Tag Archives: Booker Prize longlist

Booker Prize Longlist 2025:  Katie Kitamura’s “Audition”

“I had given in to his story… because of his persuasiveness – persuasion, which is only one step away from coercion.” – Audition, by Katie Kitamura

I am not suggesting that Katie Kitamura’s glittering novel is a retelling of Austen’s Persuasion. Both titles have three syllables, and that’s the extent of it, on the surface. Kitamura’s Audition centers on theater and performance, mothers and sons, and the quantity of an actor’s roles onstage and in life.

 And yet the words persuasion and persuasiveness, a sly allusion to Austen’s novel, are repeated in Kitamura’s Audition.  The narrator is the prey of persuasion, specifically by her husband, and she says it is “one step away from coercion.”  Anne Elliot in Persuasion has a different take: she defends the act of persuasion that separated her from her lover for seven years. But that is done in a moment of malice, when her ex-lover pays the consequences of another woman’s impulsiveness.

Kitamura’s strange little book is certainly striking. The prose is spare, the sentences lyrically icy. Divided into two parts, this extraordinary novel revolves around three characters: the narrator, who is a famous actress,  her husband, Tomas, a writer, and Xavier, a young man who may or may not be their son. 

In Part I, the narrator struggles with her role in a  play:  she cannot quite get the central scene right. And then Xavier, a young man who looks like her, shows up at the theater and asks if she is his mother. (He was adopted.) She laughs;  she has never given birth.  But she is rattled. He looks so much like her. He gets a job as an assistant in the theater, and his personality changes.  “There was no trace of the young man I had encountered only one week earlier, vibrating with uncertainty, he seemed to be a completely different person.”

In Part II, the relationships change. Xavier is now the son of the narrator and Tomas.  The narrator is in a critically-acclaimed play that is finally coming to an end.  Xavier works as a director’s assistant, but he has two months off and asks if he can move home. Tomas is the doting father: he persuades the narrator that there is enough space. And this is an act of persuasion she regrets. She was right to be reluctant. The results are horrifying.

I didn’t love it – I need more emotional connection – but it is a gorgeous book.

Completely Bonkers:  Literary Prize Roulette

“I want to read the whole longlist!”

That’s how it begins.

Every July, we go bonkers when the Booker Prize longlist is announced.  E-mails are written. Conversation ensues.  Then the National Book Award longlist is announced and usurps the Booker.  The National Book Award recently established the longlist and shortlist system.  Before that, there were six finalists, and that was enough.

Honestly, we’re exhausted by the Booker longlist. We soon realize we don’t want to read the shortlist at all.  I admired  Sarah Perry’s Enlightenment, a novel about friendship, astronomy, and a ghost: it did not make the shortlist. I  am less enthusiastic about two shortlisted novels, Samantha Harvey’s Orbital, a science fiction prose poem, and Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep, an intruder-in-the- house novel.

Mr. Nemo has also read three from the Booker longlist.  He loved Claire Messud’s  The Strange Eventful History, a family saga, considered Percival Everett’s James a necessary update on The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn, and was disappointed by Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, which, from what I’ve heard, could be called Of Mice and Women. I am, however, a fan of Wood, and recommend two of her novels, The Natural History of Things and The Weekend.

The National Book Award longlist looks exciting. As readers of my newsletter know, I loved the longlisted Jessica Anthony’s The Most, a novel told from two viewpoints, the story of the unraveling of a marriage.  Mr. Nemo is reading a longlisted nonfiction book, Rebecca Boyle’s Our Moon: How Earth’s Celestial Companion Transormed the Planet.

As you can see, we are playing Literary Prize Roulette.  Will this be the year when our picks win the prizes?

Either way, we discover a few new books we love.

Sampling the Booker Prize Longlist: Awed by Paul Harding’s “This Other Eden” 

The book buyer of my favorite independent bookstore once offered me a job.  I was recommending novels to a friend in a loud, excited voice.  I blush to remember how loud I was, but apparently that was a plus. Two customers stalked up to the desk and bought the book. 

