The Booker longlist might just be the most enjoyable of recent years

No Sally Rooney, one clear favourite and a novel set in space – this is a longlist of unexpected discoveries and big ideas

• Three British novelists make Booker 2024 longlist among ‘cohort of global voices’

It is 10 years since the Booker prize expanded its remit to include American novelists. The naysayers’ fears would appear to be borne out by this year’s longlist in which six of the 13 novels are by Americans, with just three British writers, Samantha Harvey, Sarah Perry and American-born, British-Libyan novelist Hisham Matar. Last year both the long and shortlists were dominated by Irish writers (and people called Paul), but only County Mayo’s Colin Barrett makes it this year. This means that the most feverishly anticipated novel of the year – Sally Rooney’s Intermezzo, due out in September – didn’t make the cut (she was longlisted for Normal People in 2018). It also leaves off Irish heavyweights Colm Tóibín with his sequel to Brooklyn (longlisted in 2009), former Booker winner Roddy Doyle and Kevin Barry. Other high-profile names missing include the three-times shortlisted Anita Desai, Rachel Cusk and David Nicholls, who proved that popularity isn’t always a curse when he was longlisted in 2014.

So who are this year’s Booker 13? Leading the pack is Percival Everett with James, a retelling of Huckleberry Finn from the perspective of Huck’s enslaved companion, Jim. The author of 24 novels and described as “a giant of American letters”, Everett has suddenly gained a much wider audience after The Trees was shortlisted for the Booker in 2022 and his 2001 novel Erasure was adapted into the film American Fiction last year. Long before it was published, anyone who had read a proof was proclaiming James the novel of 2024 (one writer assured me it was bound to “win every prize going”), with critics duly pronouncing it “a masterpiece” and a “modern classic”. Shocking, funny, compellingly readable, James is the magnificent culmination of 40 years’ writing.

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