The Booker Prize Shortlist 2026

Artie Dam is a man with a secret. He spends his days teaching history to high schoolers, expanding their young minds, correcting their casual cruelties, and lending a kind word to those who need it most. He goes to holiday parties with his wife of three decades, makes small talk with neighbours, and, on weekends, takes his sailboat out on the beautiful Massachusetts Bay. He is, by all appearances, present and alive.

But inside, Artie is plagued by feelings of isolation. He looks out at a world gone mad—at himself and the people around him—and turns a question over and over in his mind: how is it that we know so little about one another, even those closest to us?

And then, one day, Artie learns that life has been keeping a secret from him, one that threatens to upend his entire world. Once he learns it, he is forced to chart a new course, to reconsider the relationships he holds most dear—and to make peace with the mysteries at the heart of our existence.

With exquisite prose and profound insight, Elizabeth Strout captures the way grief reverberates through decades, the comfort found in deep friendships and the freedom that comes when we break free of our secrets. The Things We Never Say is a stunning new novel from one of our most acclaimed observers of the human heart.

Ideal for readers who…

• Enjoy literary fiction about ordinary lives, private loneliness and emotional turning points.
• Read Elizabeth Strout for her close attention to marriage, grief and friendship.
• Want a thoughtful hardback novel centred on secrets and late-life reckoning.
• Prefer quiet, character-led fiction with moral complexity and emotional depth.
• Are buying for readers of contemporary American literary fiction

The stunning new novel from the Booker Prize-winning, Sunday Times-bestselling author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo.

Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry home to the island of Harris to find that not much has changed except for him. In the windswept croft where he grew up, Cal resumes his old life, caught between the two poles of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, weaver, and pillar of their local Presbyterian church, and his Glaswegian grandmother Ella, who has kept a faltering peace with her son-in-law for decades.

While Cal wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, John is dismayed by his son's long hair and how he seems unwilling to be Saved. As the seasons pass, everything is poised to change as the threads holding together the fragile community become increasingly entangled.

John of John is the heartbreaking story of a young man's return home and how the bonds of family life are torn by the weight of expectation. It confirms Douglas Stuart as one of the great British writers at work today.

Ideal for readers who:

• Follow Douglas Stuart for tender, exact writing about class, family and longing.
• Like literary fiction rooted in place, memory and the pull of home.
• Want a character study shaped by art, faith, masculinity and island life.
• Appreciate slow-burn emotional tension between generations who cannot quite understand each other.

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2026 WINNER OF THE WATERSTONES DEBUT FICTION PRIZE 2026 AN OBSERVER BEST DEBUT NOVELIST 2026 BOOKSELLERS ARE SAYING: "A unique debut executed with richness and perfection" Jack at Waterstones Victoria "Beautiful, artistic, philosophical, curious and soothing" Helen at Waterstones Leeds "A story of inspiration, love and finding yourself again" Oleksandra at Waterstones Bishop's Stortford She is a curator, who spends her time dressing the rooms of historic buildings to bring them to life. But in the lush private quarters of a medieval palace, she finds herself so transfixed by the reign of an almost-forgotten King that the edges of her life begin to blur. He is a reluctant ruler with no hunger for power, rushed to the throne after the untimely deaths of his older brothers. But it isn't long before whispers begin to fly around the court. And with the growing belief that the King is not fit for the throne comes the idea that another might rule in his stead. May We Feed the King dances between the lives of a historical subject who risks the future of his kingdom and a woman who turns to the past to hide from her present. Laced with desire and longing, it is a playful, stirring meditation on history and storytelling: on what makes a King 'Great', and a life meaningful.

* LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2026 * A TIMES BESTSELLER * 'A visionary and brilliant investigation of anxious times' CHINA MIÉVILLE 'Elucidates humanity's disintegrating existence with strange clarity' GUARDIAN 'Speaks with uncanny indirectness to our deepest fears about collective memory and big tech' TELEGRAPH 'Memorable, haunting ... a world that's all the more uncanny on account of its proximity to our own' IRISH TIMES 'Everything to do with the tenor of how we live now. It will get deep into your bones' CHRIS POWER Phillip Tennent makes his living at the tideline, collecting artefacts that wash up from the Channel. It's been years since the crisis changed everything, but its exact nature remains obscure. Government barely functions, the seas are full of new creatures, Europe has been mislaid. It feels like the end. Now Phillip has fished out of the water an object he can't keep. A creature that keeps changing. An artefact he must take inland, before it destroys everything he thinks he knows. The End of Everything is a slyly satirical and unsettling post-apocalyptic adventure into the limits of human understanding from the peerless master of contemporary fiction. 'A work of genius' NEW SCIENTIST 'At once surreal, seductive, shrewdly funny and wholly terrifying' JULIA ARMFIELD 'This is powerful stuff ... Thrilling and disturbing' MARK HADDON 'I loved this book so much' SARAH JESSICA PARKER

'This masterpiece is the novel of the decade, if not the century' New York Times *SHORTLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2026*MARLON JAMES'S TRIUMPHANT RETURN TO THE JAMAICA OF HIS BOOKER PRIZE-WINNING A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEVEN KILLINGS'Darkness is a mood in Jamaica . . .'The Disappearers is Marlon James's triumphant return to the Jamaica of A Brief History of Seven Killings - a place of heat and chaos, and of danger for anyone outside the heteronormal.So when eight gay men meet for the first time, in Kingston in 1988, answering the casting call for an openly queer play, they are already taking a big risk. But that is nothing compared to what rains down on them when a mob descends on one of their rehearsals.By the end of this night, one man is dead, all are injured, and two subsequently disappear. As the survivors heal, each man finds he must confront the bigotry and homophobia that the attack laid bare. Some try to forget; some embrace their rage; and some simply vanish - but all are forever scarred.As one of the victims puts it, 'there's a difference between when something ends and when something stops'. And this story won't stop until both the disappearers and the perpetrators have been tracked, along trails both hot and cold, and an ending reached.Epic and intimate, violent and forgiving, The Disappearers is a tour de force which only Marlon James could have written - both an unflinching portrait of the hatred and shame faced by gay men in a society which refuses to accept them, and a deeply human story of acceptance and insight.'A triumph . . . Mighty, grand and peripatetic' Guardian'A writer of complexity, depth and uncompromising vision . . . An exceptional and important novel' Financial Times'An epic, virtuosic, propulsive performance, alternately hilarious and viscerally horrifying' Daily Mail

In Luke Kennard's audacious new novel, a penniless and out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr Blend's students react to someone zipped into on oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of autumn term lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon has unexpected consequences. A professor of post-humanism develops research questions of her own, in particular can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag? Meanwhile, the actor's childhood friend and flatmate forms a vision for monetising this new situation . . . A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity and an off-kilter love story, Black Bag is a firework of a novel: blazingly funny and profoundly humane.