I liked the book buyer, an unrecognized genius.  She spent her days in a dark, chilly basement reading ARCs and drinking cappuccinos. “I don’t read all of these.  I don’t have time.  I read a third of a lot of books, and then decide whether our customers will like them.”  

Her selections were impeccable.  It was the go-to place for books by Rachel Ingalls, Robert Irwin, Don Delillo, Christopher Coe, Marilynne Robinson, Salman Rushdie, Margaret Drabble, Vintage Contemporaries, and The National Book Award and Booker Prize winners.

In retrospect, bookselling would have been my ideal job, if I hadn’t had another job.  Still, I loved chatting to the booksellers.  One of  them was impossibly sophisticated,  wearing sleek black sheaths and lots of gold jewelry, but she and I both adored Dickens, the basis for our friendship.

The book buyer’s one-third rule still influences me. It applies perfectly to a book you cannot admire. My book group loved Ann Patchett’s State of Wonder, but I called it quits when the heroine discovered a tribe in South America where 70-year-old women could have babies. (Please, no!) And when I begin crying over a book about climate change and the death or our planet, I allow myself to put it aside till I pull myself together.

In Booker Prize season, the one-third rule is useful.  I tried some years ago to read the complete Booker longlist, but the judges’ taste did not always concur with mine. Now I regard the longlist as a list of recommendations, not as a syllabus.

I got off to a good start this morning with Paul Harding’s Booker-longlisted novel, This Other Eden. This multi-generational novel, with its sculpted sentences  and colorful imagery, must be one of the most brilliant novels of the year. Full of mystical twists and intense lyricism , the book resembles  the hollow tree where one of the main characters, Zachary Hand to God Proverb, a Civil War veteran, lives and carves scenes from  his favorite Bible stories.  “He loved, in order, sculpting robes, vegetation, faces, and most of all, hands, through which he took special joy in expressing despair, support, betrayal, supplication, forgiveness, healing, benediction, blessing, revenge, comfort, and murder, hands raised high, hanging limp, clenched, slack, palms out, extended, turned in, retracted, bathing feet, supporting elbows, wiping tears, tightening nooses, drawing swords, jabbing vinegar sops, thrusting spears, caressing sleeping faces.”

The novel concentrates on the early 20th century (so far anyway), but we learn the stories of the origins of the mixed-race community. Set on Apple Island, Benjamin Honey, an escaped slave, and his Irish wife, Patience, settled there in 1793 after an arduous ship voyage. Honey intended to plant an apple orchard, but when his seeds don’t grow, he does odd jobs as a carpenter on the mainland for farmers who advise him on growing trees and trade seeds. The Honey family flourishes, along with the trees, and soon they have children, grandchildren, and great-grandchildren.  There are a few other mixed-race families, too, and all of them have fascinating stories.

Things begin change on Apple Island in the 20th century.  Black people are less welcome on the mainland, and the lighter-skinned are more accepted. Matthew Diamond, a white retired teacher, under the auspices of Enon College of Theology and Mission, builds a one-room schoolhouse on the Island and teaches the children every summer.  He finds a wealth of talent: teemage Ethan Honey is a talented artist, his grandmother, Esther Honey, can recite Hamlet, and one child is a a mathematical genius. (Matthew orders an advanced algebra book so he can keep ahead.)  

Unfortunately, Matthew’s presence on the island attracts the attention of the Governor’s Council, who believe in eugenics and are determined to evict the “degenerate” mixed-race community from the island. 

Harding’s prose is quietly transcendent and lyrical. His storytelling bears the influences of Toni Morrison, Faulkner, and  Gabriel Garcia Marquez. Biblical and classical themes are woven into the narrative: Esther Honey passes on the family flood myth  to the new generarion: in the 19th century, a hurricane and flood crippled and killed many in their family and community. She says, Noah had the ark, we had the island.   

The one-third rule does not apply here. I am wholly committed to reading this book.