Prateek Tanmay
Each year, the Booker Prize longlists lead to a lot of debate and disappointment, with many bibliophiles, book influencers and book critics putting out their Booker predictions ahead of the Booker longlist reveal. Some nail it, others fume at the injustice of it all.
With this year’s Booker longlist rewarding “risk,” and judge Patricia Lockwood going so far as to call it “a return of weird literature,” many heavyweights, bookies and fan favourites were conspicuous in their absence.
Here are the popular titles that got the Booker snub:
Transcription— Ben Lerner
Touted as the biggest omission by multiple literary critics, Ben Lerner’s slim novel is a meditation on the impact of technology on real human connection. The book follows a narrator traveling to interview his 90-year-old mentor, a giant in his field, for what will be his final published interview. But before the meeting, the narrator’s smartphone, the only recording device on his person, becomes defunct. Unable to confess his mistake, he proceeds with the interview anyway. What unfolds is an exploration of memory and the slippery slope between what is said, what is remembered, and what is interpreted. It is an inquiry into how we capture and distort the people and moments that shape us.
Howl — Howard Jacobson
Howard Jacobson, who is famous for his black comedies, is no stranger to the Booker. He won the Man Booker Prize in 2010 for his comic novel The Finkler Question, and was shortlisted in 2014 for his dystopian novel J. Fans were certain that his latest, Howl, which unfolds in the aftermath of October 7, the trigger for the protracted Israel-Gaza conflict, would be included. It chronicles the life of a Londoner who is the son of a Holocaust survivor, and his daughter, who believes he is complicit in genocide. It is a tragicomic portrait of a man consumed with existential despair, unravelling as the world threatens to tear itself apart.
Doom Painting— AK Blakemore
From the author of The Manningtree Witches, set during the 17th-century witch trials, comes a lyrical retelling of the 1381 Peasants’ Revolt. The 672-page epic chronicles the Brentwood Peasants’ Revolt in 1381 as rebels reeling from the plague and conflict take to the streets and march to London, where they put their demands to the child-king Richard II.
Son of Nobody— Yann Martel
Those still enamoured by Christopher Nolan’s The Odyssey will certainly enjoy Life of Pi author Yann Martel’s Son of Nobody. The Canadian protagonist, Harlow Donne, a classicist, comes to Oxford University to study papyrus fragments, leaving his daughter and fracturing marriage behind. He discovers a lost account of the Trojan War, and one can see the parallels between the present and the legend played out through the themes of homesickness and regret. It is written in an unconventional style, as the story is told as an annotation of the translation of the poem he has discovered.
Departure(s) — Julian Barnes
Being Barnes’ final book, Departure(s) has been the talk of several literary circuits. It is a work of autofiction where memory and fiction conflate as Barnes meditates on growing old, death, and what one remembers and what is worth remembering. It tells the story of Stephen and Jean, who fall in love when they are young and again when they are old. A playful and profound work about memory, love, and the writer’s endgame.
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Vigil — George Saunders
From the Booker Prize-winning author of Lincoln in the Bardo comes George Saunders’ Vigil, a metaphysical satire where afterlife agent Jill Blaine attempts to guide intransigent oil magnate KJ Boone, whose life caused planetary harm, to the other side. The novel asks urgent questions about redemption when no moral epiphany awaits. Saunders confronts the biggest issues of our time with trademark humour and warmth, spinning a tale that encompasses life and death, good and evil.
American Hagwon — Min Jin Lee
The long-awaited third novel from the author of Pachinko follows a family oscillating between personal dreams and familial duty. The family, a parent and three children, is building a life in Korea when it is thrown into turmoil by the 1997 Asian financial crisis. It is a panoramic novel, which demonstrates how the smallest of gestures can have enormous repercussions.
Beginning Middle End — Valeria Luiselli
This is a road novel with a mother-daughter duo, the former on the verge of forgetting her memories and the latter quickly leaving childhood behind, at the helm of it. Beginning Middle End begins at the unravelling of a marriage and is an ode to starting again.
Uprising — Tahmima Anam
On a sinking island, children watch their mothers endure brutal servitude under Amma, a sadistic madam once sold into slavery herself. The women accept their fate, but their children dream of escape. When educated Kusum Khan is forcibly brought to the island, she refuses to break, which sows seeds of rebellion. Uprising explores how subjugation can suddenly tip into upheaval when one person dares to say no. The book is inspired by a real-life “floating” brothel settlement in Bangladesh.
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The First House—Avni Doshi
From the Booker Prize-shortlisted author of Burnt Sugar comes a psychodrama of unravelling and rebirth where an unnamed narrator is abandoned by her controlling husband. The novel charts her bitter journey even as myth and astrology offer her patterns, yet chaos prevails. It is a novel about poison seeping through the domestic space.
Life of M — Rachel Cusk
The Outline trilogy author returns with Life of M, which sits at the intersection of biography and fiction. A writer agrees to chronicle the life of M, a film star for whom reality bends until “would you just make it up?” becomes the project’s founding provocation. Critics have called it Cusk’s finest work yet.
Glyph — Ali Smith
Glyph opens with a blinded WWI horse and a WWII intelligence officer confronting mangled remains, then leaps to Petra, watching another war unfold on multiple screens in 2026. As a companion (and rebuttal) to Smith’s 2024 novel Gliff, this book asks how fiction should deal with real atrocity. Through history, sci-fi, or unflinching realism? A childhood séance game resurfaces literal ghosts, pulling in Petra’s sister and a foster teen haunted by her own real-world horror.
Ghost-Eye — Amitav Ghosh
Travelling between late-1960s Calcutta and present-day Brooklyn, this expansive novel is about family, fate and our fragile planet. Past and present collide in a novel about a girl who might just be a “case of the reincarnation type.”
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And the others…
Beyond these 13, a host of other major voices were also overlooked. Ann Patchett’s Whistler, about a woman reuniting with her former stepfather and the power of connection, was widely tipped. Maggie O’Farrell’s Land, a sweeping epic set in 19th-century Ireland in the aftermath of the Great Famine, following a father-son mapmaking duo, seemed a sure bet. Another name circulating the book circuits was Deborah Levy’s My Year in Paris with Gertrude Stein, a genre-splicer that interleaves a consideration of Stein’s development with an account of three female friends in Paris, as well as, John Lanchester’s Look What You Made Me Do, a black comedy of resentment and entitlement about two very different women.
Kae Tempest’s Having Spent Life Seeking was another hoped-for inclusion that failed to materialise, alongside Alice Evelyn Yang’s buzzy debut A Beast Slinks Towards Beijing.
