As routinely as the changing of the seasons, every year the Booker Prize — the leading literary award in the English-speaking world — is conferred to what is believed to be, in the judges’ view, the best-sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the United Kingdom and Ireland.
This year, The Michigan Daily Book Review took it upon themselves to read and review the six novels shortlisted for this year’s Booker Prize. Although the overarching goal of delicately crafted literature has never been and never will be to be minimized to a mere award, contests such as the Booker Prize decide, time and again, who the up-and-coming authors of our time are and how they have rightfully claimed their place in the literary world. Our writers have devised detail-oriented reviews analyzing the literary artistry that lies behind each of these novels, deciding, in their own right, whether or not they merit their nomination. In a culminating article, our writers come together to discuss which of the shortlisted titles they believe will ultimately be crowned the winner.
We hope you’ve enjoyed this series, and thank you for sticking with us until the end.
— Graciela Batlle Cestero, Senior Arts Editor, and Camille Nagy, Books Beat Editor
Yael van der Wouden’s “The Safekeep” is … haunting and full of desire.
“The Safekeep” is a riveting lesbian period drama set in the shadow of the Holocaust. Debut author Yael van der Wouden navigates a variety of historical lenses with ease, from examining what it means to be a Queer woman in the 1960s to navigating being a survivor of a deadly genocide in a country still struggling to acknowledge its own role in that tragedy. It’s a heavy task, especially given the subject matter. Yet van der Wouden’s writing has a beauty and lyricism that echoes great Queer novels of the past (see Radclyffe Hall’s “The Well of Loneliness” or James Baldwin’s “Giovanni’s Room”), even as she converses with personal and national memory, weaving between English and Dutch in the process.
It’s undermined, unfortunately, by an ending that comes perhaps a little too easily, at odds with what is otherwise a nuanced understanding of desire and trauma. In another year, I don’t think this would prevent what is by all other accounts a polished and extraordinarily crafted novel from claiming the Booker — but Percival Everett seems well-placed to claim the prize with his newest novel, “James,” after being shortlisted in 2022. Give van der Wouden a few years, though, and that may be a different story.
Daily Arts Writer Alex Hetzler can be reached at [email protected].
Anne Michaels’s “Held” is … beautiful but exhausting.
Anne Michaels’s “Held” is a meticulously crafted exploration of one family’s relationship with war and each other throughout multiple generations. The novel’s first half follows a couple named John and Helena and their lives before, during and after World War I. The remaining portion tracks their children, grandchildren and great-grandchildren through their own journeys of war and peace. Michaels’s unique style, with scores of different interwoven moments in time stacked one on top of another, lends the book an air of deep beauty, but it simultaneously creates barriers to entry for readers who aren’t willing to put in the effort and slog it out.
And, unfortunately, it is a slog. The book’s lack of clear narrative structure beyond the first novella stunts its development and keeps it just below the threshold it’s trying to breach. While it’s undeniably a technical gem, “Held” lacks the engagement factor that could elevate it into a winner — it simply doesn’t have the spark that keeps a reader reading. Ultimately, the reward does not equal the effort required to claim it.
Daily Arts Contributor Ethan Rogers can be reached at [email protected].
Samantha Harvey’s “Orbital” is … deeply introspective.
Samantha Harvey’s “Orbital” explores the full weight of humanity and the meaning of our existence in a snapshot of just a single day. The powerful yet short novel highlights the lives of six astronauts on the International Space Station orbiting around the Earth while struggling to make sense of their distance from everything they know. Each of these men and women, despite coming from various backgrounds and nationalities, are united in this experience. Through this, “Orbital” focuses more on the human emotions that arise from space travel, which might seem less significant in other science fiction novels.
While there is a pure and winding beauty in Harvey’s prose, “Orbital” is a natural amalgamation of much that has already been said when it comes to writing about our humanity. Harvey’s unguided lens from space is certainly a fresh perspective, but one that might blend into other works that make the same arguments about what separates and brings us together. Although we don’t predict “Orbital” will win this year’s Booker Prize, that does not mean it is not worth reading. With simultaneous melancholy and hope, Harvey spins together a beautiful story that reminds us that we are human no matter how far from home we may be.
