I
t’s the revenge of the middle-aged author! This year’s Booker prize shortlist, announced today, has rewarded maturity over novelty with six books by seasoned novelists between the ages of 46 and 64. These authors, three men and three women born in the 1960s or 1970s, aren’t exactly marquee names, but all have plenty of acclaimed novels under their belts. In fact, the only author who has written fewer than six books is Kiran Desai — and she won the Booker in 2006 for her second novel, The Inheritance of Loss.
This shortlist is a triumph of what I’d call unpretentious, old-fashioned literary fiction. I mean this as no disparagement when I say it feels like the kind of shortlist you might have seen in the 1980s and 1990s when the Booker prize rewarded novelists like Kazuo Ishiguro, Michael Ondaatje and Penelope Fitzgerald.
But which author will prevail? I love David Szalay’s Flesh and the rumour is that it was popular among the judges from an early stage in discussions. However, something tells me it will be Susan Choi’s Flashlight, a story that moves between America, North Korea and Japan. It’s just the kind of ambitious, global novel that Booker tends to favour.
Flashlight by Susan Choi
