Booksellers hail 'bold' Booker shortlist but concern over sole British writer

Booksellers have hailed this year's “bold and fascinating” Booker Prize shortlist as having great sales potential, although others have voiced their concern that only one British author made the final six.

The books vying for this year's £50,000 prize were revealed yesterday, with nominations for Anuk Arudpragasam's A Passage North (Granta), Damon Galgut's The Promise (Chatto), Patricia Lockwood's No One is Talking About This (Bloomsbury Circus), Nadifa Mohamed's The Fortune Men (Viking), Richard Powers' Bewilderment (Heinemann Hutchinson) and Maggie Shipstead's Great Circle.

Bea Carvalho, Waterstones fiction buyer, called it “a bold and fascinating shortlist which represents contemporary fiction at its brightest and most ambitious”.

She told The Bookseller: “There is truly something for readers of all tastes to discover here and we are thrilled to have this opportunity to elevate all six of these brilliant books. The Booker Prize consistently generates strong interest from readers, and this year’s titles have already enjoyed an especially strong boost from the longlist announcement.

“Of the shortlisted titles, The Promise has been our bestseller, while The Fortune Men has seen the biggest uplift in sales, with an increase of nearly 2,000% week on week after the longlist announcement. Meanwhile, Bewilderment’s publication this month was already set to be a real highlight in the year’s literary fiction calendar, and we are delighted that it now arrives with the Booker Prize’s shortlisting under its belt.

“All six titles would be very worthy winners: the judges now face an impossible task and we can’t wait to see which author they choose as their champion.”

Hazel Broadfoot, of Village Books in Dulwich, south-east London, said she was sorry not to see Kazuo Ishiguro's Klara and the Sun (Faber) make the shortlist and was “very sad” at the absence of Mary Lawson's A Town Called Solace (Vintage). “I’m a huge fan of her beautiful writing and this is my favourite of her novels,” she said.

However, she added: "We’re really pleased with this year’s list, which seems nicely balanced and with great sales potential — and impossible to call a winner. It's terrific to see Nadifa Mohammed on it – we collaborated with Sevenoaks Bookshop and Chorleywood Bookshop on a super event with her during the lockdown this year. Richard Powers isn’t out yet but the others have all been selling well for us, notably The Promise — our bestseller from the list — and Great Circle.”

Chrissy Ryan, founder of BookBar in Islington, commented: “It's brilliant to see that the books selected are those with great stories and characters at their heart, as well as beautiful writing. Great Circle, The Fortune Men and The Promise are all titles that we at BookBar love and have been handselling. The Patricia Lockwood has had lots of momentum with both its longlisting and Women's Prize shortlisting, so I'm sure we'll continue to see sales there. I'm sad that Light Perpetual didn't make it, as that's one of my favourite novels of this year, and I'm surprised not to see the Ishiguro listed, but overall I think it's a nicely balanced list, created from a strong and commercial longlist.”

Carolynn Bain, who runs Afrori Books in Brighton, highlighted the nomination of British Somali author Mohamed. She said: "In a year when three of the six shortlisted books are American it is wonderful to see the only British person to make the shortlist is Nadifa Mohamed. To see Black authors getting this level of exposure is encouraging for so many other black British writers who have struggled to get into the white dominated industry of publishing. We are of course delighted for Nadifa and for the many other Black writers and established and upcoming who will be so encouraged by this years shortlist."

During a press conference on the shortlist yesterday, judges were quizzed about the fact only one British author, Mohamed, had been chosen this year, compared to three from the US. Asked what would happen if there was an author-led campaign to make the prize only for UK and Commonwealth authors, literary director of the Booker Prize Foundation, Gaby Wood, said she thought it was “a little bit problematic”. She added: "I think there are political as well as literary problems with reverting to a Commonwealth framework, it is essentially a colonial framework, I don’t know if this is the right time to do that if there ever was a good time."

