Booker Prize 2022 Longlist

Karunatilaka’s Booker-winning novel is a dazzling, chaotic, and wildly imaginative journey through Sri Lanka’s violent past. After war photographer Maali Almeida wakes up dead, he has seven moons to solve his own murder and expose the horrors he captured on film. The novel blends political satire, metaphysics, and noir with extraordinary inventiveness. Karunatilaka’s prose is energetic and darkly funny, even as it confronts brutal realities of war and corruption. The afterlife setting allows for sharp commentary on truth, memory, and complicity. It is a genre-bending, deeply human story that refuses to look away from violence while insisting on the possibility of transformation.

Claire Keegan’s novella is a masterclass in restraint, shining a bright light on Ireland’s Magdalene laundries through one man’s small act of courage. Set in the 1980s, the book follows Bill Furlong as he uncovers cruelty hidden in plain sight within his town’s religious institutions. Keegan’s prose is spare yet luminous, capturing the moral weight of seemingly ordinary decisions. She explores complicity, shame, and the quiet power of choosing to do what is right. The story is brief but emotionally immense, revealing how political injustice thrives on silence. A profound and deeply humane work.

Everett’s novel uses satire and crime fiction to confront America’s history of racial violence. A series of grotesque murders forces a reckoning with unresolved pasts. The tone shifts between dark comedy and moral outrage. Everett exposes the absurdity of denial and inaction. Beneath the humour lies deep anger. A sharp, urgent, and unsettling novel.

Inspired by Zimbabwe’s 2017 coup, Glory is a wildly inventive political satire populated entirely by animals. Bulawayo blends folklore, humour, and biting critique to create a world that’s both fantastical and painfully familiar. The novel’s energy is relentless, its language exuberant and playful. Beneath the wit lies a serious examination of tyranny, revolution, and the stories nations tell about themselves. It’s daring, distinctive, and deeply resonant.

Audrey Magee’s The Colony is a taut, layered novel about language, identity, and colonial legacy set on a small Irish island. The arrival of an artist and a linguist sparks tensions that reveal deeper fractures around power, preservation, and cultural ownership. Magee’s prose is sharp and controlled, creating a claustrophobic atmosphere that mirrors the island’s political pressures. She uses parallel narrative threads to explore how violence and cultural domination echo through generations. The book is intellectual yet visceral, both intimate and sweeping. It is a quietly explosive examination of what it means to claim — or be claimed by — a place.

Strout returns to Lucy Barton with her trademark clarity and compassion. In Oh William! Lucy reflects on her complicated first husband as they embark on a journey that unearths unexpected family secrets. Strout’s prose is deceptively simple, capturing the complexity of love, friendship, and lingering attachment. Her voice is intimate and wise, inviting readers into Lucy’s reflections with warmth and vulnerability. The novel reveals how relationships evolve over a lifetime, often in ways we barely understand. It is gentle, insightful, and quietly profound.

Written by Leila Mottley at just seventeen, Nightcrawling is a raw and deeply empathetic portrait of survival in Oakland. Kiara, a young Black woman forced into sex work to keep her family afloat, becomes entangled in a police corruption scandal. Mottley’s prose is lyrical yet unflinching, capturing the vulnerability, resilience, and emotional complexity of her protagonist. The novel explores systemic poverty, exploitation, and the failures of social infrastructure with maturity far beyond the author’s years. Kiara’s voice is unforgettable — fierce, wounded, and full of longing. The book is heartbreaking, courageous, and vital.

Alan Garner’s Treacle Walker is a myth-infused, philosophical tale following a boy whose encounter with a mysterious wanderer opens gateways into folklore and metaphysics. Garner blends children’s-story simplicity with profound themes of time, vision, and transformation. His language is rhythmic, enigmatic, and steeped in traditional lore. The novella invites multiple interpretations, rewarding readers who enjoy symbolic and mystical storytelling. Strange, delicate, and hypnotic, it is a unique contribution to contemporary British fiction.

Mortimer’s debut is a stylistically daring novel that follows a woman living with terminal illness while blending poetry, typography, and shifting perspectives. The narrative unfolds both in her external world and inside her body, where illness itself becomes a voice. Mortimer explores family, identity, and memory with tenderness and imaginative flair. Her experimental form enhances rather than distracts, creating a visceral reading experience. It is heartbreaking yet full of life, offering a meditation on mortality that feels intimate and expansive. A luminous, daring work.

Fowler’s Booth is an expansive historical novel about the family of John Wilkes Booth, the assassin who killed Abraham Lincoln. Rather than focusing on the act itself, Fowler traces the hopes, fractures, and failures that shaped a family living through America’s turbulent 19th century. Her meticulous research brings depth to each sibling’s perspective, revealing how personal and national histories intertwine. The novel examines ambition, loyalty, and the making of an extremist. It is rich, tragic, and morally searching — a sweeping portrait of a family shadowed by infamy.

Hernan Diaz crafts a literary puzzle about money, power, and authorship in early twentieth-century America. Told in four interlocking narratives, the novel revisits the same marriage from competing perspectives. Each section reframes the previous one, destabilizing the notion of a single truth. Diaz’s cool, controlled prose mirrors the austere world of finance. Beneath that surface lies a meditation on erasure and narrative control. A marginalized voice gradually claims its authority. The structure becomes a commentary on how wealth shapes history itself. Readers are invited to question not only characters, but storytellers. It is cerebral, elegant, and quietly subversive.

Burnet’s Case Study is a witty, psychologically rich novel presented as a series of notebooks written by a woman investigating a controversial 1960s psychotherapist. The book plays with authenticity, narrative reliability, and the performance of identity. Burnet’s meticulous construction allows readers to question the truth at every turn while enjoying his sly humour. The novel is both a parody of psychoanalytic culture and a sharp exploration of fractured selfhood. It is clever, entertaining, and layered with emotional subtlety.

Selby Wynn Schwartz’s After Sappho is an innovative, genre-bending novel that traces the intertwined lives of women artists, writers, and activists of the late 19th and early 20th centuries. Written in shimmering fragments, the book assembles a collective portrait of feminist desire, creativity, and political rebellion. Schwartz’s storytelling is poetic and playful, blending historical fact with speculative reconstruction. The novel celebrates queer history while interrogating the structures that constrained its subjects. It is a bold, imaginative work that challenges traditional narrative forms. Reading it feels like witnessing history being rewritten through art.