What unites the books on the shortlist for this year’s International Booker prize? Brevity, for one thing: five of the six are under 200 pages, and half barely pass 100. They are works of precision and idiosyncrasy that don’t need space to make a big impression. Themes are both timely – AI, the migration crisis – and evergreen: middle-class ennui; the place of women in society. And for the second consecutive year, every book comes from an independent publisher, with four from tiny micropresses. Ahead of the winner announcement on 20 May, here’s our verdict on the shortlist.
Solvej Balle’s On the Calculation of Volume, Book I (Faber, £12.99; translated by Barbara J Haveland) is easiest to introduce through the film Groundhog Day: its heroine, Danish antiquarian book dealer Tara Selter, is stuck in time. “It is the 18th of November,” she writes. “I have got used to that thought.” Each time she wakes up, it’s the same day again, same weather, same people passing the window.
This book, the first of a projected seven volumes, mostly explores Tara’s set-up. Despite the cool tone, there’s a sense of excitement for the reader as Tara works out the possibilities in real time. Can she travel overnight? If she takes something out of a cupboard, will it return the next day? And are we all somehow like Tara, living the same day over and over? The high concept, and the sense of a major work under way, make it a strong contender. Even if future volumes don’t live up to this one, for now the reader is happy to be trapped alongside Tara.
An even more ambitious headspinner is Japanese novelist Hiromi Kawakami’s Under the Eye of the Big Bird (Granta, £14.99; translated by Asa Yoneda). If Kawakami has a sweet mode (Strange Weather in Tokyo) and a weird mode (Record of a Night Too Brief), this one is in the latter category. It’s a sort of do-it-yourself work: what seems to be a collection of stories turns out to be a novel, but the reader must piece it together. We’re hundreds of years in the future; countries have disappeared and humans are grouped into self-contained communities. Some people are clones, others exist in a world with hardly any men, and there are unexplained categories of people: “watchers”, “scanners”, “the mothers”. Characters recur across chapters and regions, but they’re too thinly drawn to easily tell apart.
But that’s OK: this book is about its ideas, including how societies break down, how we doom ourselves with our failure to get along, and how AI threatens us. Given that human intelligence is so riven with conflict, the book suggests, we might be ripe for replacement by machines. (“Let’s wrap this up,” says one character of humanity.) Its mysteries mean that by the end, when we finally know what’s going on, the book demands rereading – a durability that makes it a plausible Booker winner.
If Kawakami isn’t much interested in character, the opposite is true of French novelist Anne Serre’s A Leopard-Skin Hat (Lolli, £11.99; translated by Mark Hutchinson). Right from the start, Fanny is alarming young children and “had a way of standing […] like a question”. Her full-colour character is matched by the book’s askew narrative style, which jumps around a lot. Alongside Fanny is the Narrator, who is not the narrator of the book but her lifelong friend. “It was in slapstick mode they got along best.”
We learn early on that Fanny died at the age of 43 (“her small, fair head ascends into the skies”), which gives the rest of the book – an account of her lifelong mental turmoil – added poignancy. The story teems with charm, a tribute to the unconventional and a warning of “the violence done to the tender-hearted” in our conformist society. Fanny’s friend seems to speak for Serre – who wrote the book following the death of her younger sister – when he says: “I love realistic novels, yet the moment I try to write one I yawn with boredom.” There’s no time for boredom in this delightful, sad, idiosyncratic story, though its unusual – even eccentric – style might limit its chances of Booker success.
The other shortlisted French writer has a more grounded approach. Vincent Delecroix’s Small Boat (HopeRoad, £12.99; translated by Helen Stevenson) is inspired by a real-life tragedy in November 2021, when 27 people died on an inflatable dinghy trying to cross the English channel from France. Most of the book is from the viewpoint of a French emergency call handler who fielded pleas for help from migrants on the boat, and who falsely told them no rescue vessels were available.
Under investigation by police, our narrator is sometimes unrepentant (“these people … their obsession with flinging themselves into the water”), sometimes filled with shame. Why, she asks, is she blamed, rather than the geopolitical “gigantic storm that sweeps behind them”? Her somewhat repetitive monologue is broken by a vivid account from the migrants’ viewpoint, out on the “insipid, bulging, surly sea”, and the story ends with fitting grimness. Small Boat is undoubtedly timely, which may be why it’s the bookies’ favourite; but as a novel it lacks the depth of other shortlisted titles, and seems a long shot for the prize.
The flexibility of the International Booker prize – it’s not just for novels – is exemplified in Banu Mushtaq’s collection of stories, Heart Lamp (And Other Stories, £14.99; translated by Deepa Bhasthi). The selection here is drawn from Mushtaq’s 35-year career. She writes in the Indian tradition of “Bandaya Sahitya” – protest literature against the domination of male-led, upper-caste writing – and her subject is the lives of women.
In one story, a new mother whose husband is unfaithful and rude – “One day he had said, ‘You are like my mother’, and with those words had pushed her alive into hell” – is told to be grateful he doesn’t beat her. “Thank God you are in a good situation.” In another, a man becomes obsessed with making his wife wear his sister-in-law’s high-heeled shoes; elsewhere, a woman struggling with school holidays – Mushtaq’s concerns are universal as well as culture-specific – takes her boys to the barber to be circumcised. The tone varies from quiet to comic, but the vision is consistent, as exemplified by the final story, where a woman questions why God requires her to be a “helpless prisoner of life” in subjugation to her husband. Its title? Be a Woman Once, Oh Lord! This wonderful collection would be a worthy winner, though history is against it: stories have never taken the prize before.
The most talked-about book on the shortlist is Italian writer Vincent Latronico’s Perfection (Fitzcarraldo, £12.99; translated by Sophie Hughes). You can see why, from its relatability – it’s the story of a modern millennial couple, Anna and Tom – to its literary connections: the book is a “tribute”, in Latronico’s words, to French writer Georges Perec’s 1965 novel Things. In both books, young professional lives have the constructed texture of an advert or social media stream, and are simultaneously given meaning and constrained by the need for possessions and cultural signifiers. Where Perec’s couple had Paul Klee prints and Borges paperbacks, Latronico’s have Monocle magazine and Radiohead vinyl.
Written as a detached overview (“They lived a double life.” “They tried travelling”), Perfection exerts a hypnotic hold as Anna and Tom face anew the same problem as every generation before them: how to live? They tie themselves in knots, “worried they were content merely being contented”, and slowly find themselves no longer the focal generation of their era, as the world changes around them. “The cultural centre where old Greeks used to play cards was now the flagship store of a Japanese trainer brand.” Perfection packs a huge amount into a small space: its irony, modernity and irresistible style would make it a popular winner.