However, the concern over a lack of homegrown authors was echoed by literary agent Caroline Michel of PFD, who told The Bookseller having Americans eligible for the prize makes her "blood boil". She said: “I love prizes, I love the Booker Prize. Look how it changes a writer’s career, look at the difference it makes to their sales, profile, international standing, look at the wonder that is Bernardine Evaristo now compared to before her win. So why when we need to support, grow, and encourage writers in the UK and Commonwealth did they open this prize to American writers? 

“America is rich in literary awards not open to writers outside the US and we have few that can throw such a transformative spotlight on a writer and their work. We need to encourage the Emma Raducanus of the literary world with life-changing awards too and the only one of those we arguably have is the Booker,  on which I really wholeheartedly believe we should keep every precious place on the longlist and shortlist there to support  the great creativity that there is in Britain and the Commonwealth.”

In the press coverage, many papers seized on Wood's comments and the fact only one Brit had made the shortlist. The Telegraph called it a  "functional and American-dominated shortlist". Claire Allfree, who picked out Galgut as the frontrunner, said: “The lack of British representation on the shortlist is becoming an annual lament. The Booker’s fervent desire to distance itself from the Commonwealth and create a global prize means homegrown talent is less likely to get a look in. Would previous winners such as William Golding or Penelope Fitzgerald be nominated today?” 

Robbie Millen in the the Times lamented the absence of Francis Spufford and Kazuo Ishiguro, although his concerns were not so much about author nationality. “This is a shortlist without a buzz, with little scope for controversy,” he said. “It is a shame that Sally Rooney’s new novel wasn’t there, just to get a conversation going. If they wanted to show how fiction allows the freedom to discuss awkward issues, the judges should have included Torrey Peters’ Detransition, Baby (which tackles trans relationships and parenting) or Shalom Auslander’s funny Mother for Dinner, a satire on identity politics.”

But BBC arts correspondent Rebecca Jones said she was pleased by the choices. “It is serious, not showy, but features books you will actually want to read (and will enjoy) rather than books you feel you ought to read (and might not enjoy),” she said.

The www.theguardian.com/books/2021/sep/14/analysis-the-2021-booker-shortlist-tunes-in-to-the-worries-of-our-age">Guardian's Alex Clark called it a “a closely matched field of riders and runners”. She wrote: “If there’s a collective sense of weighty themes to these novels, their styles and registers are noticeably varied, from the hip, flip tone of Lockwood’s first act to Galgut’s low-key satire, itself an echo of one of his influences, E M Forster, to the commitment to evoking the precise atmosphere and contours of the past in Mohamed’s work. Noticeable, too, is the skilful way this group of authors negotiates the boundaries between personal stories and their relation to wider societal shifts and pressures.”

For the shortlisted books' publishers there was joy at their nominations. Laura Barber, Granta's deputy publishing director and Arudpragasam's editor, said: “We are completely thrilled to see A Passage North on such an august and brilliant shortlist.  This is a novel that moved and impressed us all deeply, so it’s wonderful to witness the Booker-effect on sales, knowing that Anuk’s indelible story is finding its way into the hands of even more readers.”

Alexis Kirschbaum, associate publisher at Bloomsbury, said: “Patricia Lockwood is a writer I wanted to bring to Bloomsbury for years. Her ability to combine verbal exuberance, existential depth, and laugh-out-loud comedy in No One Is Talking About This proves she can make peerless, breathtaking art in any register. Here we have an experimental novel about two halves of modern life: the one lived online and the real world that disrupts it. For each she’s created a distinct idiom, and in the end she shows the limits of self-conscious, performative language to capture the experience of sorrow and grief in the real world. No novel of the past 10 years has made me laugh so hard, and cry very quickly afterwards. Her restless verbal skill is only matched by her heart. I couldn’t admire it more and we are delighted she made the shortlist for The Booker Prize.”

At Hutchinson Heinemann, publishing director Ailah Ahmed said of Powers' Bewilderment: “This is in incredibly special novel about fathers and sons, the environment and what we will leave to future generations. Powers, winner of the Pulitzer Prize last year, is shortlisted for the Booker again – he was too with his last novel The Overstory. We can’t wait for everyone to read it. It’s out next week.”