Booker 2022

It is 1985, in an Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and timber merchant, faces into his busiest season. As he does the rounds, he feels the past rising up to meet him - and encounters the complicit silences of a people controlled by the Church.EndorsementsA Book of the Year in The Times, The New Statesman, Observer, Financial Times, Irish Times, Irish Independent, Times Literary Supplement.Winner of the Orwell Prize and the Kerry Group Irish Novel of the Year Award.Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize and the Irish Novel of the Year at the Dalkey Literary Awards.“Exquisite.” — Damon Galgut“Masterly.” — The Times“Miraculous.” — Herald“Astonishing.” — Colm Toibin“Stunning.” — Sunday Independent“Absolutely beautiful.” — Douglas Stuart

When the rural town of Money, Mississippi is beset by a series of brutal murders, a pair of detectives from the Mississippi Bureau of Investigation arrive, only to be met with resistance from the local sheriff, his deputy, the coroner, and a mob of racist white townsfolk. This, they expect. Less predictable, however, is the second corpse that appears at each crime scene: that of a man resembling Emmett Till, the young Black boy lynched in the same town sixty-five years earlier. As a spate of copycat killings spreads across the country, what begins as a murder investigation soon becomes a journey into the soul of America's violent past.EndorsementsSunday Times Fiction Book of the Year 2022Winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2022Sunday Times Novel of the Year 2022'Everett has mastered the movement between unspeakable terror and knockout comedy.' — The New York Times

'I have decided to write down everything that happens, because I feel, I suppose, I may be putting myself in danger.'London, 1965. An unworldly young woman suspects charismatic psychotherapist Collins Braithwaite of involvement in a death in her family. Determined to find out more, she becomes a client of his under a false identity. But she soon finds herself drawn into a world in which she can no longer be certain of anything.In Case Study, Graeme Macrae Burnet presents both sides: the woman's notes and the life of Collins Braithwaite. The result is a dazzling, page-turning and wickedly humorous meditation on the nature of sanity, identity and truth itself, by one of the most inventive novelists writing today.EndorsementsLonglisted for the 2022 Booker Prize.Shortlisted for the 2022 Gordon Burn Prize.'A page-turning blast.' — Times'Genuinely affecting ... a very funny book.' — Guardian'Burstingly alive and engaging.' — Telegraph

Something gleeful and malevolent is moving in Lia's body, learning her life from the inside out. A shape-shifter. A disaster tourist. It's travelling down the banks of her canals. It's spreading.When a sudden diagnosis upends Lia's world, the boundaries between her past and her present begin to collapse. Deeply buried secrets stir awake. As the voice prowling in Lia takes hold of her story, and the landscape around becomes indistinguishable from the one within, Lia and her family are faced with some of the hardest questions of all: how can we move on from the events that have shaped us, when our bodies harbour everything? And what does it mean to die with grace, when you're simply not ready to let go?Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is a story of coming-of-age at the end of a life. Utterly heart-breaking yet darkly funny, Maddie Mortimer's astonishing debut is a symphonic journey through one woman's body: a wild and lyrical celebration of desire, forgiveness, and the darkness within us all.EndorsementsLonglisted for the Booker PrizeWinner of the Desmond Elliott PrizeShortlisted for the Goldsmiths PrizeLonglisted for the Dylan Thomas Prize'Original, memorable, shimmering' — Sarah Moss'Restlessly inventive... delicate and persuasive' — The Guardian

"The first thing we did was change our names. We were going to be Sappho," so begins this intrepid debut novel, centuries after the Greek poet penned her lyric verse. Ignited by the same muse, a myriad of women break from their small, predetermined lives for seemingly disparate paths: in 1892, Rina Faccio trades her needlepoint for a pen; in 1902, Romaine Brooks sails for Capri with nothing but her clotted paintbrushes; and in 1923, Virginia Woolf writes: "I want to make life fuller and fuller." Writing in cascading vignettes, Selby Wynn Schwartz spins an invigorating tale of women whose narratives converge and splinter as they forge queer identities and claim the right to their own lives.A luminous meditation on creativity, education, and identity, After Sappho announces a writer as ingenious as the trailblazers of our past.Endorsements"This book is splendid: Impish, irate, deep, courageous... Brava!" — Lucy Ellmann, author of Ducks, Newburyport

An introspective young boy, Joseph Coppock squints at the world with his lazy eye. Living alone in an old house, he reads comics, collects birds' eggs and plays with his marbles. When, one day, a rag-and-bone man called Treacle Walker appears, exchanging an empty jar of a cure-all medicine and a donkey stone for a pair of Joseph's pyjamas and a lamb's shoulder blade, a mysterious friendship develops between them.A fusion of myth, magic and the stories we make for ourselves, Treacle Walker is an extraordinary novel from one of our greatest living writers.Endorsements'Playful, moving and wholly remarkable' — Guardian'A small miracle' — New Statesman'Mastery of craft, resonance and deep feeling on every page' — Telegraph'All the exuberance and eccentricity, all the deep thought and resounding mythology of [Garner's] best work' — Observer'Spare and allusive... luminous and understated' — Rowan Williams, New Statesman'Cryptic, evocative, sparely told and deceptively simple' — Carolyne Larrington, TLSA New Statesman Book of the YearA TLS Book of the YearA Guardian Best Fiction Book of 2021

Junius is the patriarch, a celebrated Shakespearean actor who fled bigamy charges in England, both a mesmerising talent and a man of terrifying instability. As his children grow up in a remote farmstead in 1830s rural Baltimore, the country draws ever closer to the boiling point of secession and civil war.Of the six Booth siblings who survive to adulthood, each has their own dreams they must fight to realise — but it is Johnny who makes the terrible decision that will change the course of history — the assassination of Abraham Lincoln.Charmers, liars, drinkers and dreamers, they will change history forever. Booth is a riveting novel focused on the very things that bind, and break, a family.

Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida, war photographer, gambler and closeted gay, has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the serene Beira Lake and he has no idea who killed him. At a time where scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long, as the ghouls and ghosts with grudges who cluster round can attest.But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to try and contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to a hidden cache of photos that will rock Sri Lanka.A searing satire set amid the murderous mayhem of Sri Lanka beset by civil war.EndorsementsWinner of the Booker Prize 2022.Longlisted for the RSL Ondaatje Prize 2023.'Fizzes with energy, imagery and ideas against a broad, surreal vision of the Sri Lankan civil wars' — The Booker judges'Recalls the mordant wit and surrealism of Nikolai Gogol's Dead Souls or Mikhail Bulgakov's The Master and Margarita ... Karunatilaka has done artistic justice to a terrible period in his country's history' — Guardian'Outstanding... the most significant work of Sri Lankan fiction in a decade.' — New European

Narrated by a vivid chorus of animal voices that unveil the tyranny and ruthlessness required to uphold absolute power, Glory is the tale of an uprising and a country's implosion. At the centre of it all is a young goat named Destiny, returning home to bear witness to a revolution.Urgent, wild, dazzling with life and an irrepressible wit, Glory is a razor-sharp satire that unpicks power and shows how history can be halted in a moment.An exhilarating Animal Farm-inspired novel about power and corruption set in an animal nation trapped in a cycle as old as time, by one of the most exciting voices writing today.Endorsements“Bulawayo is really out-Orwelling Orwell. This is a satire with sharper teeth, angrier, and also very, very funny.” — New York Times Book Review“Glory is a masterpiece for our times. Gripping and exhilarating.” — ObserverLonglisted for the Women's Prize 2023Shortlisted for the Booker Prize 2022Shortlisted for the Rathbones Folio Prize 2023Shortlisted for the 2023 Visionary Arts Awards

He handed the easel to the boatman, reaching down the pier wall towards the sea. Mr Lloyd has decided to travel to the island by boat without an engine — the authentic experience. Unbeknownst to him, Mr Masson will also soon be arriving for the summer. Both will strive to encapsulate the truth of this place — one in his paintings, the other by capturing its speech, the language he hopes to preserve. But the people who live on this rock — three miles long and half-a-mile wide — have their own views on what is being recorded, what is being taken and what is given in return. Soft summer days pass, and the islanders are forced to question what they value and what they desire. As the autumn beckons, and the visitors head home, there will be a reckoning.

A Wall Street tycoon takes a young woman as his wife. Together, they rise to the top in an age of excess and speculation. Now a novelist is threatening to reveal the secrets behind their marriage. Who will have the final word in their story of greed, love and betrayal?Composed of four competing versions of this deliciously deceptive tale, Trust by Hernan Diaz brings us on a quest for truth while confronting the lies that often live buried in the human heart.Trust is a sweeping, puzzle-like novel about power, greed, love, and a search for the truth that begins in 1920s New York. Can one person change the course of history?

Kiara Johnson and her brother Marcus are barely scraping by in a squalid East Oakland apartment complex optimistically called the Royal-Hi. Both have dropped out of high school, their family fractured by death and prison. But while Marcus clings to his dream of rap stardom, Kiara hunts for work to pay their rent—which has more than doubled—and to keep the 9-year-old boy next door, abandoned by his mother, safe and fed. One night, what begins as a drunken misunderstanding with a stranger turns into a job Kiara never imagined wanting but now desperately needs: nightcrawling. Her world breaks open even further when her name surfaces in an investigation that exposes her as a key witness in a massive scandal within the Oakland Police Department.A dazzling, unforgettable novel about a young Black woman who walks the streets of Oakland and stumbles headlong into the failure of its justice system—a debut that announces a blazingly original voice. Full of edge, raw beauty, electrifying intensity, and piercing vulnerability, Nightcrawling marks the stunning arrival of a voice unlike any we have heard before.

I would like to say a few things about my first husband, William.Lucy Barton is a writer, but her ex-husband, William, remains a hard man to read. William, she confesses, has always been a mystery to me. Another mystery is why the two have remained connected after all these years. They just are.So Lucy is both surprised and not surprised when William asks her to join him on a trip to investigate a recently uncovered family secret—one of those secrets that rearrange everything we think we know about the people closest to us. There are fears and insecurities, simple joys and acts of tenderness, and revelations about affairs and other spouses, parents and their children. On every page of this exquisite novel we learn more about the quiet forces that hold us together—even after we’ve grown apart.At the heart of this story is the indomitable voice of Lucy Barton, who offers a profound, lasting reflection on the very nature of existence. “This is the way of life,” Lucy says. “The many things we do not know until it is too late.”Pulitzer Prize winner Elizabeth Strout explores the mysteries of marriage and the secrets we keep, as a former couple reckons with where they’ve come from—and what they’ve left behind.Endorsements“Elizabeth Strout is one of my very favorite writers, so the fact that Oh William! may well be my favorite of her books is a mathematical equation for joy. The depth, complexity, and love contained in these pages is a miraculous achievement.” — Ann Patchett, author of The Dutch House.“Perfect attunement to the human condition.” — Hilary Mantel