The Booker Prize rewards the finest in fiction, highlighting great books to readers and transforming authors’ careers. The shortlist has just been announced.
The New Wilderness by Diane Cook (available as an eBook)
Bea’s five year old daughter Agnes is slowly wasting away. The smog and pollution of the overdeveloped, overpopulated metropolis they call home is ravaging her lungs. Bea knows she cannot stay in the City, but there is only one alternative: The Wilderness State. Mankind has never been allowed to venture into this vast expanse of untamed land. Until now. Bea and Agnes join eighteen other volunteers who agree to take part in a radical experiment. They must slowly learn how to live in the unpredictable, often dangerous Wilderness, leaving no trace on their surroundings in their quest to survive. But as Agnes embraces this new existence, Bea realises that saving her daughter’s life might mean losing her in ways she hadn’t foreseen.
This Mournable Body by Tsitsi Dangaremgba (available as an eBook)
In this tense and psychologically charged novel, Tsitsi Dangarembga channels the hope and potential of one young girl and a fledgling nation to lead us on a journey to discover where lives go after hope has departed. Here we meet Tambudzai, living in a run-down youth hostel in downtown Harare and anxious about her prospects after leaving a stagnant job. At every turn in her attempt to make a life for herself, she is faced with a fresh humiliation, until the painful contrast between the future she imagined and her daily reality ultimately drives her to a breaking point.
Burnt Sugar by Avni Doshi
Sharp as a blade, and laced with caustic wit, “Burnt Sugar” unpicks the slippery, choking cord of memory and myth that binds two women together, making and unmaking them endlessly.
The Shadow King by Maaza Mengiste (available as an eBook)
Ethiopia. 1935. With the threat of Mussolini’s army looming, recently orphaned Hirut struggles to adapt to her new life as a maid. Her new employer, Kidane, an officer in Emperor Haile Selassie’s army, rushes to mobilise his strongest men before the Italians invade. Hirut and the other women long to do more than care for the wounded and bury the dead. When Emperor Haile Selassie goes into exile and Ethiopia quickly loses hope, it is Hirut who offers a plan to maintain morale. She helps disguise a gentle peasant as the emperor and soon becomes his guard, inspiring other women to take up arms. But how could she have predicted her own personal war, still to come, as a prisoner of one of Italy’s most vicious officers?
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart (available as an eBook)
It is 1981. Glasgow is dying and good families must grift to survive. Agnes Bain has always expected more from life. She dreams of greater things: a house with its own front door and a life bought and paid for outright (like her perfect, but false, teeth). But Agnes is abandoned by her philandering husband, and soon she and her three children find themselves trapped in a decimated mining town. As she descends deeper into drink, the children try their best to save her, yet one by one they must abandon her to save themselves. It is her son Shuggie who holds out hope the longest. Shuggie is different. Fastidious and fussy, he shares his mother’s sense of snobbish propriety. The miners’ children pick on him and adults condemn him as no’ right. But Shuggie believes that if he tries his hardest, he can be normal like the other boys and help his mother escape this hopeless place.
Real Life by Brandon Taylor (available as an eBook)
Wallace is a biochemistry grad student at a lakeside Midwestern university used to keeping a wary distance even from those closest to him. His class is the first in more than three decades to include a black student, something Wallace has not been allowed to forget. But, over the course of one weekend at the end of summer, a series of confrontations with colleagues and an unexpected shift in his relationship with a friend, Miller, force him to grapple with intimacy, desire, the trauma of the past and the question of the future.
For information on how to access eBooks and eAudio please visit the Wokingham Libraries website https://www.wokingham.gov.uk/libraries/library-services/e-books/
wokinghamboroughlibraries 