Booker Prize 2018

Anna Burns’s Milkman is a darkly comic, unsettling novel set in an unnamed Northern Irish community during the Troubles. Told through a breathless, looping narrative voice, it follows a young woman stalked by a powerful older man. Burns captures the suffocating atmosphere of surveillance, gossip, and unspoken rules with remarkable precision. The novel explores how control operates through language and silence. Its humour sharpens rather than softens its critique. Challenging but unforgettable, it is a novel that reshapes how political fear is rendered on the page.

Richard Powers’s The Overstory is an ambitious, polyphonic novel placing trees at the centre of human history. Interweaving multiple characters, the book explores environmental activism, science, and interconnectedness. Powers writes with awe and urgency, reframing humanity’s relationship to nature. The novel challenges anthropocentric storytelling on an epic scale. Its ideas are vast, its emotions sincere. A landmark work of ecological fiction.

Washington Black is a sweeping historical adventure that follows a formerly enslaved boy across continents and cultures. Esi Edugyan blends wonder with brutality, examining freedom, science, and self-invention. The novel reworks the adventure genre to centre Black experience and moral complexity. Edugyan’s prose is vivid and expansive, moving from plantations to Arctic ice. Beneath the spectacle lies a meditation on belonging and power. It is both thrilling and thoughtful.

Robin Robertson’s The Long Take is a verse novel that blends poetry, noir, and social history. Set in post-war America, it follows a traumatized veteran drifting through cities scarred by violence and inequality. Robertson’s cinematic language captures urban decay and moral dislocation with haunting clarity. The novel confronts racism, housing injustice, and PTSD. Its formal daring deepens its emotional impact. A striking fusion of lyricism and political witness.

Belinda Bauer’s Snap is a tense, compassionate crime novel that avoids easy thrills. Beginning with a mother’s disappearance, the story explores the long aftermath of violence on children’s lives. Bauer balances suspense with emotional depth, focusing on vulnerability and resilience. The novel resists sensationalism in favour of humanity. Its pacing is tight, its characters vivid. A crime novel with a conscience.

Daisy Johnson’s debut is a dark, lyrical retelling of the Oedipus myth set along English rivers. The novel explores mother–daughter bonds, language, and buried trauma. Johnson’s prose is spare yet hypnotic, steeped in water and memory. The story unfolds through fragments, creating a sense of dread and inevitability. It is both intimate and mythic. A bold and unsettling reimagining of ancient tragedy.

Guy Gunaratne’s debut captures London on the brink, told through multiple voices in the aftermath of a terrorist attack. The novel pulses with urgency, anger, and tenderness. Gunaratne portrays masculinity, friendship, and racial tension with raw honesty. The city feels alive, fractured, and volatile. His language is energetic and musical. A powerful portrait of a generation under pressure.

Rachel Kushner’s The Mars Room is set largely inside a women’s prison in California. Through the story of Romy Hall, Kushner exposes the brutality and indifference of the American penal system. The novel blends social realism with sharp character studies, refusing sentimentality. Kushner gives voice to lives society prefers to ignore. The prose is cool, controlled, and devastating. A fierce indictment of structural injustice.

Sally Rooney’s Normal People traces the evolving relationship between two young people navigating class, intimacy, and vulnerability. Rooney’s style is spare and emotionally precise, capturing miscommunication and longing. The novel explores how power shifts within relationships. Its quietness amplifies its emotional force. The characters feel achingly real. A defining novel of millennial intimacy.

Sabrina is a graphic novel that examines grief, conspiracy, and media saturation in contemporary America. Drnaso’s minimalist art mirrors emotional numbness and alienation. The story explores how tragedy becomes distorted through online paranoia. Its restraint heightens its unsettling impact. The book feels eerily prescient. Quiet, chilling, and deeply unsettling.

Michael Ondaatje’s Warlight is a luminous novel about childhood, secrecy, and the aftermath of war. Set in postwar London, it follows siblings left in the care of mysterious guardians. Ondaatje’s prose is graceful and elliptical, revealing truth slowly. The novel explores memory and the partial nature of knowledge. It is tender and atmospheric. A quiet meditation on history’s shadows.

Sophie Mackintosh’s dystopian debut imagines sisters raised in isolation to fear male violence. The novel explores control, trauma, and female embodiment through unsettling imagery. Mackintosh’s prose is spare and hypnotic. The story resists clear allegory, instead building dread through atmosphere. It interrogates how fear is taught and inherited. Disturbing and provocative.