The longlist for the Booker Prize 2026 has been announced, featuring two previous winners and three debut novelists. Here is the full list of the 13 books on the Booker Prize longlist.
In This LitStack List of the Booker Prize Longlist 2026
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The Booker Prize Longlist
The longlist of 13 novels has been selected by the 2026 judging panel, chaired by celebrated classicist, writer and broadcaster Mary Beard. Beard is joined by award-winning poet, writer and educator Raymond Antrobus; musician, writer and broadcaster Jarvis Cocker; journalist, editor and critic Rebecca Liu; and Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist, poet and essayist Patricia Lockwood.
The prize has rewarded and celebrated world-class talent for over 55 years, shaping the canon of 20th and 21st century literature. This year’s selection, which was chosen from 163 submissions, celebrates the best works of long-form fiction by writers of any nationality, written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between October 1, 2025 and September 30, 2026.
The shortlist will be announced at a public event at the Southbank Centre, London on Tuesday, September 22, 2026, which will feature all five judges in conversation. The winning book will be announced on Monday, November 9, 2026 at a ceremony at Old Billingsgate in London. The winner will receive £50,000 (approx. $67,412), while the shortlisted authors will each receive £2,500 (approx. $3,370).
And the Booker Prize Longlist novels are…
The Shadow of the Object
By Chloe Aridjis
Published by Chatto & Windus
Flora is visiting home in Mexico when the family dog leaps up and bites her hand. She finds herself in hospital where she undergoes several surgeries and meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman with pneumonia, who collects pre-cinema toys and instruments. The two of them embark on a series of dream-like conversations in the hospital corridors. Wilhelmina puts on a magic lantern show for Flora, leaving her spellbound.
When things take an unexpected turn, Flora finds herself entrusted with an important mission. She returns to London, where she resumes her job polishing silver at a jewellery shop, and strikes up a strange friendship with Wilhelmina’s son, Max. As Flora dips in and out of her imagination, she is increasingly aware it’s not only the magic lantern that projects, and her perception of reality is subtly altered.
Switzy
By Emma Cline
Published by Chatto & Windus
A private plane cuts through the winter night, somewhere over Greenland. David, a retired executive, sits back in his leather seat, playing solitaire on his phone. Click. Click. Drag. Click. The notebook in his jacket pocket is filled with familiar phrases, urgent reminders to himself, but he struggles to recognize his own handwriting.
A mystery, among many mysteries. The world, once so knowable, has been rendered inscrutable.
This is what David knows: Cody, his assistant, asleep in the seat next to him, will shepherd him along the voyage. A stopover in London. Dinner with his adult daughter. A meeting in France with an old friend, estranged for decades.
His final destination is Zurich.
David glides through hotel rooms and airports and foreign cities, running out the clock on his mortal life. His grasp on the present slips away, and the past rushes in: the Sunday roasts of childhood. The stiff clothes meant only for church. A summer at a school friend’s house. The losses and missteps that punctuate a life.
As David’s arrival in Zurich looms, an exquisitely rendered portrait of an unraveling mind emerges, both darkly humorous and profoundly moving. Hypnotic and startlingly original, Switzy probes the depths of human consciousness, revealing what a man is left with when the accomplishments and compromises that have defined him, and the illusions he’s relied on, vanish.
Helen of Nowhere
By Makenna Goodman
Published by Fitzcarraldo Editions
In the middle of the countryside, a realtor is showing a disgraced professor around an idyllic house. She speaks not only about the home’s many wonderful qualities but about its previous owner, the mystifying Helen, whose presence still seems to suffuse every fixture. Through hearing stories of Helen’s chosen way of living, the man begins to see that his own story is not actually over—rather, he is being offered a chance to buy his way into the simple life, close to the land, that’s always been out of reach to him. But as evening fades into black, he will learn that the asking price may be much higher, and stranger, than anticipated.
Philosophically and formally adventurous, at once intimate and cosmic in scope, Helen of Nowhere asks: What must we give up in exchange for true happiness?
The End of Everything
By M. John Harrison
Published by Serpent’s Tail
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, an entire continent 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.
The Disappearers
By Marlon James
Published by Hamish Hamilton
In 1988, eight men in Kingston, Jamaica, begin rehearsals for a play. The men are strangers to one another and each has a different reason for being involved. But they all share one inescapable truth: All of them are gay―a “battyman” in Jamaican argot―and all of them must contend with the dangers that such a truth lays bare.
One night a mob savagely attacks them, killing one of the men. For the survivors, their recovery is as much emotional as it is physical. As their bodies heal, each man grapples with the violence, the hatred, and the rage that the attack made plain. Some try to ignore what the attack has unearthed, while others double down on retribution.
In The Disappearers, Marlon James has written a riveting and deeply human story of men forced to make compromises to survive what the society they live in demands. It is both a dramatic page-turner and an unflinching exploration of queer life in Jamaica during the 1980s and 1990s.
Black Bag
By Luke Kennard
Published by John Murray
An out-of-work actor accepts the role of a lifetime—sitting soundlessly in a lecture theater, zipped into a large leather bag—to aid a professor’s psychological experiment. What could possibly go wrong?
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 an oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of Fall 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?—and the actor’s childhood friend forms a vision for monetizing 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.
The Renovation
By Kenan Orhan
Published by Hamish Hamilton
A woman discovers that her bathroom has been remodeled into a prison cell―where she is an unlikely inmate―in this surreal novel of exile, grief, memory, and migration.
In Salerno, Italy, Dilara spends her days caring for her aging father and her hypochondriac husband. Since leaving her native Istanbul, she’s been unable to find a job―adrift, she becomes increasingly fixated on domestic improvement, specifically on the renovation of a second bathroom. When the work is completed, she enters and finds herself not in a bathroom but in a prison cell, and a Turkish one at that.
