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Find Out More about The Booker Prize 2022 Shortlist - Extracts and Reading Guides

This year’s Booker Prize shortlist has six fantastic books, ‘set in different places at different times [and] are all about events that in some measure happen everywhere, and concern us all’. Keep reading to find out more about each of the selected titles, as well as links to read extracts, download reading group guides and read interviews from each of the authors.

Glory, by NoViolet Bulawayo

This energetic and exhilarating joyride from NoViolet Bulawayo is the story of an uprising, told by a vivid chorus of animal voices that help us see our human world more clearly.

A long time ago, in a bountiful land not so far away, the animals lived quite happily. Then the colonisers arrived. After nearly a hundred years, a bloody War of Liberation brought new hope for the animals – along with a new leader: a charismatic horse who commanded the sun and ruled and ruled – and kept on ruling…

Glory tells the story of a country trapped in a cycle as old as time. And yet, as it unveils the myriad tricks required to uphold the illusion of absolute power, it reminds us that the glory of tyranny only lasts as long as its victims are willing to let it.

Read an Extract | Reading Group Guide | Interview with NoViolet Bulawayo



The Trees, by Percival Everett

A violent history refuses to be buried in Percival Everett’s striking novel, which combines an unnerving murder mystery with a powerful condemnation of racism and police violence.

Something strange is afoot in Money, Mississippi. A series of brutal murders are eerily linked by the presence at each crime scene of a second dead body: that of a man who resembles Emmett Till, a young black boy lynched in the same town 65 years before.
The investigating detectives soon discover that uncannily similar murders are taking place all over the country. As the bodies pile up, the detectives seek answers from a local root doctor, who has been documenting every lynching in the country for years…

Read an Extract | Reading Group Guide | Interview with Percival Everett





Treacle Walker, by Alan Garner

This latest fiction from a remarkable and enduring talent brilliantly illuminates an introspective young mind trying to make sense of the world around him.

Joe Coppock squints at the world with his lazy eye. He reads his comics, collects birds’ eggs and treasures his marbles, particularly his prized dobbers. When Treacle Walker appears off the moor one day – a wanderer, a healer – an unlikely friendship is forged and the young boy is introduced to a world he could never have imagined.

In this playful, moving and evocative fable, set once again in his beloved Cheshire, the masterly Alan Garner delivers both a stunning fusion of myth and folklore and a profound exploration of the fluidity of time.

Read an Extract | Reading Group Guide | Interview with Alan Garner




The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida, by Shehan Karunatilaka

Shehan Karunatilaka’s rip-roaring epic is a searing, mordantly funny satire set amid the murderous mayhem of a Sri Lanka beset by civil war.

Colombo, 1990. Maali Almeida, war photographer, gambler and closet queen, has woken up dead in what seems like a celestial visa office. His dismembered body is sinking in the Beira Lake and he has no idea who killed him. At a time when scores are settled by death squads, suicide bombers and hired goons, the list of suspects is depressingly long.

But even in the afterlife, time is running out for Maali. He has seven moons to try and contact the man and woman he loves most and lead them to a hidden cache of photos that will rock Sri Lanka.

Read an Extract | Reading Group Guide | Interview with Shehan Karunatilaka


Small Things Like These, by Claire Keegan

Claire Keegan’s tender tale of hope and quiet heroism is both a celebration of compassion and a stern rebuke of the sins committed in the name of religion.

It is 1985, in an Irish town. During the weeks leading up to Christmas, Bill Furlong, a coal and
timber merchant, faces his busiest season. As he does the rounds, he feels the past rising up to
meet him – and encounters the complicit silences of a small community controlled by the Church.

Read an Extract | Reading Group Guide | Interview with Claire Keegan








Oh William! by Elizabeth Strout

Bestselling author Elizabeth Strout returns to her beloved heroine Lucy Barton in a luminous novel about love, loss, and the family secrets that can erupt and bewilder us at any time.

Lucy Barton is a successful writer living in New York, navigating the second half of her life as a recent widow and parent to two adult daughters. A surprise encounter leads her to reconnect with William, her first husband – and longtime, on-again/off-again friend and confidante.

Recalling their college years, the birth of their daughters, the painful dissolution of their marriage, and the lives they built with other people, Strout weaves a portrait, stunning in its subtlety, of a tender, complex, decades-long partnership.

Read an Extract | Reading Group Guide | Interview with Elizabeth Strout



Get involved

Looking to promote The Booker Prize shortlist in your library? We have a free POS and digital pack that you can order from our shop here.

This year, The Booker Prize launched an exciting opportunity for six book clubs to help rate and review the Booker Prize 2022 shortlist, and to have the chance to attend this year’s Booker Prize winner ceremony in London, as well as a host of other prizes. Find out more about the groups taking part.

Have you read any of the shortlisted books? Share your thoughts with us on Twitter and Instagram, tagging @readingagency, @TheBookerPrizes and #BookerPrize2022.

For more information, visit the Booker Prize website.

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