BOOKER PRIZE 2019

The shortlist for this year's Booker Prize for Fiction has been announced by The Booker Prize Foundation. Former Booker winners Salman Rushdie and Margaret Atwood are in the running for the literary honour for Quichotte  and The Testaments respectively.

Culled by a five-member jury comprising Hay Festival founder Peter Florence, Afua Hirsch, Joanna MacGregor, Xiaolu Guo, and Liz Calder, six authors feature on the shortlist. "The entries this year are a testament to a vibrant and adventurous publishing industry. Anyone who reads these six books would be enlightened and awe-struck," Florence said during the announcement made at The British Library in London. The shortlist has been selected from 151 entries.

Shortlist for the Booker Prize 2019:

 Margaret Atwood (Canada) – The Testaments (Vintage, Chatto & Windus)

Margaret Atwood's sequel to The Handmaid's Tale picks up the story fifteen years after Offred stepped into the unknown, with the explosive testaments of three female narrators from Gilead.

Lucy Ellmann (USA/UK) – Ducks, Newburyport (Galley Beggar Press)

Latticing one cherry pie after another, an Ohio housewife tries to bridge the gaps between reality and the torrent of meaningless info that is the United States of America.

 Bernardine Evaristo (UK) – Girl, Woman, Other (Hamish Hamilton)

Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives and struggles of twelve very different characters. Mostly women, black and British, they tell the stories of their families, friends and lovers, across the country and through the years.

Chigozie Obioma (Nigeria) – An Orchestra of Minorities (Little Brown)

A contemporary twist on the Odyssey, An Orchestra of Minorities is narrated by the chi, or spirit of a young poultry farmer named Chinonso. His life is set off course when he sees a woman who is about to jump off a bridge

 Salman Rushdie (UK/India) – Quichotte (Jonathan Cape)

Inspired by the Cervantes classic, Sam DuChamp, mediocre writer of spy thrillers, creates Quichotte, a courtly, addled salesman obsessed with television, who falls in impossible love with a TV star. Together with his (imaginary) son Sancho, Quichotte sets off on a picaresque quest across America to prove worthy of her hand, gallantly braving the tragicomic perils of an age where “Anything-Can-Happen”.