A psychological crime thriller will compete with the latest novel from the Nobel prize winner JM Coetzee for this year’s Man Booker prize, the judges have revealed as they released details of the 2016 longlist.

In total, 13 novels make the list. Six are by women and seven by men, with five American writers, six British, one Canadian and one South African.

Leading lights and fresh stars shine in Man Booker prize 2016 longlist Read more

The list includes Coetzee, who is the first person to win the Man Booker twice, and well known writers such as Deborah Levy, AL Kennedy and Elizabeth Strout.

The chair of judges, Amanda Foreman, called it a very exciting year. ”The range of books is broad and the quality extremely high. Each novel provoked intense discussion and, at times, passionate debate, challenging our expectations of what a novel is and can be,” she said.

“From the historical to the contemporary, the satirical to the polemical, the novels in this list come from both established writers and new voices. The writing is uniformly fresh, energetic and important. It is a longlist to be relished.”

Perhaps the most surprising book on the list is Graeme Macrae Burnet’s His Bloody Project, a crime thriller published last year by the tiny independent crime fiction imprint Contraband.

It was not widely reviewed although it was described enthusiastically by the critic Jake Kerridge as “a real box of tricks … a truly ingenious thriller as confusingly multilayered as an Escher staircase”.

In truth, the book is more than your average crime thriller. Foreman said: “We very strongly believe in books which transcend their genres and His Bloody Project really does that and that’s what makes and refreshes literature, so we were very excited to have that on the list.”

Glasgow-based Burnet said he would call it a novel about a crime rather than a crime novel, although he had no problem about the label.

“I’m totally thrilled and totally thrilled for the publishers,” said Burnet who named Georges Simenon as his literary hero. “You look at the other names on the list and you think ‘wow’.”

Could a crime thriller win the Man Booker prize? It was given odds of 6/1 by William Hill which made Kennedy and Coetzee joint 3/1 favourites.

The 76-year-old Coetzee, who won the prize with Life & Times of Michael K in 1983 and Disgrace in 1999, is listed for The Schooldays of Jesus, a book not due out until September, meaning very few people beyond Man Booker judges have read it.



What is known is that it is manifestly a follow-up to his 2013 novel, The Childhood of Jesus, which baffled – and delighted – many readers and was described by the Guardian as involving a Kafkaesque retelling of the Nativity story.

Foreman feels people may be equally baffled by the new novel. “This is the book which will have many, many, many people debating and arguing about what it means and that is one of the most marvellous things that a book can do – provoke intense discussion and debate,” she said.

After Coetzee, the only previously Booker-listed author is Levy, for Hot Milk.



Levy was shortlisted in 2012 for Swimming Home, which had initially failed to find a publisher for being “too literary” for the marketplace.

There was no trouble this time, with Hot Milk published by the Penguin Random House imprint Hamish Hamilton and well received by critics. Erica Wagner, in the Observer, called it “a powerful novel of the interior life” with “a transfixing gaze and a terrible sting that burns long after the final page is turned”.

Remarkably, the Scottish writer Kennedy has never made it on to a Booker longlist, but has this year been chosen for her eighth novel Serious Sweet, a London love story told over the course of 24 hours.

The independent publisher Oneworld celebrated its first Booker success last year when Marlon James won the prize with A Brief History of Seven Killings, due to be made into a TV series by HBO.

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Oneworld has a contender once more with the Californian Paul Beatty’s The Sellout, described by the Guardian as “a galvanising satire of post-racial America”. The reviewer Seth Colter Walls wrote: “The longer you stare at Beatty’s pages, the smarter you’ll get.”

There are four debut novels on the list: Hystopia by David Means, The Many by Wyl Menmuir, Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh and Work Like Any Other by Virginia Reeves.



Means, a critically acclaimed American short story writer who has been compared to John Cheever, is longlisted for a novel which imagines a history in which John F Kennedy was not assassinated, the Vietnam war drags on and returning soldiers have their traumas wiped.

Booker prize judges normally find a book which has been off most people’s radars and that certainly applies to Menmuir’s novel, published by the small independent Salt.

Menmuir, who wrote the book as part of his Masters degree at Manchester Metropolitan University, lives on the north coast of Cornwall and his novel tells the story of a man who moves to an abandoned house in an isolated Cornish fishing village. The longer he stays, the more uncomfortable and bizarre life becomes.

Menmuir said he initially ignored the call telling him of his listing because he was having coffee with his 90-year-old gran. “I’m in shock, it is something I could not have expected at all. I’ve got the ambition maybe, but the expectation zero.”

Boston-born Moshfegh is longlisted for her 1960s-set novel which tells the story of an unhappy young woman and a bitterly cold Massachusetts winter. The Guardian’s reviewer said it brought to mind Sylvia Plath’s The Bell Jar.



The fourth debut is by the Texan writer Reeves. Set in rural Alabama in the 1920s, it tells the story of a pioneering electricity engineer sent to prison for manslaughter after a young man stumbles on one of his illegal power lines.

The other UK novelists on the list are David Szalay, for a novel praised as a “kaleidoscopic portrait of masculinity, and Ian McGuire, for The North Water, set in the 1850s in the dying days of Hull’s whaling industry – a novel Ladbrokes made its 3/1 favourite to win.

Coetzee, born in Cape Town and now an Australian citizen, is the only African writer on the list and Asian-born writers are conspicuous by their absence.

The Canadian writer Madeleine Thien is longlisted for Do Not Say We Have Nothing, published by Granta, which tells the story of musicians who suffered during and after China’s Cultural Revolution.

The last US writer longlisted is Strout for My Name is Lucy Barton.

Notable absentees include Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Rose Tremain, Edna O’Brien, Thomas Keneally, Don DeLillo and Jonathan Safran Foer.

This year’s prize is the third year that American authors have been permitted to compete, a rule change that sparks debate about the relative strengths of British and American fiction.

Foreman said the key issue was that the two cultures were distinct. “What we have to avoid is homogeneity; that would be terrible,” she said. “These two cultures are alive but they are not the same. They have a different literary and historical heritage which informs them and it is really important that we don’t make literary soup out of them.”

Judges for the prize this year are Foreman, Jon Day, Abdulrazak Gurnah, David Harsent and Olivia Williams. They will read all 13 books and announce a shortlist on 13 September. The £50,000 winner will be revealed on 25 October.

