Maps of Our Spectacular Bodies is a unique read, flitting back and forth between its protagonist Lia (a mother, wife and creative who has just received a terminal cancer diagnosis) and an unnamed second narrator who may or may not be the cancer itself. It plays with the novel form both in this sense and in its heavy borrowings from the world of poetry, with the text often deviating wildly from novelistic convention and into visual / concrete poetry modes. It’s drawn from personal experience of losing a mother to cancer, and amongst the formal experimentation is a relatively familiar and yet deeply emotive story of coming to terms with (or failing to come to terms with) death and reflecting on life - both the good and the bad.

Alias Grace is based on the true story, well known in Atwood’s Canada, of the murders of Thomas Kinnear and his housekeeper Nancy Montgomery in 1843. Atwood focuses mainly on one of the accused murderers, Grace Marks, a servant in Kinnear’s household along with James Montgomery, who was hanged for the murders while Grace was sentenced to life.  

The Bottle Factory Outing focuses on two young women who live together in a bedsit in North London, while both also working as labellers in a wine-bottling factory. The factory is owned by the Italian Mr Paganotti, who filled most of the factory’s roles with Italians from his hometown who feel indebted to him as a result. In this space, the two English women are relative outsiders, treated with a mixture of suspicion and reverence by the Italian men.  

The Stone Diaries is an epic covering the life of one woman, Daisy Goodwill Flett, over the course of almost the entire twentieth century. Beginning with her birth in 1905, during which her mother dies, it catches up with Daisy at regular(ish) intervals through the century, covering her early life raised by her aunt Clarentine, her early marriage to the alcoholic Harold Hoad, a second marriage to a much older man (previously her ward, Barker Flett), parenthood and gradual decline through to her death in Florida in her nineties.

widow and resident of the town for around ten years, decides to open a bookshop in an abandoned seafront property known as The Old House, which is damp, decaying and apparently haunted by a "rapper" (poltergeist). She faces opposition from influential (and rich) local resident Mrs Gamart, who despite having shown negligible interest in the Old House previously, declares that she wants to use the location to set up an arts centre.

A Little Life begins in a familiar enough mode, detailing the lives of four clearly exceptionally talented young men, brought together as roommates at university in New York: JB, a painter; Malcolm, an architect; Willem, an aspiring actor; and finally Jude, a mathematical genius and eventual lawyer. It’s clear from early on that much of the novel’s intrigue is going to revolve around Jude, who despite his many talents is clearly suffering - with both serious physical and mental health issues resulting from initially undisclosed past events.

As it develops, it comes to focus more directly on Jude, and all of the other characters largely come to be defined more in terms of their relationship to him. We learn relatively early on that he has suffered severe abuse as a child, the nature of which is slowly expanded upon in increasingly horrific detail. Crucially, he is unable to reveal the truth of his life to anyone - instead taking refuge in long hours of work as a lawyer and in persistent self harm. While he enjoys the love of many friends, and ultimately adoptive parents in the form of mentor Harold and his wife Julia, he is unable to overcome his trauma. Throughout we’re given hope that through a series of positive developments Jude may be able to begin to face his past and at least begin to enjoy his life, but this - ultimately - isn’t that kind of novel.

Klara and the Sun is Ishiguro’s eighth novel, released to much anticipation last year at the height of the Covid Pandemic. It’s told from the perspective of an AF (Artificial Friend), a robotic life-form created to help provide company for children in a world in which they are no longer able to (for reasons not initially stated) socialise in school-like settings. As in Never Let Me Go, many key details are withheld. We come to understand via Klara’s limited but perceptive observations that this world is different to our own in ways we don’t quite understand (beyond just the existence of sentient AI-based lifeforms, of course.)

The Promise charts the decline of the white South African Swart family, at their farm outside Pretoria, over four decades. The novel covers the funerals of four out of five of the core family, against a backdrop of a changing South Africa, from the later years of Apartheid through the optimism of the Mandela years, Zuma-era corruption and into almost the present day.

Shuggie Bain is a deeply personal story, clearly heavily influenced by Stuart’s own childhood, of a caring but “different” child, Hugh “Shuggie” Bain growing up in 1980s Glasgow with his alcoholic mother, Agnes. The book begins with the pair (and Shuggie’s two siblings Leek and Catherine) living with Agnes’ parents and Shuggie’s father “Shug” in Glasgow tenements. Shug moves the family to the isolated mining “scheme” accommodation of Pithill, before abandoning them to move in with another woman. Agnes is glamorous but unfulfilled, taking refuge in alcohol which worsens as her parents die and her daughter marries young and moves to South Africa.

The 2010s were a hugely significant decade for the Booker, largely due to the shift in rules which came into place in 2014. From that year onwards, the Prize was open to all novels published in the English language, replacing the long-held (and many might say, dated) criteria that focused on authors of British, Irish and Commonwealth heritage. This shift led to a lot of hand-wringing and fretting about the potential “domination” of the Prize by US authors, and a dilution of what the Prize stood for.

