2 days ago
The male novelist isn't extinct – just look at this year's Booker longlist
It appears rumours of the death of the male novelist have been greatly exaggerated. This year's Booker longlist, announced today, bucks recent convention by celebrating this most unfashionable literary creature over hot new faces – six of the 13 authors on the list are men, not to mention middle-aged ones (by contrast, last year's shortlist of six featured five women).
With Sarah Jessica Parker on a panel headed by Roddy Doyle, the list plays a curiously straight bat. The men, in particular, are mid-career – Andrew Miller, Benjamin Markovits, David Szalay, Benjamin Wood, Tash Aw and Jonathan Buckley – meaning the list has largely eschewed this year's buzzy debuts. British-Hungarian writer Szalay, one of Granta's Best Young Novelists in 2013, leads the pack with Flesh, his brilliant novel about masculinity, sex and modernity, told through the rags-to-riches life of a Hungarian immigrant. Miller is another venerated, if overlooked, author of exquisitely observed, character-led novels – it's great to see the elegantly atmospheric Our Land in Winter get the nod.
Joining them is the 44-year-old Wood, five novels-deep into his career, with his arresting novel, Seascraper, about a 20-year-old loner in a 1960s English coastal town. And, too, Jonathan Buckley: author of 13 radical novels, his career has been maintained through the faith of independent publishers, including his current stable Fitzcarraldo. (These are, let's face it, hardly household names. Instead, they represent the quiet men of – largely – British fiction, toiling away in the slipstreams.)
So they are not the usual suspects. There's noticeably no Ian McEwan, whose new and highly anticipated sci-fi novel, What We Can Know, is out in September (although, to be fair, the last time McEwan got the Booker nod was in 2007 for On Chesil Beach). No Alan Hollinghurst, who won in 2004 with The Line of Beauty and whose recent elegiac novel, Our Evenings, was a hotly tipped contender. No Tim Winton, the Australian heavyweight whose admittedly hard-going climate change novel, Juice, has been critically acclaimed.
This year's crop of swaggering new talent from across the Irish sea has also been omitted. There's no Wendy Erskine, whose time-bending, polyphonic debut, The Benefactors, has received rave reviews. No Roisín O'Donnell, or John Patrick McHugh, or Niamh Ni Mhaoileoin, whose respective first novels have each been causing a splash.
Nor is there much room for the Americans, whose usual dominating presence on the shortlist each year generates palpitations of anxiety about undue American cultural might. There is the London-based American Benjamin Markovits (a regular fiction critic for this paper, and picked along with Szalay as one of the Telegraph's Best Novelists Under 40 in 2010); the Korean-American Susan Choi, and the experimental minimalist Katie Kitamura. They're all fine writers – yet they hardly have the razzle-dazzle force of say, a Percival Everett, whose bravura novel James narrowly lost out on the top prize to Samantha Harvey last year.
So what are we left with? There are a few stylistic stand-outs – Kitamura's Audition, which tells one story in two radically different circumstances; Jonathan Buckley's modernist-leaning, elusive beauty, One Boat; Maria Reva's tricksy Ukrainian heist caper Endling – one of the most eye-catching novels on the list.
But in general, these are novels that are structurally conservative, opting for traditional narrative over technical innovation and without the daring of, for example, Patricia Lockwood's forthcoming Will There Ever Be Another You (another disappointing omission from this list). Several books – Desai's The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny; Choi's Flashlight – deal in the sort of narrative the Booker judges tend to love: they're bustling, intergenerational family dramas about migration and post-colonialism, set against heaving geo-political backdrops.
The judging panel may exult in their list's roving global energy, but in truth, many of the novels this year are intimate psychological dramas. Some are also strikingly modest, such as Love Forms, Claire Adam's novel about a woman haunted by the baby she gave up for adoption – a result perhaps of the influence of SJP, whose book club picks tend to be both populist and easy on the eye.
So, ostensibly a far from exciting list. But at its best it also celebrates the sort of quietly observational, superficially traditional storytelling that has been passed over by critics and judges in recent years – yet which often deliver just as much satisfaction as the most extravagantly hyped new sensation. No doubt this is down to the much more consequential presence of Doyle, who excels at precisely this sort of book. Will one of these underrated writers triumph? My bet is that Szalay, Reva, Wood and Desai are placed to do well, with Szalay's authoritative, deceptively spare examination of male desire at this point, arguably, the leading contender. But with so many dark horses on the field, it's a wide-open race.
