The 2024 International Booker Prize shortlist has been announced.
This year, the prestigious award for fiction translated into English, has selected titles from six different countries, including Korea, Brazil, Argentina, Germany, Sweden and The Netherlands.
Below, find the six International Booker Prize shortlisted novels to add to your 2024 reading pile.
The 2024 International Booker Prize Shortlist
Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck (translated by Michael Hofmann)
$39.25 From Booktopia
Set during a defining period of European history, Jenny Erpenbeck’s fourth novel, Kairos, follows two lovers through the ruins of their relationship in communist East Germany in the 1980s.
Exploring relationships, power, and loss, the novel is both an intimate and devastating read.
Read the blurb:
“Berlin. 11 July 1986. They meet by chance on a bus. She is a young student, he is older and married. Theirs is an intense and sudden attraction, fuelled by a shared passion for music and art, and heightened by the secrecy they must maintain. But when she strays for a single night he cannot forgive her and a dangerous crack forms between them, opening up a space for cruelty, punishment and the exertion of power.
And the world around them is changing too: as the GDR begins to crumble, so too do all the old certainties and the old loyalties, ushering in a new era whose great gains also involve profound loss.”
Not A River by Selva Almada (translated by Annie McDermott)
$34.25 from Booktopia
In Not A River, Argentinian author and feminist intellectual, Selva Alma provides us with a unique vision of rural Argentina. Following three men who are haunted by an accident that occurred three years earlier, the story explores the concepts of masculinity, guilt and desire.
Read the blurb:
“Three men go out fishing, returning to a favourite spot on the river despite their memories of a terrible accident there years earlier.
As a long, sultry day passes, they drink and cook and talk and dance, and try to overcome the ghosts of their past. But they are outsiders, and this intimate, peculiar moment also puts them at odds with the inhabitants of this watery universe, both human and otherwise. The forest presses close, and violence seems inevitable, but can another tragedy be avoided?”
Mater 2-10 by Hwang Sok-yong (translated by Sora Kim-Russell, Youngjae Josephine Bae)
$32.50 from Booktopia
In Mater 2-10, Korean novelist Hwang Sok-young weaves together a powerful multigenerational story that covers a century of Korean history.
Read the blurb:
“Centred on three generations of a family of rail workers and a laid-off factory worker staging a high-altitude sit-in, Mater 2-10 vividly depicts the lives of ordinary working Koreans, starting from the Japanese colonial era, continuing through Liberation, and right up to the twenty-first century.”
The Details by Ia Genberg (translated by Kira Josefsson)
$22.40 from Booktopia
Translated from Swedish by Kira Josefsson, Ia Genberg’s lyrical novel offers a powerful exploration of what it means it means to be human.
Read the blurb:
“A famous broadcaster writes a forgotten love letter; a friend abruptly disappears; a lover leaves something unexpected behind; a traumatised woman is consumed by her own anxiety. In the throes of a high fever, a woman lies bedridden. Suddenly, she is struck with an urge to revisit a particular novel from her past.
Inside the book is an inscription: a message from an ex-girlfriend. Pages from her past begin to flip, full of things she cannot forget and people who cannot be forgotten. Johanna, that same ex-girlfriend, now a famous TV host. Niki, the friend who disappeared all those years ago.
Alejandro, who appears like a storm in precisely the right moment. And Birgitte, whose elusive qualities shield a painful secret. Who is the real subject of a portrait, the person being painted or the one holding the brush?”
What I’d Rather Not Think About by Jente Posthuma (translated by Sarah Timmer Harvey)
$27.75 From Booktopia
Dutch author Jente Posthuma’s gently beautiful novel, What I’d Rather Not Think About poses difficult questions about loss, family and grief.
Read the blurb:
“What if one half of a pair of twins no longer wants to live? What if the other can’t live without them? This question lies at the heart of Jente Posthuma’s deceptively simple What I’d Rather Not Think About.
The narrator is a twin whose brother has recently taken his own life. She looks back on their childhood, and tells of their adult lives: how her brother tried to find happiness, but lost himself in various men and the Bhagwan movement, though never completely.”
Crooked Plow by Itamar Vieira Junior (translated by Johnny Lorenz)
$22.40 From Booktopia
Translated from Portuguese by Johnny Lorenz, Itamar Viera Junior’s novel brings light to the lives of subsistence farmers in Brazil’s poorest region.
Read the blurb:
“Deep in Brazil’s neglected Bahia hinterland, two sisters find an ancient knife beneath their grandmother’s bed and, momentarily mystified by its power, decide to taste its metal. The shuddering violence that follows marks their lives and binds them together forever.”
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