It’s sometimes said that a camel is a horse designed by a committee. Each of us have lost books we’d like to have seen go further in the process. The shortlist from which the winner will be selected is not the one that any single one of us, unaided, would have created. But I think it’s the better for it: it was arrived at not by brute-force voting, but by careful and detailed and impassioned argument – followed, in the odd case, by brute-force voting.
So it’s a list that represents no single person’s taste, but that all of us are proud to own. We have Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings – a rumbustious, thrilling, many-voiced historical novel about gang violence in Jamaica. We have Tom McCarthy’s Satin Island – a horrifyingly comic novel of ideas with its fingers jammed into the light-socket of the age. We have Chigozie Obioma’s extraordinary debut The Fishermen – a story of brotherhood and family that mixes tragedy and farce, the mythic and the mundane. We have Sunjeev Sahota’s hugely immersive and moving story about the experience of Asian immigrants in today’s Britain, The Year of the Runaways: what those who make the journey bring with them, what they leave behind. We have, in Anne Tyler’s A Spool of Blue Thread, a multi-generational family saga told with astonishing sensitivity and command. And we have A Little Life, Hanya Yanagihara’s wrenching and relentless fable of sexual trauma and its aftermath.
What do you look for in a novel? Stylistic grace, emotional punch, truth to experience, extravagance of imagination, storytelling brio, moral rigour, intellectual or formal audacity, depth of characterisation, or what Milan Kundera calls “the soft gleam of the comical”…? All these virtues are amply represented on this list: every book on it is long in more than one of these suits and most of them are long in many. We think that every one of these novels has something remarkable to offer its readers. We hope you’ll agree.
More about:
