The Man Booker Prize 2015 Shortlist

Who will win the 2015 Man Booker Prize tomorrow? It’s highly unpredictable this year, but here’s what we do know of the six shortlisted titles:

The Fishermen by Chigozie Obioma

The Fishermen is set in a small town in western Nigeria and is about four young brothers who use their strict father’s absence from home to go fishing at a forbidden local river. They encounter a dangerous local madman who predicts that the oldest brother will be killed by another. This prophesy breaks their strong bond, and unleashes a tragic chain of events of almost mythic proportions. The publisher’s blurb describes The Fishermen as “passionate and bold, a breathtakingly beautiful novel firmly rooted in the best of African storytelling.”

What the critics say:
“Awesome in the true sense of the word: crackling with life, freighted with death, vertiginous both in its style and in the elemental power of its story. Few novels deserve to be called ‘mythic’, but Chigozie Obioma’s The Fishermen is certainly one of them. A truly magnificent debut.” Eleanor Catton, Man Booker Prize-winning author of The Luminaries.

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A Spool of Blue Thread by Anne Tyler

The 73-year-old author of The Accidental Tourist has many critically acclaimed novels behind her. Her latest is about the Whitshank family and Abby Whitshank who loves to tell the story of how she and Red fell in love that day in July 1959. The whole family on the porch, relaxed, half-listening as their mother tells the same tale they have heard so many times before. And yet this gathering is different. Abby and Red are getting older, and decisions must be made about how best to look after them and their beloved family home. They’ve all come, even Denny, who can usually be relied on only to please himself.

What the critics say:

“A Spool of Blue Thread about the secrets in the dysfunctional Whitshank family, hardly equals her finest, but it’s superbly accomplished, perceptive and funny, tugged forward by suspended revelations to its hurricane climax.” – The Guardian (Read More)

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Satin Island by Tom McCarthy

An experimental novel in which U is a talented and uneasy figure currently pimping his skills to an elite consultancy in contemporary London. His employers advise everyone from big businesses to governments, and expect their ‘corporate anthropologist’ to help decode and manipulate the world around them, all the more so now that a giant, epoch-defining project is in the offing. Instead, U. spends his days procrastinating, meandering through endless buffer-zones of information and becoming obsessed by the images with which the world bombards him on a daily basis: oil spills, African traffic jams, roller-blade processions, zombie parades. Is there, U. wonders, a secret logic holding all these images together – a codex that, once cracked, will unlock the master-meaning of our age? Might it have something to do with South Pacific Cargo Cults, or the dead parachutists in the news?

What the critics say:

“Smart, shimmering and thought-provoking… McCarthy isn’t a frustrated cultural theorist who must content himself with writing novels; he’s a born novelist, a pretty fantastic one, who has figured out a way to make cultural theory funny, scary and suspenseful – in other words, compulsively readable.” – The New York Times (Read more)

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A Little Life by Hanya Yanagihara

A Little Life is currently the favourite of the Booker contenders this year. It’s a harrowing look at child abuse, addiction, family dysfunction, self-harm and suicide. Four graduates from a small Massachusetts college move to New York to make their way, but they’re broke, adrift, and buoyed only by their friendship and ambition. Over the decades, their relationships deepen and darken, tinged by addiction, success, and pride. One of them, Jude, is scarred by an unspeakable childhood, and haunted by what he fears is a degree of trauma that he’ll not only be unable to overcome – but that will define his life forever.

What the critics say:

“Proof that sometimes in art more really is more, A Little Life is unlike anything else out there. Over the top, beyond the pale and quite simply unforgettable.” – The Independent (Read more)

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A Brief History of Seven Killings by Marlon James

From Jamaican Marlon James, A Brief History of Seven Killings expores the attempted assassination of Bob Marley in the late 1970s. Inspired by this near-mythic real-life event, A Brief History of Seven Killings is an imagined oral biography, told by ghosts, witnesses, killers, members of parliament, drug dealers, conmen, beauty queens, FBI and CIA agents, reporters, journalists, and even Keith Richards’ drug dealer.

What the critics say:

“It’s epic in every sense of that word: sweeping, mythic, over-the-top, colossal and dizzyingly complex. It’s also raw, dense, violent, scalding, darkly comic, exhilarating and exhausting – a testament to Mr. James’s vaulting ambition and prodigious talent.” – The New York Times (Read More)

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The Year of the Runaways by Sunjeev Sahota

The Year of the Runaways tells of the bold dreams and daily struggles of an unlikely family thrown together by circumstance. Thirteen young men live in a house in Sheffield, each in flight from India and in desperate search of a new life. Tarlochan, a former rickshaw driver, will say nothing about his past in Bihar; and Avtar has a secret that binds him to protect the choatic Randeep. Randeep, in turn, has a visa-wife in a flat on the other side of town: a clever, devout woman whose cupboards are full of her husband’s clothes, in case the immigration men surprise her with a call.

What the critics say:

“Through these stories and others, Sahota moves some of the most urgent political questions of the day away from rhetorical posturing and contested statistics into the realm of humanity. The Year of the Runaways is a brilliant and beautiful novel.” – The Guardian (Read More)

See the longlisted books for the 2015 Man Booker prize here

See our list of every Booker prize winning book since 1969 here

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