As she tries and fails to conceal the discovery from her husband, she confronts the prison’s other inhabitants―the buffoonish guards who refuse to believe her conundrum; the other women who begin filling the cells beyond hers―and the strange things that drift through it: the smell of the Bosporus, her mother’s voice, calls to prayer . . .
This slender, disquieting first novel tells a story of modern migration like no other. The Renovation is a tragic comedy of displacement, a story that remodels its own form to the dazzling inevitable end.
May We Feed the King
By Rebecca Perry
Published by Granta
A curator is absorbed in the medieval world of a reluctant monarch in this searing debut about what becomes lost over time and what devotion can reanimate.
A curator spends her days reconstructing the past—selecting and carefully arranging furniture, fabrics, and replica food to bring medieval rooms back to life. Whether it’s a feast with spilling platters or a table for two littered with small hints of intimacy, it must appear as if the people have just left the room.
After accepting a commission to work on the private quarters of a medieval palace, the curator becomes absorbed in the story of a king almost forgotten by history. As she studies the traces he left behind, the boundary between her own life and his begins to blur.
The King is an unlikely ruler: a man with little appetite for power, hurried to the throne after the sudden deaths of his brothers. At court, doubts about his judgment are whispered from chamber to chamber. Then an unthinkable possibility emerges among the gossip: maybe someone else will take the crown.
A riveting debut from an award-winning poet, May We Feed the King is a story seen through shadows and old slips of paper, heard through cracked doors and murmured breaths. It asks how history takes shape—and how the stories that survive can distort the lives they claim to preserve. Laced with desire and longing, Perry’s novel is a searing meditation on the small details and large gaps that make up a life.
The Palm House
By Gwendoline Riley
Published by Picador
Laura Miller and Edmund Putnam have been friends for a long time. Theirs is a happy meeting of minds, with long evenings spent huddled in an ancient pub by the Thames, where they share office gossip, reflect on their teenage passions, and lament the state of the world.
Recently, though, Putnam has been harder to reach: He has lost his father, and the magazine to which he has dedicated his life has been hijacked by an insufferable new editor, Simon “Shove” Halfpenny.
Laura has her own problems: Living in London, a beautiful but also indifferent city, with a prickly mother to manage and a tricky past to contemplate, she finds that day-to-day life presents its difficulties. And as Putnam starts to sink into despondency, she must try to bring him back.
A novel of enduring friendships and small mercies, The Palm House offers us Gwendoline Riley’s trademark keen observation and wit, and leaves us with a sense of possibility.
The Things We Never Say
By Elizabeth Strout
Published by Viking
Artie Dam is living a double life. He spends his days teaching history to eleventh graders, 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 neighbors, 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.
Elizabeth Strout, as we have come to expect, delivers a moving exploration of the human condition—one that brims with compassion for each and every one of her indelible characters. With exquisite prose and profound insight, The Things We Never Say takes one man’s fears and loneliness and makes them universal. And in the same breath, captures the abiding love that sustains and holds us all.
John of John
By Douglas Stuart
Published by Picador
Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry back home to the Isle of Harris in the Outer Hebrides to find that little has changed except for him. He returns to the windswept croft and the two pillars of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, tweed weaver, and lay preacher in the local Presbyterian church, and his maternal grandmother Ella, a profanity-loving Glaswegian whose steady warmth helped Cal weather the sudden departure of his mother.
Cal privately wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, while John is dismayed by his son’s long hair, strange clothes, and seeming unwillingness to be Saved. But Cal isn’t the only one in the croft house who is keeping secrets. As lambing season turns to shearing season, the threads holding together the community together become increasingly frayed, and nothing will remain as it was before.
John of John is a singular novel about duty, passion, and the transformative power of the truth. It is a magnificent literary work that cements Douglas Stuart’s reputation as one of our greatest novelists working today.
All Them Dogs
By Djamel White
Published by John Murray
A young Irish gangster is caught in a brutal dance between desire and loyalty
Tony Ward is back in Dublin. After five years in England, where he fled after murdering a rival gang member, he returns to find that his mentor is dead and his best friend has gone straight.
Keen to reestablish himself, he jumps at the chance to work for the enforcer of a local crime boss. But Flute Walsh is a far cry from the boy Tony once knew. Drawn to Flute in ways he never expected, Tony finds that the boundaries he thought he understood are breaking down in a world where nothing stays buried and where retribution is just a bullet away.
By turns savage, erotic, and unexpectedly tender, All Them Dogs is a gripping story of violence, lust, and greed that explores one man’s struggles to find balance in an unsparing world.
The Vivisectors
By Missouri Williams
Published by 4th Estate
A reclusive graduate student is forced into a friendship that destabilizes her life in this surreal, allegorical romance.
In a famed but crumbling university city overrun by nature, where power is held in a fragile balance between academics and a contingent of rogue gardeners, the reclusive narrator of The Vivisectors spends her days propping up the career of her needy and fraudulent professor boss. Then a controversy ruptures her careful routine: Adam, a contrarian student and an obsession of the boss, comes into heated conflict with a young professor, with both men claiming discrimination. The crisis subsumes the university, though the narrator is unmoved―not even the attempted suicide of her estranged mother has been enough to dispel her lack of engagement with the world. But when her boss commands her to befriend Adam, the narrator finds herself both caught up in the events threatening to tear the city apart and increasingly drawn to the alluring student at the heart of it all.
Coursing with icy suspense and told with violent precision, The Vivisectors is a new kind of love story for an age of deteriorated communication. With the unsparing style and intellectual ambition that made her award-winning debut The Doloriad a celebrated provocation, Missouri Williams holds a mirror up to humanity’s most intimate contradictions and reflects them back through a novel of profound, spiky spiritual reckoning.
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