a book of two distinct halves. In the first, we’re introduced to an unnamed woman who became famous when her social media post – 'Can a dog be twins?' – went viral. Then, in the second half, the narrator finds herself lifted 'cleanly and completely […] out of the stream of regular life', Her sister is pregnant, but the foetus has a profound congenital disorder." Read the full review
The Fortune Men by Nadifa Mohamed ★★★☆☆
"We first meet the Somalian sailor Mahmood Mattan in a bar in Cardiff’s Tiger Bay on the day of the death of King George VI in 1952. He’s there with other Somalians and a ragtag of men blown in from the four corners of the British Empire, who have made a hardscrabble home among the 'low slung, wind blown terraces' of the Butetown housing estate, and to their ears the radio announcer with his 'white bow-tie' voice might as well live on a different planet. Yet Mattan, a real historical figure, would soon come face to face with the British establishment. Later that year, he was wrongfully convicted and executed for the murder of Lily Volpert, a Jewish shopkeeper found with her throat cut. At his trial, even his defence counsel called this speaker of five languages a 'semi-civilised savage'. His conviction, procured on the flimsiest of evidence, was overturned in 1998 after it emerged the police had pressurised a witness. From these bare facts, Mohamed has fashioned a novel heaving with life.” Read the full review
Bewilderment by Richard Powers ★★★☆☆
"Theo is an astrobiologist who scans the universe for habitable planets. He is also the widowed single father to a nine-year-old son, Robin. Robin is not quite like the other ducks: prone to obsessively meticulous behaviour and outbreaks of violent rage, he has been diagnosed any number of ways by any number of doctors. Those doctors want to drug him up, but Theo resists medicalising him. After all, it’s suggested, Robin’s vibrating distress at animal cruelty and ecological devastation is on the face of it a more rational response than the sanguine, tinkering-round-the-edges orthodoxy of the adult world." Read the full review
Great Circle by Maggie Shipstead ★★★★★
"In Maggie Shipstead’s fat, juicy peach of a novel, Marian Graves, a female aviator from Montana, has spent most of her life dreaming of flying a complete circle around the Earth, pole to pole. In 1950, she reaches Antarctica and is about to embark onwards to New Zealand. But the plane never makes it. Her story is interwoven with that of Hadley Baxter, a crazily famous, present-day, scandal-soiled starlet, who is hoping to resurrect her career by playing Marian in a film about her doomed final flight.” Read the full review
To order any of these books call 0844 871 1514 or visit the Telegraph Bookshop