The 2025 Booker longlist
Love Forms by Claire Adam (Trinidadian)
Forty years ago, Dawn, a white Trinidadian teenager, was forced by her family to give up her illegitimate daughter following a brief encounter during Carnival. Now a divorced GP living in London, she has never been able to escape the thought of what she has lost – when, out of the blue, a mysterious Italian woman gets in touch. This is a novel of quiet sadness, steeped in the grief of a life half-lived.
Flesh by David Szalay (Hungarian-British)
Jonathan Cape
David Szalay leads the heavyweights on the list with this critically acclaimed exploration of the socioeconomic forces that shape a single life. A superb novel about sex, money and masculinity, it's the story of István, a teenage offender who moves from a Hungarian council estate to a position of extreme status and wealth – and back again.
Universality is playful but modest: it's a literary striptease which comprises alternating chapters from various characters, all linked to an assault on a Yorkshire farm. A novel about the commodification of language and truth, in the age of the sound bite.
The South by Tash Aw (Malaysian)
4th Estate
It's third time lucky for Tash Aw, one of Malaysia's most venerated authors. He's longlisted once again, this time for a tender epic about a love affair between two boys in an unnamed Asian country. A novel of Proustian luminosity, it's the first in a quartet tracing the lives of a family against the fall-out of the 1997 Asian financial crisis.
Buckley is a virtuoso stylist, barely known in his native Britain. An elliptical work about memory and selfhood, and comprising mostly a series of fleeting encounters, One Boat centres on a woman retreating in the wake of her father's death – to the same Greek shoreline where she mourned her mother nine years previously.
Flashlight by Susan Choi (American)
Jonathan Cape
In this sprawling, sometimes heavily political novel, a Korean academic disappears the night his daughter nearly drowns. Spanning four decades in one Korean family's history, the novel explores the idea of exile in both emotional and geopolitical forms. Our critic called it an 'engrossing' tale 'which delights in playing with the reader's expectations'.
The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny by Kiran Desai (Indian)
Hamish Hamilton
Desai has been working on her third novel ever since her second, The Inheritance of Loss, won the Booker Prize in 2006. A busy, decades-spanning novel about love, family and solitude in a post-colonialist, globalised world, think of it as an Indian-style Romeo and Juliet (that runs up to 700 pages). A quintessential Booker novel.
Audition by Katie Kitamura (American)
Fern Press
In a list short on technical daring, Kitamura's Audition stands out – it's a gnomic meditation on character and artifice which pivots on the familial tensions between a New York art critic, actor and their adopted son. Not everyone is a fan: among reviewers, Kitamura's tonally vacant prose and equivocal narrative approach have proven literary marmite.
Wood is another welcome British surprise: a 44-year-old author from Stockport whose five lyrically tense novels have slipped under the radar – until now. Set in 1960s Lancashire, the pungently atmospheric Seascraper explores ideas of class, dreams and creativity through the unlikely friendship between a 20-year-old shrimp farmer and an American director, in town to shoot a film starring Henry Fonda.
The Rest Of Our Lives by Benjamin Markovits (American)
An American road trip and a midlife crisis novel in one: The Rest of Our Lives follows Tom who, after dropping off his daughter at university, heads west instead of back home. Twelve years previously his wife had an affair, and while on the road, he reckons with this ongoing emotional fallout, problems at work and his place within our new modernity. It's an understated book which simultaneously seems to nod to all the great 20th-century American novels about the disillusionment of the white middle-class male.
The Land in Winter by Andrew Miller (British)
Sceptre
Set during the freezing winter of 1962, this psychologically interior novel from a master of the form centres on two married couples – one living in a well-to-do doctor's residence, the other in a run-down nearby farm – who are forced to re-examine their lives when a blizzard cuts off their homes from the outside world.
Endling by Maria Reva (Canadian-Ukranian)
Virago
This arresting debut, which features endangered snails and the mail-order bride trade among other eccentricities, is one of the liveliest and most original novels on the list. Three women make a journey across the Ukrainian countryside with a van of kidnapped bachelors in tow – then they're abruptly torpedoed by the Russian invasion. It's a bleakly comic novel about war – and a meta-fictional delight.
Misinterpretation by Ledia Xhoga (Albanian-American)
Daunt Books Originals
An Albanian interpreter based in Brooklyn throws her marriage into crisis when, faced with clients who include refugees, she finds herself unable to draw the line between professional conduct and emotional impulse. A rather earnest debut, about PTSD.
