The 2019 Booker Prize for Fiction will be announced on Oct 14, 2019. Here’s a quick recap of the shortlist to know who might win the coveted literary award this year.

The Testaments
By Margaret Atwood
This sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale picks up the narrative 15 years after the original novel to tell the story of Offred’s two daughters: Agnes must follow tradition and marry a Gileadean commander, while Daisy grows up in entirely different circumstances in Canada.

Ducks, Newburyport
By Lucy Ellman
This book is mostly one very long sentence that runs for 1000 pages. The protagonist is a married mother of four, formerly a college teacher, now recovering from cancer, who muses on numerous global problems while keeping herself busy with cooking.

An Orchestra of Minorities
By Chigozie Obioma
In this mix of Greek tragedy and Nigerian folklore, a chicken farmer saves a woman from suicide. In order to win her wealthy family’s approval, he enrols at a university in Cyprus, only to be robbed and imprisoned in an alien land.

Girl, Woman, Other
By Bernardine Evaristo
Twelve characters, mostly black British women but of different ages, cultural backgrounds and sexual identities, whose lives connect and intersect in various ways, tell their stories of friends, families and loves through the years and across the country.

Quichotte
By Salman Rushdie
Rushdie’s 14th novel tells the story of Sam, an Indian-born novelist writing unsuccessful spy thrillers in America. As a last resort to success, Sam creates the character of an elderly, former pharmaceutical salesman obsessed with an ex-Bollywood actress.

10 Minutes 38 Seconds in this Strange World
By Elif Shafak
Beginning with a dead body found in a garbage bin, Shafak’s novel follows the journey of an ordinary young village girl led by disturbing personal circumstances into the red light district of Istanbul and the family she creates from a motley crew of social misfits and outcasts.

Published in Dawn, Books & Authors, October 13th, 2019