Booker’s long list is neatly curated and gives Alan Garner overdue recognition | Booker Price 2022

IIt’s taken more than half a century, but Alan Garner’s long Booker list is finally recognition of an under-hyped national treasure too often pigeonholed as “just” a children’s writer. Over the decades his writing has deepened and clarified and Treacle Walker, a flint little fable about a convalescing boy visited by a rag picker, reads like a perfect distillation of his longstanding themes: mythology, archeology , childhood, the transient rhythms of vernacular speech, deep time and inner visions.

This is a neatly curated list that spotlights small presses and ignores some of the biggest names (Hanya Yanagihara and Jennifer Egan, Ian McEwan with his strongest novel in years, The Next Lessons) for pleasures calm and rewarding surprises. Like Treacle Walker, Claire Keegan’s Small Things Like These is another miracle of brevity, compressing the usually bulky novel form into a diamond. This story of an Irish coal merchant in the 1980s who is forced to confront what the whole town ignores – the church’s institutional abuse of young women – is not lost on words, the implications emerging from the short text. Another Irish novel, The Colony by Audrey Magee, about an English painter visiting a small Irish island, is set in the time of the Troubles but blends into a larger allegory about power, colonialism, marginalized languages ​​and even Brexit.

An interest in form unites the list: Trust by Hernan Diaz investigates the shared fiction of money through different perspectives on a 1920s Wall Street mogul – novel, revealing autobiography, memoir, diary. With only her second novel, Diaz has emerged as an ambitious and meaningful voice. Graeme Macrae Burnet, who shot to fame when His Bloody Project was a surprise inclusion on the Booker five years ago, is known for his snarky and Hall of Mirrors storytelling. Case Study is a moving story of psychotherapy, false identity and mental instability in 1960s London.

Other titles on the list are also looking forward to the experience. There’s NoViolet Bulawayo’s exuberant political satire Glory, which dramatizes Robert Mugabe’s downfall through animal allegory, and Maddie Mortimer’s debut Maps of our Spectacular Bodies, which brings an innovative narrative approach to writing. on the bodily incursion of cancer. After Sappho by Selby Wynn Schwartz is a fragmented collective biography of artists and writers of the late 19th and early 20th centuries – women pushing the boundaries of an oppressive society and asserting their desire to study, create and to love other women. It’s lyrical, scholarly, passionate and utterly unique.

In The Trees, Percival Everett uses dark comedy, absurd horror, and thriller form to address the history and legacy of lynching in the United States. America’s historic violence is the theme of Karen Joy Fowler’s Booth, a family epic that explores the life and times of the man who shot Abraham Lincoln. Leila Mottley’s Nightwalking, the youngest discovery on the list, is an explosive and exuberant debut based on a real-life case of corruption and abuse in the Oakland Police Department against a backdrop of pervasive racism.

It’s been a decade since the extremely enjoyable debut of Shehan Karunatilaka, Chinaman. Narrated in the second person and set in the afterlife, Maali Almeida’s The Seven Moons returns to 1980s Sri Lanka and is once again a riotous and frantic satire of terrible times. The 13 titles are completed by Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout, the third in her much-loved series about a writer called Lucy Barton. It’s a lighter work than most of the other novels on the list, written in a confessional, spontaneous style, like a voice whispered in your ear – but it’s not easy to make the prose sound so natural.