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As a Booker prize judge I helped whittle 153 books down to a shortlist of six. Here’s why you should read them | Chris Power

Ben Markovits, David Szalay, Kiran Desai, Andrew Miller, Susan Choi and Katie Kitamura’s books will all take you on enthralling journeys

The Booker prize is both a serious and celebratory undertaking. It should be, anyway, for those who care about literature, and I’ve certainly found it to be so since I began reading this year’s submissions on a stormy Devon beach on New Year’s Eve (fun, but subsequently I relied on the books, not ambient conditions, to provide the drama).

Now the shortlist is decided, I and my fellow judges – our chair, Roddy Doyle, who won the prize in 1993, the novelists Ayòbámi Adébáyò and Kiley Reid (both previous longlistees), and the actor, producer and publisher Sarah Jessica Parker – struggle to believe 153 books have become just six, and that our monthly meetings to discuss form, content and font size are at an end.

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‘Brilliantly human’: Kiran Desai and David Szalay make Booker prize shortlist

No debut novels are among the six finalists, with established authors including Ben Markovits and previously shortlisted Andrew Miller in the running

No debuts appear on this year’s Booker prize shortlist, which is dominated by established authors including previous winner Kiran Desai and previously shortlisted writers David Szalay and Andrew Miller.

Ben Markovits, Susan Choi and Katie Kitamura are also on the list, which was announced at an event at the Southbank Centre in central London on Tuesday evening.

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Review: The Primal of Blood and Bone by Jennifer L. Armentrout- Spoilers

The Primal of Blood and Bone by Jennifer L. Armentrout kicks the door open right where we left off—with Casteel and Kieran waiting (and panicking) for Poppy to wake from her Ascension. But something is cooking..? Let’s find out.. ✨Join 250+ readers getting Power-packed book reviews, release updates, and bookish news—every week. ✨ 🚫 No […]

Will There Ever Be Another You by Patricia Lockwood review – long Covid from the inside

The cult author’s autofictional follow-up to No One Is Talking About This is the story of a breakdown

It sounds like the setup to a joke: a viral author and a global virus walk into a novel. The punchline is long Covid, an illness that defies narrative – dissolves it. Patricia Lockwood’s new autofiction, Will There Ever Be Another You, is the product of that cruel dissolution. “I wrote it insane, and edited it sane,” she explained in a recent interview. The madness is the method. But must you know the mind before you can know the madness?

Lockwood is the literary Frankenchild of Dorothy Parker and Flannery O’Connor: a heretical wit fused with gothic strangeness, vintage quippery rewired for the digital age. She’s the kind of writer who inspires parasocial devotion and copycat haircuts. Even her cats are internet-famous. The sacred text of Lockwood lore is Priestdaddy, her glorious 2017 memoir, which introduced readers to the American author’s trouser-resistant father, an ordained Catholic priest who blew his daughter’s college fund on a vintage guitar.

“What are you working on?” people kept asking me. Little stories, I would evade, and leave it at that, because if to write about being ill was self-indulgent, what followed was that the most self-indulgent thing of all was to be ill. But I was determined to do it. I was going to write a masterpiece about being confused.

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‘A resistance to AI’: The author inviting readers to contribute to a mass memoir

Richard Beard says he’s got ‘better at telling the truth’ by arranging his life story on a grid – and invites others to do the same

Richard Beard, award-winning author of The Day That Went Missing and Sad Little Men, thought he was writing his next book, a whole life memoir. In the event, he has written his way off the page and into an entirely new publishing model. The Universal Turing Machine is the title both of Beard’s memoir and the mass memoir project he hopes others will help him to build.

Organised as a chessboard, each of the 64 squares narrates one year of Beard’s life, in 1,000 words per year. (He’s 58, so the last five years are fictionalised.) The reader moves around the “board” as if they were a knight, picking the next year to read from options limited by the knight’s L-shaped ambulation.

Contributions to The Universal Turing Machine can be made at universalturingmachine.co.uk

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107 Days by Kamala Harris review – no closure, no hope

The former presidential candidate sticks to the script in a memoir that will only cause further bad blood

Almost a year after the 2024 election there are still some houses with “Harris” signs in their windows dotted around my liberal Philadelphia neighbourhood. The result left many people in a state of shock and denial, unable to process exactly what went wrong.

No one was more shocked than Kamala Harris, whose inner circle had been confident on election night that they’d eked out a win during the whirlwind campaign. Cupcakes with “Madam President” toppings were ready to go; champagne on ice. “It says a lot about how traumatized we both were by what happened that night that [my husband] Doug and I never discussed it with each other until I sat down to write this book,” Harris reveals in her new memoir, which functions as a political postmortem.

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If Anyone Builds it, Everyone Dies review – how AI could kill us all

If machines become superintelligent we’re toast, say Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares. Should we believe them?

What if I told you I could stop you worrying about climate change, and all you had to do was read one book? Great, you’d say, until I mentioned that the reason you’d stop worrying was because the book says our species only has a few years before it’s wiped out by superintelligent AI anyway.

We don’t know what form this extinction will take exactly – perhaps an energy-hungry AI will let the millions of fusion power stations it has built run hot, boiling the oceans. Maybe it will want to reconfigure the atoms in our bodies into something more useful. There are many possibilities, almost all of them bad, say Eliezer Yudkowsky and Nate Soares in If Anyone Builds It, Everyone Dies, and who knows which will come true. But just as you can predict that an ice cube dropped into hot water will melt without knowing where any of its individual molecules will end up, you can be sure an AI that’s smarter than a human being will kill us all, somehow.

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How modern life makes us sick – and what to do about it

From depression to obesity, the concept of ‘evolutionary mismatch’ can help foster self-compassion and point the way to a more rewarding existence

One of the fascinating things about working as a psychotherapist is the opportunity to observe how many of our problems involve us getting in the way of ourselves. The difficulties we encounter are frequently the result of self-sabotage, and managing them often requires wrestling with our own drives, doing our best not to give in to every impulse. This is easier said than done, of course. To lose weight and keep it off, to successfully climb out of debt, to find meaningful work, to maintain long-term, happy relationships: all demand postponing our immediate desires in the service of a longer-term goal.

Delaying gratification, as it’s called, has been a useful tactic for aeons. But at a certain point it becomes reasonable to ask: why does so much of modern life seem to involve swimming upstream? Why is it that following our instincts often seems to land us in so much trouble?

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Hilary Mantel championed emerging writers – a new prize in her memory will help them get published

Judged by Maggie O’Farrell, Ben Miles and Chigozie Obioma, the Hilary Mantel prize for fiction will recognise emerging talent, and pay tribute to the Wolf Hall author’s legacy

A few months after Hilary Mantel died in September 2022, the novelist Maggie O’Farrell was browsing in a bookshop. Stopping at a table of new novels, she noticed a couple with Mantel’s endorsement on the cover, which, she tells me, she generally regards as instantly justifying the book’s price. This time, though, “I suddenly thought there aren’t going to be many more of these. It was such a sad moment. We’re not going to get another Mantel book, and we’re also not going to get to know about the books that she read and loved.”

To many readers who gobbled up Mantel’s books – 17 of them, including the novel Beyond Black, and the Wolf Hall trilogy, which won two Booker prizes – it’s extraordinary that she found time or energy for anything beside the mammoth research that her vast historical enterprises entailed, not to mention her enthusiastic and detailed involvement in their various adaptations. But Mantel was an engaged and enthusiastic supporter of other writers, especially those in the crucial early stages of their careers. Perhaps she never forgot how long it took her to see the first novel she wrote, A Place of Greater Safety, finally emerge in print in 1992.

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