Welcome back to Book Break! In this video we are hosting a little prize ceremony, so this time of
year is always so exciting for book lovers. It is the season of the Booker prize. Basically this is
like the Oscar season of publishing. There is so much buzz about some of the best books of
the year. At the time this video is going up we are just a few days away from the big reveal, the
winner of the 2021 Booker prize, and we are all on tenterhooks. But we also want to celebrate some of
the other incredible novels that didn't make it onto this year's longlist or shortlist. The full
Booker longlist has 13 books, so I have assembled for this video a list of 13 incredible novels that
are just as worthy of the Booker. Some of these are my own personal favourites of the year,
some of these are made up from suggestions sent in from you. We asked over on Instagram so thank you
to everyone who sent in your recommendations for that, I would love to hear more recommendations
from you. So do leave comments below letting us know what your personal Booker longlist might have
been. But here we go. The Book Break Booker 2021 longlist. Starting with Luster by Raven Leilani.
This was a debut novel that got so many people talking about it this year. It was longlisted for
the Women's Prize but I really think it could have been Booker material as well. It's a novel about
relationships, about youth, and about race. It's funny but it's also pretty painful and brutal,
watching Edie, the main character, get caught up in this very tangled relationship with a white man
who is in a semi-open marriage. He has an adopted Black daughter who doesn't really have any other
Black role models in her life other than Edie. She doesn't even have anyone to show her how to
do her hair. The book is very cutting, it's very unexpected, I would have put that one on the list.
The Painter's Friend by Howard Cunnell is about a painter with a violent past who seeks refuge on an
island amongst a community of other outsiders. Everyone living there has struggles of their own,
and the island is owned by an art collector whose decision to raise the rent in order to improve his
property threatens to destroy the community that has settled there. So it's about gentrification
and its human cost, and it's also about one man's attempt to convey the struggles of his community
through art - and who will truly benefit from this? The Other Black Girl by Zakiya Delila
Harris would have been a great one. There's a bit of an in-joke that movies about Hollywood
always win Oscars, so you would think that books about publishing would always win the Booker.
This book is about Nella, who is a young editorial assistant at a major publishing house. And she is
fed up of being the only Black employee and all of the microaggressions that go along with that.
So she is thrilled when another Black woman joins the team - a woman called Hazel. But soon things
start to go wrong, and Nella and Hazel start to be pitted against each other, with Hazel being the
clear office favourite. And then this book becomes a thriller / social commentary when Nella starts
receiving threatening messages. The Lamplighters by Emma Stonex is a really unusual mystery
based on a true story. So it's inspired by a story where three men went missing without a
trace from a lighthouse. Emma Stonex takes those real events and then weaves her own
fictional version of it. The book is told between two timelines. So we see the men in the lighthouse
before their disappearance, and all of the events leading up to their disappearance, and then 20
years later we also follow the lives of the women that they each left behind. It's very unusual,
it's ghostly, it's got really really beautiful writing, particularly if you love the sea. This
is a book that brings the sea to life in all its terrifying glory. Then there's Detransition Baby
by Torrey Peters. So I would have put this one on the Booker longlist for how thought-provoking and
conversation-provoking it is. This is a story about three characters and their intertwining
lives. Reese is a trans woman who is still not over her relationship with her ex-girlfriend Amy,
who was another trans woman but who has since detransitioned and is now living as a man
called Ames. Ames is now in a relationship with a cis woman called Katarina who he has recently
got pregnant, not knowing that he still had the ability to do that, and so all three characters
struggle with the new roles they're going to take - deciding for reasons that are so complicated
you will have to read the book to understand, that they may want to raise this child together
as a three-parent unit. The book is simultaneously so accessible and so readable, but also so
challenging in terms of its ideas. It really makes you scrap all of the assumptions that you had so
far about gender and start again. And I think that is prize worthy in itself. What Strange Paradise
by Omar El Akkad is an incredibly moving book about the global refugee crisis seen through the
eyes of a child. The book is set on a small island where a young boy finds himself the sole survivor
of a refugee journey, when the overfilled and ill-equipped ship that he was traveling on sank.