The Testaments revisits Gilead (the setting of The Handmaid’s Tale) via a number of new perspectives, each shedding new light on the dystopian world Atwood created some three and half decades previously. The first is a covert diary written to a future audience by The Handmaid’s Tale’s fearsome Aunt Lydia, describing how she became a part of the regime as well as how she comes to subtly undermine it from inside; the second a testimony from Agnes, a girl who has grown up knowing nothing other than the Gilead regime; and the third from Daisy, a teenager in Toronto who has viewed Gilead from the outside, but will have to face its realities first hand (for various spoilerish reasons.)

The Handmaid’s Tale, for anyone who’s been living under a rock and is somehow not familiar with its plot, is essentially the tale of a dystopian, totalitarian version of America, known as Gilead, seen through the eyes of one of its presumably millions of ordinary female victims - Offred - who, as one of the diminishing number of fertile women in an aggressively patriarchal society, is assigned to the role of “handmaid”, essentially a house-slave of her “commander” whose sole purpose is to bear him and his wife a child.

Girl, Woman, Other follows the lives of 12 characters, predominantly black and female, in the UK over the course of the twentieth and early twenty-first century. Each of the 12 main sections is told in the voice of those characters, whose lives cross over, in some cases intimately and in others highly tangentially, with the other characters in the book. The first chapter focuses on the build-up to the launch of its central character, Amma's new play, The Last Amazon of Dahomey, opening at the National Theatre. The final chapter takes place at the play's afterparty, at which many of the present-day characters are present or in the minds of those attending.

Milkman is told in the distinctive voice of an unnamed 18-year-old "middle sister" trying to go about her life in an unnamed city in peak-Troubles Northern Ireland. She is stalked and harrassed by a 41-year-old paramilitary officer known only as "Milkman". False rumours spread that she is in a relationship with this character, affecting her relationship with her mother, the wider community, and her "maybe-boyfriend".

Lincoln in the Bardo focuses on the death of Abraham Lincoln's son Willie. It focuses (not sequentially) on the build-up to his death (in which the Lincoln's host a party while Willie lies bed-ridden), his death itself, and the aftermath, in which the grieving president visits his son's crypt and holds his body, all apparently based in historical fact. So far, so simple? Well… the above summary does absolutely no justice to what this novel actually is, which is a joyously unusual thing that mixes historical accounts (real and invented) of those events with a wild supernatural narrative set in the "bardo", a Buddhist term for the "intermediate state" between death and resurrection.

The Sellout takes place in the fictional town of Dickens, California, an agrarian town around LA. It begins with its narrator, an African-American farmer whose father has recently been unjustly killed by police, known only as "Me", or "Bonbon" - a nickname, standing trial before the Supreme Court for crimes related to his attempt to restore slavery and segregation in Dickens. What follows is an examination of the alternately painfully real and highly surreal events that led to this seemingly absurd scenario.

A Brief History of Seven Killings is about an attempt on the life of Bob Marley in 1976. Except, of course, it’s about far more than that. It’s also far from brief at almost 700 dense pages, and covers considerably more than seven killings, typically in graphic and visceral detail. It’s actually about several decades of complex and violent Jamaican history, told through a multiplicity of voices from gang leaders to politicians, journalists and seemingly peripheral “ordinary” people. Oh, and a ghost. Because of course.

The Narrow Road to the Deep North tells the story of Dorrigo Evans, a famed war veteran and public figure in his later years, who considers his accolades to be unjustly earned. The novel reflects on major moments in his life, most centrally his role in the Australian Imperial Force during World War II and his regiment's internment as hard labourers on the notorious Burma Death Railway. In this period he is reluctantly installed as the commander of his regiment in the camp, and is forced into making numerous impossible choices that will inevitably lead to the death of his comrades. Against this is a constant thread focusing on his obsession with his brief affair with his uncle's wife, Amy, prior to the war, and his ongoing post-war infidelities to his wife and mother of his children, Ella.

The Luminaries takes us to New Zealand, during the Gold Rush years in the mid Nineteenth Century. In straightforward plot terms, it’s a mystery novel centering on the aftermath of a series of seemingly disconnected events in the town of Hokitika. Central is the death of a little-known hermit, Crosbie Wells, alongside the disappearance of a rich young prospector, Emery Staines, and the arrest of opiate-addicted prostitute Anna Wetherell.

Bring Up the Bodies is the sequel to Mantel's 2009 Booker winner, Wolf Hall. It continues to follow the life of Thomas Cromwell, blacksmith's son now risen to Master Secretary to the King's Privy Council. King Henry VIII is tiring of his second wife Anne Boleyn, who has yet to bear him a male heir, and beginning to fall in love with Jane Seymour, a former attendant to the Queen and inhabitant of Wolf Hall.