Booker Longlist 2026: Books #7, #8 and #9

Now it's time for a couple of stars of the longlist, and also for my first DNF of the year! I don't review books I give up on - I think it's very unfair - but the very fact of my not completing can be read as a comment (not a positive one) on what I thought of the book.

I'm about to start the audiobook of The Renovation, and will try to read Switzy once it's available (release date is 8 Sept). I've decided not to attempt Helen of Nowhere, which is getting dire reviews (you don't often see a rating dipping below 3 on Goodreads!) or the James book because ... I don't want to. I'll roll into shortlist announcement at 11/13 attempted, 10 read, which is not too bad. 

With nine down, I am prepared to rank the ones I have read, and call whether I think they a) should be and b) will be on the shortlist. I have a feeling that both Switzy and the James book might shortlist, so I am only picking four from my current nine for that reason. Stars are next to the ones that I think will shortlist (as opposed to what I would most prefer to!)

*Equal 1st and both should shortlist: The Things We Never Say and John of John
*Second: The Shadow of the Object (should shortlist and I think it will)
Third: May We Feed the King (I would like it to shortlist but sadly I don't think it will)
*Fourth: Black Bag (I could go either way on whether it should, but I think it will!)
Fifth: The Palm House
Equal Sixth: The End of Everything and The Vivisectors (I do NOT want either of these two on the shortlist)
DNF unranked: All Them Dogs

I would unreservedly recommend the top 4 books on my list and honestly Black Bag is a lot of fun too, I'd say give it a whirl. The Palm House is middling, but not awful. I definitely wouldn't bother with the bottom three though.

The rolling list is below. I use a green cross if I attempted the book but didn't finish; red crosses are for ones that I (at this stage) don't intend to attempt. I abandoned All Them Dogs at about 1/3 of the way through.

✅1. The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis: 8.5/10
2. Switzy by Emma Cline
❌3. Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman
✅4. The End of Everything by M. John Harrison: 5/10
❌5. The Disappearers by Marlon James
✅6. Black Bag by Luke Kennard: 7/10
7. The Renovation by Kenan Orhan
✅8. May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry: 8.5/10
✅9. The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley: 6/10
✅10. The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout: 9.5/10
✅11. John of John by Douglas Stuart: 9.25/10
❎12. All Them Dogs by Djamel White
✅13. The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams: 5/10

The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis: 8.5/10

This is another delightfully brief novel from the longlist, and I found it resonant, thought-provoking, and linguistically beautiful. The plot is quite straightforward; some critics have suggested that not a lot actually happens, which, while true, implies a barrenness of story that I think is a real mischaracterisation.

The narrator, Flora, is a silversmith living in London, but we open the story in a hospital in Mexico, where Flora is undergoing multiple surgeries on her hand after being bitten by her family's ageing dog while on a trip home to see her mother and stepfather. In hospital, Flora meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman (who also lives in London), who has been hospitalised with advanced lung problems, although she minimises them. The two strike up an unlikely friendship, which is abruptly cut short with Wilhelmina's sudden and unexpected death on the very day she was due to be discharged. Feeling a combination of obligation, sadness, and curiosity, Flora agrees to carry Wilhelmina's handbag and her ashes back to London to deliver to the dead woman's son, Max, about whom she has heard tales from his mother. Max and Flora strike up a strange, semi-distant relationship.

That's the factual, no-poetry version of the plot, but it in no way conveys the interplay of ideas, mood, tone and perspective changes that this book revels in. Wilhelmina was a collector of pre-cinema toys and instruments: shadowboxes and zoetropes, magic lanterns and picture wheels, anything that used light and sleight of hand to trick the eye and bewitch the heart. Before her death, she puts on a show with one of her devices for Flora in the hospital, and it this strange, evocative, ethereal presence that continues to permeate and inform everything that follows.

I enjoyed the use of language in this book so much, and the incredible way that Wilhelmina continued to be one of the most vivid characters in it despite dying after the first two chapters. (Although a very different kind of book, in this regard, it reminded me a little of how the character of the dead Rebecca dominates du Maurier's book of the same name). I was fascinated by the almost-slide into magic realism and the way the text played with points of view and reality/unreality (I particularly liked the passages given to Max's pet mouse, and Mike, the British Museum cat.) I think the affect of the book can best be summed up for me by this quote, from Flora:

""I, too, did not believe in an afterlife, or in any kind of magic. Yet, every so often, a door would open and close, on its own."

John of John by Douglas Stuart: 9.25/10

I was a reader who admired the craft of Stuart's debut, Shuggie Bain, but did not fall in love with it the way many seemed to (including the Booker judges, given that it swooped the prize in 2020, making Stuart only the second Scottish writer to ever do so). I came to this book with an open mind but not necessarily expecting to be swept away ... but oh, I was.

Is this a stylistically adventurous, theoretically complex, lyrically masterful, book? No, it is not. What it is, though, is one of the best pure "community storytelling with heart" novels I have read in years. Stuart has complete control of the beats of the story and of the interplay of the characters, all of whom are vividly realised (no mean feat with such a large cast).

The scene is the island of Harris, the era is the 1990s, and our main protagonists are Cal, a 22 year old closeted gay man home broke from an unsuccessful attempt at a textile arts career on the mainland; his father John, a dour, at times abusive, sheep farmer and weaver, who is also (this is not a spoiler, we find out in about chapter 3) a closeted gay man in a long-term relationship with their neighbour Innes; and the Glaswegian import, Ella, Cal's grandmother and John's mother-in-law, who stayed in the house after Cal's mother Grace left John (to help raise Cal).

The book unfolds in the context of the strict (but dying) Presbyterianism that governs the small community with a fist of moral iron, and economic strictures that are only getting worse as traditional industries falter. Everyone in the story is fighting their own battle, some harder than others, and Stuart never pulls away from the depths of misery and suffering that being trapped in a stultified, hidebound, future-less place can bring. In particular, the story arc of Doll, Cal's childhood friend, is heartbreaking, and although I did suspect where his spiralling descent into alcoholism would end, it was no less tragic when we arrived there.

I only really had one minor niggle, and it's from my own history rather than the book's. Several of Stuart's devout, strictly observant Presbyterian elders (including John himself) swear freely, sprinkling their conversation with fucks and so forth, and this did not quite ring true to me. I am the descendant of Scottish Presbyterians of more or less exactly this ilk, and while my own family attended a much more liberal church in the 90s, neither my parents nor my older relatives still in the strict church would have ever, ever peppered their conversation with profanity in this way. My great-grandfather in particular would have considered it a sin to do so. It grated me a little, therefore, to read it in the dialogue.

Overall, I don't want to say too much more about the plot, as it will definitely be better to read it without knowing all the twists and turns. I would just say, it is an incredibly good book, well and truly worthy of the shortlist and may indeed bag Stuart his second Booker.