The Booker Prize

The Booker Prize Foundation has announced the 13-book longlist for the 2023 Booker Prize. The 2023 longlist features four debut novelists - Jonathan Escoffery, Siân Hughes, Viktoria Lloyd-Barlow and Chetna Maroo. It also includes three writers with previous Booker nominations, the most notable being Sebastian Barry who joins an elite group of authors with five or more Booker nods.

A generational narrative of disillusionment and lost hope in post-Apartheid South Africa, via the viewpoint of a white family unwilling to do the right thing, dragged down by their stubbornness in giving up the old ways. Damon Galgut's story appears to follow an intriguing and mysterious country's rich and impressive literary history. In every way, The Promise lives up to its name and more.

Thomas Keneally's Schindler's List (or Schindler's Ark) is an account of how the Nazi member and industrialist Oskar Schindler rescued over a thousand Jews from very probable death from at Auschwitz, by protecting them as workers at his enamel ware factory. Thomas Keneally won the Man Booker Prize for Schindler's List in 1982.

Arundhati Roy brings us her masterful first novel The God of Small Things which won the Man Booker Prize in 1997. A powerful novel filled with luscious prose and a heart rending story, Roy reveals to her readers an India hanging onto to the traditions of the past with a slight glimpse of her future.

Life of Pi serves a great lesson – to have faith in the toughest of times. You may not be a religious person, but I recommend Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, he does an exceptional job of carrying the theme through to the reader.