The 2018 shortlist of six novels has been announced.
I want to read all six of these books, and since I am so interested, I thought you might be too.
First I will just list the six books, then below that, I will go into more detail and include a synopsis of each one:
So, here is the list:
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Title: MILKMAN
Author: ANNA BURNS
Country of Origin: UK
Publisher: Faber & Faber
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Title: WASHINGTON BLACK
Author: ESI EDUGYAN
Country of Origin: CANADA
Publisher: SERPENT’S TAIL
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Title: EVERYTHING UNDER
Author: DAISY JOHNSON
Country of Origin: UK
Publisher: JONATHAN CAPE
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Title: THE MARS ROOM
Author: RACHEL KUSHNER
Country of Origin: USA
Publisher: JONATHAN CAPE
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Title: THE OVERSTORY
Author: RICHARD POWERS
Country of Origin: USA
Publisher: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
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Title: THE LONG TAKE
Author: ROBIN ROBERTSON
Country of Origin: UK
Publisher: PICADOR
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SYNOPSIS OF EACH BOOK
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Title: MILKMAN
Author: ANNA BURNS
Country of Origin: UK
Publisher: Faber & Faber
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SYNOPSIS:
In this unnamed city, to be interesting is dangerous. Middle sister, our protagonist, is busy attempting to keep her mother from discovering her maybe-boyfriend and to keep everyone in the dark about her encounter with Milkman. But when first brother-in-law sniffs out her struggle, and rumours start to swell, middle sister becomes ‘interesting’. The last thing she ever wanted to be. To be interesting is to be noticed and to be noticed is dangerous.
Milkman is a tale of gossip and hearsay, silence and deliberate deafness. It is the story of inaction with enormous consequences.
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Title: WASHINGTON BLACK
Author: ESI EDUGYAN
Country of Origin: CANADA
Publisher: SERPENT’S TAIL
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SYNOPSIS:
From the author of the award-winning international best seller Half-Blood Blues comes a dazzling new novel, about a boy who rises from the ashes of slavery to become a free man of the world.
Washington Black is an eleven-year-old field slave who knows no other life than the Barbados sugar plantation where he was born. When his master’s eccentric brother chooses him to be his manservant, Wash is terrified of the cruelties he is certain await him. But Christopher Wilde, or “Titch,” is a naturalist, explorer, scientist, inventor, and abolitionist. He initiates Wash into a world where a flying machine can carry a man across the sky; where two people, separated by an impossible divide, might begin to see each other as human; and where a boy born in chains can embrace a life of dignity and meaning. But when a man is killed and a bounty is placed on Wash’s head, Titch abandons everything to save him. What follows is their flight along the eastern coast of America, and, finally, to a remote outpost in the Arctic, where Wash, left on his own, must invent another new life, one which will propel him further across the globe. From the sultry cane fields of the Caribbean to the frozen Far North, Washington Black tells a story of friendship and betrayal, love and redemption, of a world destroyed and made whole again–and asks the question, what is true freedom?
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Title: THE OVERSTORY
Author: RICHARD POWERS
Country of Origin: USA
Publisher: WILLIAM HEINEMANN
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SYNOPSIS:
An Air Force loadmaster in the Vietnam War is shot out of the sky, then saved by falling into a banyan. An artist inherits a hundred years of photographic portraits, all of the same doomed American chestnut. A hard-partying undergraduate in the late 1980s electrocutes herself, dies, and is sent back into life by creatures of air and light. A hearing- and speech-impaired scientist discovers that trees are communicating with one another. These four, and five other strangers—each summoned in different ways by trees—are brought together in a last and violent stand to save the continent’s few remaining acres of virgin forest.
In his twelfth novel, National Book Award winner Richard Powers delivers a sweeping, impassioned novel of activism and resistance that is also a stunning evocation of—and paean to—the natural world. From the roots to the crown and back to the seeds, The Overstory unfolds in concentric rings of interlocking fables that range from antebellum New York to the late twentieth-century Timber Wars of the Pacific Northwest and beyond, exploring the essential conflict on this planet: the one taking place between humans and nonhumans. There is a world alongside ours—vast, slow, interconnected, resourceful, magnificently inventive, and almost invisible to us. This is the story of a handful of people who learn how to see that world and who are drawn up into its unfolding catastrophe.
The Overstory is a book for all readers who despair of humanity’s self-imposed separation from the rest of creation and who hope for the transformative, regenerating possibility of a homecoming. If the trees of this earth could speak, what would they tell us?
“Listen. There’s something you need to hear.”
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Title: THE LONG TAKE
Author: ROBIN ROBERTSON
Country of Origin: UK
Publisher: PICADOR
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SYNOPSIS:
A noir narrative written with the intensity and power of poetry, The Long Take is one of the most remarkable – and unclassifiable – books of recent years.
Walker is a D-Day veteran with post-traumatic stress disorder; he can’t return home to rural Nova Scotia, and looks instead to the city for freedom, anonymity and repair. As he moves from New York to Los Angeles and San Francisco we witness a crucial period of fracture in American history, one that also allowed film noir to flourish. The Dream had gone sour but – as those dark, classic movies made clear – the country needed outsiders to study and dramatise its new anxieties.
While Walker tries to piece his life together, America is beginning to come apart: deeply paranoid, doubting its own certainties, riven by social and racial division, spiralling corruption and the collapse of the inner cities. The Long Take is about a good man, brutalised by war, haunted by violence and apparently doomed to return to it – yet resolved to find kindness again, in the world and in himself.
Robin Robertson’s The Long Take is a work of thrilling originality.
The Long Take is like a film noir on the page. A book about a man and a city in shock, it’s an extraordinary evocation of the debris and ongoing destruction of war even in times of peace. In taking a scenario we think we know from the movies but offering a completely different perspective, Robin Robertson shows the flexibility a poet can bring to form and style.
Man Booker judges’ citation