The Booker Prize 2024: the best-written books on the shortlist

Plus the best-written previous winner of the century

COMING SOON:

—November is the busiest month for literary prizes, so we’ll be featuring the best-written books from their shortlists, and also from the century’s previous winners of these prizes. To avoid sending you too many posts, we’ll leave the recent releases until December.

—Eleanor Anstruther and Samuél Lopez-Barrantes will be joining me on the 16th of November for a live video discussion of what we mean by the term ‘literary’. All of you are welcome to join us, and you can find more information here, restacks of which would be appreciated.

IN TODAY’S ISSUE

—‘He did not believe that the mystery at the heart of things was amorphous or vague or a discrepancy, but a place in us for something absolutely precise. He did not believe in filling that space with religion or science, but in leaving it intact; like silence, or speechlessness, or duration’: one of the two best-written works on the shortlist for 2024’s Booker Prize. The winner will be announced on the 12th of November.

Our other …