Each year, a distinguished panel of judges curates selections for the prestigious Booker Prize, regarded as one of the leading literary award in the English speaking world. Here is a long-listed, short-listed, and winner of the 2024 Booker Prize.
Long-listed: ‘Playground’
What Richard Powers did for trees and the natural world with his Pulitzer Prize-winning 2019 novel, “The Overstory,” he expands to marine creatures and the ocean in his latest novel. “Playground” delves into the inextricable interconnections between humanity and earth’s ecosystem, and the potential risks posed by AI.
On a remote Polynesian island, an existential battle unfolds over technology’s impact on nature and community. Three characters emerge in a pivotal intersection: a reclusive billionaire tech founder, his brilliant estranged high-school friend who has made the island his home, and a fiercely committed female diver dedicated to exploring ocean mysteries. When American venture capitalists arrive seeking to create a “seasteading” hub for their future floating cities, the islanders face a choice between economic opportunity or preserving their way of life. Will the venture bring progress or devastation?
“Playground” resonates with cautionary themes. Powers reminds us that the ocean is a universe beyond the beach at the shore — with marvels and vulnerability that are embodied in the diver’s plea, “Without your love, the ocean will die.” The novel also critiques the isolating allure of AI, encapsulated by the tech programmer’s popular virtual reality game that entices millions at the expense of identity and real-world connections. It’s a warning to readers to ask, “What do we lose in the virtual world?”
Short-listed: ‘The Safekeep’
Yael Van Der Wouden’s debut novel, “The Safekeep,” is the evocative story of Isabel, a solitary woman living in her late mother’s home in rural Netherlands in 1961. Isolated and entrenched in ordered routine, her world is disrupted by the arrival of Eva, her brother’s unpolished and unwelcomed girlfriend, who comes to stay for a month.
Spare and taut, Van der Wouden’s writing reveals layers of complex emotion and tension through small moments, beginning with Isabel’s fixation on a broken piece of crockery as a symbol of a fraught history. Eva’s presence stirs Isabel’s repressive nature and their relationship transforms, awakening dormant sexual desires and uncovering guarded secrets and painful truths. But the novel transcends the story of personal transformation when Van Der Wouden broadens the scope, drawing in shadows of the Holocaust and collective guilt and memory.
“The Safekeep” is a moving introspective on isolation, intimacy, and haunting legacies. With it, Van Der Wouden affirms the transformative power of forgiveness and human connection to confront past trauma and as defiant acts of historical reckoning.
The Winner: ‘Orbital’
Samantha Harvey’s “Orbital” is a profound meditation on Earth’s beauty and fragility as seen through the eyes of six astronauts aboard the International Space Station. Hailed as a “love letter to Earth,” the first-ever award winner set in space, the novel was selected over the favored-to-win “James,” (the reimagining of “Huckleberry Finn,”) which garnered numerous awards throughout the year, including the National Book Award.
Through a single day abroad the ISS, the astronauts, representing diverse nations, deal with close quarters, physical isolation, and personal loss while pondering the infinitude of the universe. Harvey’s prose alternates from detailed meal pouch menus to the definition of dark matter, blending the intimate and the expansive. As one character reflects: “Our lives here are inexpressibly trivial and momentous at once.”
Without alien encounters or dramatic rescues, Harvey delivers a quietly thoughtful “space pastoral” that is both awe-inspiring and humbling. From the astronauts’ celestial perspective, Harvey reflects on the splendor of our planet, its glaciers, oceans, and deserts, and urges us to reflect on humanity’s interconnectivity and our stewardship of the world. As one astronaut muses, “Humankind is not this nation or that, it is all together, always together come what may.”