This week saw the announcement of the shortlist for the Booker prize, which is awarded to the best novel written in English each year. The judges - a particularly fascinating group, including poet and dramatist Lemn Sissay, Emily Wilson, translator of Homer’s Odyssey, and Lee Child, creator of modern day epic hero Jack Reacher - produced a longlist of 12 novels back in July, and they’ve now narrowed that down to the final six.

Hilary Mantel famously did the double in 2009 and 2012, by winning the prize for the first two novels in her series about Tudor statesman Thomas Cromwell. Anyone hoping she might do the triple, with the final novel in the trilogy, The Mirror and the Light, will be sadly disappointed - she didn’t make the final cut. But you can find a list of the novels that did here - and an article about them here - and they all sound brilliant. They're all available to borrow from the Kayton Library, so get reading, and see what you think. 

Regular blog readers might also be interested to know that the Library will once again be running its own ‘Predict the Booker’ evening in November: six Pauline readers will each make a case for one of the shortlisted books, and try to persuade the audience that their novel should win. You can find the blog’s reports of the previous two ‘Predict the Booker’ events here (2019; 2018). On neither occasion did the SPS audience manage to pick the actual winner - so maybe this year will be different (it’s been different in so many ways already).If you’d like to be one of the readers presenting, or you just want to find out more about the event, e-mail Mrs Cummings at librarian@stpaulsschool.org.uk.

Meanwhile, here’s a review of two books from the Booker longlist that sadly - like Hilary Mantel - didn’t make the final cut, but are definitely worth reading anyway. One is very funny; the other is very sad: they're both very good.  

Such a Fun Age by Kiley Reid is an entertaining piece of social satire, sharp-edged and (largely) soft-centred, that casts a sceptical eye on contemporary American attitudes to race and culture. When a store security guard suspects Emira Tucker of kidnapping a three year old girl (Emira is the girl’s baby-sitter: but she’s black, and Briar, the little girl, is white), everything in Emira’s life changes. Previously, she’s been drifting aimlessly but happily between college and she’s not quite sure what. Now not only does her relationship with Briar’s guilt-stricken family - headed by Alix, a lifestyle and empowerment guru (you can’t help thinking ‘Gwyneth Paltrow’) - intensify, but she also finds herself the object of (white) witness Kelley T Copeland’s romantic attention. He’s captured the incident on his phone: perhaps she’d like him to do something with it …? 

Chaos gently ensues, as Alix and Kelley, both acting out their own ‘white saviour’ narratives, try to claim Emira as their own. Alix’s blinkered complacency and delusions of grandeur are deftly skewered by Reid’s clear-eyed observation; Kelley - infatuated with black culture, but not quite as respectful to it as he imagines - is also roundly mocked (when he walks into a nightclub with his black trophy friends, Emira thinks it looks like the opening to ‘an extremely problematic music video’). Emira herself is a richly sympathetic heroine, and you feel for her as she attempts to retain her independence and integrity in the face of Kelley’s concern and Alix’s condescension. This is a clever, provocative, funny and ‘zeitgeist-y’ novel with a darker undertow: its lightness of touch and focus on social comedy disguise its underlying seriousness - maybe that’s what kept it off the shortlist. Such a pity, because it’s an excellent novel that definitely deserves to be widely read (before the inevitable film or TV adaptation).

Formally and tonally, Apeirogon by Colum McCann is the complete opposite of Such a Fun Age. It’s based on a true story - the friendship that develops between two men, Rami Elhanan and Bassam Aramin, one Israeli and the other Palestinian, who meet at a support group for grieving parents after they each lose a child to the conflict’s violence: Rami’s daughter is murdered by a suicide bomber, and Bassam’s by a young Israeli soldier shooting rubber bullets at kids throwing stones. 

The mathematical figure that gives the novel its title - a figure of infinitely countable sides - is clearly intended as a symbol of the Israeli/Palestinian conflict. It shapes the form of the novel, which doesn’t follow a linear narrative, but instead presents the reader with 999 disconnected fragments, some of them as short as a single paragraph. Finding the connections between the different pieces enables the reader to uncover the origins, details and consequences of the terrible tragedies at the novel’s heart; it also conveys the difficulty of establishing blame, or responsibility, or tracing any event back to a first cause. The structure is clever, although sometimes distracting, and not always entirely convincing: what’s most powerful in the novel is the story of the two fathers, and their daughters, whose characters emerge with such tremendous power and clarity, and whose loss is heart-rending. You can’t remain unmoved by this book: the sadness of the stories at its centre is overwhelming.