Daily Arts Writers Logan Brown and Archisha Pathak can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected].
Rachel Kushner’s “Creation Lake” is … complex and sure to be controversial.
In the strictest of terms, “Creation Lake” is a spy novel following a woman who attempts to infiltrate a French leftist, anarcho-primativist commune suspected of acts of ecoterrorism. Oddly and delightfully, though, the book itself is more about our spy, Sadie, grappling with the challenges of her own identity. Sadie is not a good person — she lies and deceives for the good of herself and her clients without much regard for the people she has to screw over in the process.
While gathering intel on the commune’s activity, Sadie reads and intercepts emails from a mysterious thinker named Bruno, who speaks of liberating oneself from the evils of modern life by literally going back to Neanderthal roots, living in caves and darkness. Despite her almost all-consuming cynicism, Sadie is intrigued by Bruno’s conception of how all political expression boils down to a form of identity formation unless done completely privately, for oneself only. Thematically, Sadie’s espionage mission is less of a practical plot choice and more of a way for Kushner to explore what it means to create an identity you can live with in peace.
“Creation Lake” is fascinating and filled with very good prose, but I don’t predict it’ll take home the Booker Prize. Despite its killer concept, the work is chock-full of oddities that are sure to divide readers’ opinions. Sadie’s inconsistency as a narrator, an ambiguous relationship to plot movement and a strange series of unrealistic conveniences pointed out by the book itself are all moves that will be perceived as extremely intelligent by some readers yet unbelievably distracting by others. While I am solidly in the Rachel-Kushner-is-a-literary-gift camp, I don’t think all will be convinced.
Daily Arts Writer Grace Sielinski can be reached at [email protected].
Charlotte Wood’s “Stone Yard Devotional” is … hard to find, literally.
Obtaining a copy of this book was ridiculously complicated, but after more than a month of sitting around and waiting for it to appear on my doorstep, I am happy to report that I now possess a free advanced copy from the publisher and a full refund from a well-meaning (though slightly unreliable) book retail company. A big thank you to “Paul, Customer Support Hero” — you are as heroic as your email signature claims.
Lucky for me, “Stone Yard Devotional” is well worth the wait. It’s formatted as a series of journal entries written by a woman escaping a period of profound burnout from her busy life of social and environmental advocacy. She takes refuge in an abbey near her hometown, and what follows is a quiet, soul-cleansing meditation on the meaning of human life. Wood writes in honest, meandering prose that feels deeply authentic. It’s a story that rings true, cutting to the core of the human experience — and that’s just the first 200 pages I’ve read thus far. A full review will be out soon, but for now, believe me when I say that “Stone Yard Devotional” is formidable.
Daily Arts Writer Pauline Kim can be reached at [email protected].
Percival Everett’s “James” is … our winner!
“James” is subversive, exciting, uncomfortable, absurd, hilarious, tragic and everything in between. The success of the film “American Fiction,” which adapts Everett’s 2001 novel “Erasure,” has catapulted the author to the cultural spotlight in recent months. While he has an impressive backlog of critically acclaimed novels, even being shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2022, “James” is the perfect story to finally secure him the acclaimed literary award.
The novel masterfully upends Mark Twain’s contentious classic, “The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn,” focusing on Jim, the runaway slave who accompanies Huck. James, as Everett imagines him, has a rich, perplexing internal world. Everett’s inventive recharacterization is thoroughly gut-wrenching and exposes the open wounds surrounding slavery, representation and the language of the oppressed. Through James’s eyes, well-known childhood adventures become an odyssey, rife with references to Voltaire and Locke, bursts of violence and dry irony. Whether it be in the adept use of dialects, engrossing storytelling or bitingly impactful narrative, Percival Everett far and away deserves the Booker for the spectacular “James.”
Daily Arts Writers Kathryn Hemmila and Awmeo Azad can be reached at [email protected] and [email protected].
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