So this boy Amir meets a teenage girl living on the island, and the two form a very special and
unlikely bond, despite the fact they don't even share a common language. This is a book that you
hope will change people's hearts, and for that reason I would have put it on my longlist. For
something very different, my next suggestion is Mother for Dinner by Shalom Auslander.
This is a book that is designed to shock you. It's a book about cannibalism. More than that,
this book is a satire about identity centered around a family of ancestral cannibals. So
cannibalism is their heritage, and it's a heritage that our main protagonist wants absolutely nothing
to do with at the start of the book, but as the story goes on he finds himself starting to connect
with his family's traditions. It's bizarre, it's funny, it's gross, but it also dives into themes
of history and its weight on individuals, so a book worthy of recognition. Then there's
Transcendent Kingdom by Yaa Gyasi. So just like Jessie's first book Homegoing, this is a sweeping
story that spans continents and generations. Our main character Gifty has always been fascinated
by her family's journey, her parents immigration from Ghana to the US. But far from the romantic
mythology that she has placed on this story, the reality of the hard immigrant life living in the
American south has destroyed her family's lives. And in tracing her history Gifty finds that the
roots of her family's shared trauma reach back further than she ever imagined. Of Women and
Salt by Gabriela Garcia is another sweeping novel. This one spans five generations of Latina women,
following them from 19th century Cuba to present day Miami. Again this one is about family,
and shared family trauma, and the stories that pass between these different women - each fierce
and brave in a different way. It also explores structural and systemic violence against women,
all told through these interlocking stories. Then there's The Pull of the Stars by Emma Donoghue. I
would have put this one on the list for the mirror that it held up to the world. So this was a book
about a pandemic, but not the current pandemic we're in. This is set a hundred years ago.
It's set in Dublin in a hospital, and it just spans three days - so very different from the
last few sweeping novels I've been recommending. This one is just three days on a maternity ward.
The women there are being quarantined because of the flu, and so it is this terrifying and
claustrophobic and brave story of the women there to give birth, and also three women working at the
hospital: a nurse, a doctor and a volunteer. It's sad and it's intense but it's also really
hopeful, and it's a story about bravery in the hardest of times. Assembly by Natasha
Brown is a really short book at just a hundred pages. It would have been the shortest book
ever to win the Booker if it had won. This one is told in these little vignettes showing the many
ways that racism affects the daily life of our main character. Every relationship that she has,
every success or failure, are all in some way tainted by assumptions made based on the colour
of her skin. So it is not an uplifting book at all, but it is a beautifully crafted one.
How can 100 pages do so much? Then there's Harlem Shuffle by Colson Whitehead. Colson
Whitehead has been longlisted for the Booker before in 2017 for The Underground Railroad,
and a few of you submitted this as another book worthy of the same recognition. Harlem Shuffle
is a thriller set in 1960s Harlem following a small-time crook who becomes embroiled in a heist,
and every book that you get from Colson Whitehead does something a little different. A crime novel
is a departure for him, but once again just like with all of his previous books, Whitehead manages
to expand the usual genre categorisations. And finally the most popular one sent in from you
was The Prophets by Robert Jones Jr. This book is a love story set in an extremely bleak landscape.
It's set on a plantation and it follows the romance between two enslaved men, Isaiah and
Samuel. They are the focus of the story, but you also hear from so many secondary characters who
are each given a voice, a personality. Jones creates this incredible universe filled with
characters that feel completely real. So from that longlist, who would you vote to win the Book
Break Booker? Let us know in the comments below, along with your own recommendations for your own
Booker longlist. I will also link here to a video we made in the past with our alternative
Oscars list so you can come to another of our prize ceremonies, and I'll see you next time!