Scottish writer Graeme Macrae Burnet’s story of murder in a 19th-century crofting community has beaten novels by some of literature’s biggest names to make the shortlist for the Man Booker prize, a list that judges said “showed courage and a willingness to take risks”.
The six shortlisted books tackle some grim subjects – from a Swiftian satire about a black man reintroducing slavery in Los Angeles to a bleak and depressing exploration of masculinity and the state of contemporary Europe. This year’s chair of judges, the historian Amanda Foreman, admitted that they could be seen as “very difficult, challenging and upsetting”. But crucially, she said, each one was “transporting for the reader”.
Burnet’s His Bloody Project– published by Contraband, the crime fiction imprint of the tiny independent Scottish press Saraband – is one of the more surprising contenders for this year’s £50,000 prize. Although it is billed as crime fiction, judges said it was a long way from generic thrillers.
The author himself told the Guardian that he felt his book was a novel about a crime, rather than a crime novel. “I’d say it is primarily about character and setting, but that is not to dissociate myself from the crime fiction world,” Burnet said.
He said he was thrilled and surprised to be shortlisted: “There is a certain Scottish way of preparing yourself for disappointment in advance, a coping strategy born out of many years of watching our football team.”
But the news was still sinking in. “When you see Nicola Sturgeon and Ian Rankin and Val McDermid are tweeting their congratulations, you begin to feel it is quite a big deal,” he said.
The judges overlooked major writers on the longlist, including Nobel laureate JM Coetzee, Costa winner AL Kennedy and Pulitzer winner Elizabeth Strout, to choose titles that also included a debut novel from the American writer Ottessa Moshfegh, who at 35 is the youngest author on the shortlist for her psychological thriller Eileen.
Fellow American author Paul Beatty secures a place for his biting satire about a man who tries to reintroduce slavery and segregate the local high school, The Sellout. While it may upset some with its bad language and liberal use of the n-word, judge and poet David Harsent said the language was indispensable: “It is part of the music of the book. What he is doing requires those speech rhythms.”
Another of the judges, the actor Olivia Williams, called The Sellout “an eccentric mix of Swiftian satire and observational humour worthy of Richard Pryor.” She added: “I was banned from reading in bed by my husband because I was laughing so much.”
The Sellout is published by independent press Oneworld, which won the Booker last year with Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings.
British author Deborah Levy, who was shortlisted for the Booker in 2012 for Swimming Home, makes the cut for Hot Milk, an examination of female rage, sexuality and the sometimes toxic bond between mother and daughter. It was 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”.
The Canadian-born British writer David Szalay is on the list with All That Man Is, described by judge Jon Day as being “brilliantly depressing and endlessly engrossing. It is a wry, important and timely novel about masculinity and the state of contemporary Europe – a post-Brexit novel for our time.”
Some have questioned whether Szalay’s book is a novel, and is in fact a collection of nine short stories – but Day is in no doubt: “It is obviously a novel. The experience of reading it is utterly dependent on the whole.”
The shortlist is completed by Canadian Madeleine Thien’s Do Not Say We Have Nothing, in which a girl and her mother invite a young woman – who has fled China and the Tiananmen Square protests – into their home.
Foreman said the novels this year were “innovative, bold, courageous” and took great risks: “They show us that the artform is not being nostalgic, it is not being held back by some vision of what it used to be. For something like literary fiction to be alive and vigorous and healthy, it needs to be continually reinventing itself and be pushing those boundaries – and this is what we’ve seen in 2016.”
Judges baulked at suggestions that the six books were full of people it was hard to sympathise or empathise with. “This wasn’t the damaged people panel,” said Harsent.
Bookmakers William Hill straight away deemed Levy 2/1 favourite to win, with Moshfegh the 8/1 outsider.
At bookseller Foyles, web editor Frances Gertler welcomed what she called an “excitingly wide-open shortlist”, which continues the prize’s “trend towards new faces”.
Levy, said Gertler, is the “only well-known author left” in the running. “Burnet’s historical crime thriller His Bloody Project would be a popular and accessible win for a genre that is often overlooked for this prize,” she added. “Thien’s sweeping intergenerational account of China’s cultural revolution has an impressive depth and breadth, but the time might just be right for David Szalay’s thoughtful portrait of masculinity.”
Waterstones fiction buyer, Chris White said he felt that “the judges have certainly set out to surprise me this year”.
“Having left off established names such as Ian McEwan, Julian Barnes, Rose Tremain and Graham Swift from the longlist, the shortlist is now without the two titles I thought shoo-ins: The North Water and My Name Is Lucy Barton. Having said that, it is – as the longlist was – an intriguing and refreshing list which will introduce thousands of new readers to some remarkable works of fiction. If I were to pick a winner I would say it will be between Levy and Szalay but then I’m almost always wrong.”
Unlike last year’s shortlist, which included the hefty A Little Life by Hanya Yanighara and James’s ironically titled A Brief History of Seven Killings, there are no doorstoppers this year, but judges said little could be read into that. The length of a book never entered their discussions, they said, and submissions were no shorter than previous years.
The longlist of 13 titles was chosen from 155 submissions. The £50,000 prize is open to writers of any nationality writing originally in English, and published in the UK between October 2015 and September 2016. The winner will be announced on 25 October.
The 2016 Man Booker shortlist:
The Sellout by Paul Beatty (Oneworld)
Hot Milk by Deborah Levy (Hamish Hamilton)
His Bloody Project by Graeme Macrae Burnet (Contraband)
Eileen by Ottessa Moshfegh (Vintage)
All That Man Is by David Szalay (Vintage)
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