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The 2020 Booker Prize finalists books have been announced!
I don’t think that every single fiction book you read needs to be intellectual, high quality, or the next great masterpiece… However, I do like to dip my toe into prestige every once in a while, and what is more prestigious than winning a Booker Prize?
Recently, the 2020 Booker Prize Short List was announced, and here’s why I’m excited.
The 2020 Booker Prize Short List Is
- The New Wilderness by Diane Cook (Oneworld Publications)
- This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangarembga (Faber & Faber)
- Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi (Hamish Hamilton, Penguin Random House)
- The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste (Canongate Books)
- Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart (Picador, Pan Macmillan)
- Real Life by Brandon Taylor (Originals, Daunt Books Publishing)
The Books
The New Wilderness
Diane Cook
A daring, passionate and terrifying novel about a mother’s battle to save her daughter in a world ravaged by climate change.
Bea’s five-year-old daughter, Agnes, is wasting away, consumed by the smog and pollution of the over-developed metropolis they call home. If they stay in the city, Agnes will die, but there is only one alternative – joining a group of volunteers in the Wilderness State.
At once a blazing lament of our contempt for nature and a deeply humane portrayal of motherhood, and what it means to be human, The New Wilderness is an extraordinary, compelling novel for our times.
Why I Want To Read It
Climate change is real. Climate change is gonna have an impact. I’m intrigued to see what kind of art and fiction we create as a society around this not so new danger that is looming.
Tsitsi Dangarembga
In this tense and psychologically charged novel, Tsitsi Dangarembga channels the hope and potential of one young girl and a fledgling nation to lead us on a journey to discover where lives go after hope has departed.
Here we meet Tambudzai, living in a run-down youth hostel in downtown Harare and anxious about her prospects after leaving a stagnant job. At every turn in her attempt to make a life for herself, she is faced with a fresh humiliation, until the painful contrast between the future she imagined and her daily reality ultimately drives her to a breaking point.
Why I Want To Read It
I have often struggled to reconcile the future I imagined with my daily reality. This novel feels raw and real.
Avni Doshi
In her youth, Tara was wild. She abandoned her loveless marriage to join an ashram, endured a brief stint as a beggar (mostly to spite her affluent parents), and spent years chasing after a dishevelled, homeless ‘artist’ – all with her young child in tow. Now she is forgetting things, mixing up her maid’s wages and leaving the gas on all night, and her grown-up daughter is faced with the task of caring for a woman who never cared for her.
This is a love story and it is a story about betrayal. But not between lovers – between mother and daughter. Sharp as a blade and laced with caustic wit, Avni Doshi tests the limits of what we can know for certain about those we are closest to, and by extension, about ourselves.
Why I Want To Read It
This novel scares me a little. I have a historically fraught relationship with my own mother, and I’m not sure how ready I am to read about one here. Here’s hoping it’s cathartic.
Maaza Mengiste
Ethiopia. 1935. With the threat of Mussolini’s army looming, recently orphaned Hirut struggles to adapt to her new life as a maid. Her new employer, Kidane, an officer in Emperor Haile Selassie’s army, rushes to mobilise his strongest men before the Italians invade.
Hirut and the other women long to do more than care for the wounded and bury the dead. When Emperor Haile Selassie goes into exile and Ethiopia quickly loses hope, it is Hirut who offers a plan to maintain morale. She helps disguise a gentle peasant as the emperor and soon becomes his guard, inspiring other women to take up arms. But how could she have predicted her own personal war, still to come, as a prisoner of one of Italy’s most vicious officers?
The Shadow King casts light on the women soldiers written out of African and European history. It is a captivating exploration of female power, and what it means to be a woman at war.
Why I Want To Read It
Telling the stories of women written out of history is incredibly important to me. This is a book written about Ethiopian women written by an Ethiopian woman.
Douglas Stuart
1981. Glasgow. The city is dying. Poverty is on the rise. People watch the lives they had hoped for disappear from view. Agnes Bain had always expected more. She dreamed of greater things: a house with its own front door, a life bought and paid for outright (like her perfect – but false – teeth). When her philandering husband leaves, she and her three children find themselves trapped in a mining town decimated by Thatcherism. As Agnes increasingly turns to alcohol for comfort, her children try their best to save her. Yet one by one, they have to abandon her in order to save themselves.
It is her son Shuggie who holds out hope the longest. But Shuggie has problems of his own: despite all his efforts to pass as a ‘normal boy’, everyone has decided that Shuggie is ‘no right’. Agnes wants to support and protect her son, but her addiction has the power to eclipse everyone close to her, including her beloved Shuggie.
Laying bare the ruthlessness of poverty, the limits of love, and the hollowness of pride, Shuggie Bain is a blistering and heartbreaking debut, and an exploration of the unsinkable love that only children can have for their damaged parents.
Why I Want To Read It
I also had a family member that struggled with addiction and it had a huge impact on my childhood. I’m nervous yet excited to see how the author handles this sensitive topic.
Brandon Taylor
Wallace has spent his summer in the lab breeding a strain of microscopic worms. He is four years into a biochemistry degree at a lakeside Midwestern university, a life that’s a world away from his childhood in Alabama. His father died a few weeks ago, but Wallace didn’t go back for the funeral, and he hasn’t told his friends – Miller, Yngve, Cole and Emma. For reasons of self-preservation, he has become used to keeping a wary distance even from those closest to him. But, over the course of one blustery end-of-summer weekend, the destruction of his work and a series of intense confrontations force Wallace to grapple with both the trauma of the past, and the question of the future.
Deftly zooming in and out of focus, Real Life is a deeply affecting story about the emotional cost of reckoning with desire, and overcoming pain.
Why I Want To Read It
Ah, these recurring themes of dealing with past trauma and facing the future. Aren’t these often the things that drive our lives?
In Conclusion
I’m pretty excited about this group of 2020 Booker Prize Finalists. There’s a lot of authentic voices writing about their lived experiences, and I’m so here for it. The winner will be announced on November 19, 2020.
UPDATE: And the winner is……… SHUGGIE BAIN!
Which book on this list are you most excited about reading? Which ones have you read?
Xoxo,
Anne
