The Booker Prize Longlist 2026

by Djamel White

€16.99

For fans of Lisa McInerney, Gabriel Krauze, and Graeme Armstrong, All Them Dogs is a fizzing debut from one of Ireland's most striking new voices Things are different since Tony Ward landed back in town. The West Dublin gangland has changed. His old mentor is dead, and his best pal Kenny Boyle is on the straight and narrow. After five years keeping quiet across the way, Tony is keen to reinstate himself, and when the opportunity to work side by side with Darren 'Flute' Walsh, a top enforcer of notorious crime boss Angus Lavelle, it feels like a no brainer. Biting off more than he can chew has never bothered Tony Ward, but Flute Walsh is not the meek, quiet boy Tony remembers from school. Brooding, stoic, and unpredictably dangerous, Tony finds himself drawn to his new associate in more ways than one. With retribution from his past actions always close in the rear view, the protection offered by Flute's standing in the gang is crucial. But how safe is Tony really, when a mutual attraction starts to complicate matters? Ideal for readers who… love gritty, voice-driven crime fiction set in contemporary Ireland enjoy gangland stories where loyalty, reputation, and survival are constantly tested want morally complex characters pulled between ambition, fear, and desire like tense, slow-burn dynamics where attraction raises the stakes instead of lowering them are fans of Lisa McInerney, Gabriel Krauze, and Graeme Armstrong-style modern noir

by Elizabeth Strout

€18.99

Artie Dam is a man with a secret. He spends his days teaching history to high schoolers, expanding their young minds, correcting their casual cruelties, and lending a kind word to those who need it most. He goes to holiday parties with his wife of three decades, makes small talk with neighbours, and, on weekends, takes his sailboat out on the beautiful Massachusetts Bay. He is, by all appearances, present and alive. But inside, Artie is plagued by feelings of isolation. He looks out at a world gone mad—at himself and the people around him—and turns a question over and over in his mind: how is it that we know so little about one another, even those closest to us? And then, one day, Artie learns that life has been keeping a secret from him, one that threatens to upend his entire world. Once he learns it, he is forced to chart a new course, to reconsider the relationships he holds most dear—and to make peace with the mysteries at the heart of our existence. With exquisite prose and profound insight, Elizabeth Strout captures the way grief reverberates through decades, the comfort found in deep friendships and the freedom that comes when we break free of our secrets. The Things We Never Say is a stunning new novel from one of our most acclaimed observers of the human heart. Ideal for readers who… Enjoy literary fiction about ordinary lives, private loneliness and emotional turning points. Read Elizabeth Strout for her close attention to marriage, grief and friendship. Want a thoughtful hardback novel centred on secrets and late-life reckoning. Prefer quiet, character-led fiction with moral complexity and emotional depth. Are buying for readers of contemporary American literary fiction

by Douglas Stuart

€15.99

The stunning new novel from the Booker Prize-winning, Sunday Times-bestselling author of Shuggie Bain and Young Mungo. Out of money and with little to show for his art school education, John-Calum Macleod takes the ferry home to the island of Harris to find that not much has changed except for him. In the windswept croft where he grew up, Cal resumes his old life, caught between the two poles of his childhood: his father John, a sheep farmer, weaver, and pillar of their local Presbyterian church, and his Glaswegian grandmother Ella, who has kept a faltering peace with her son-in-law for decades. While Cal wonders if any lonely men might be found on the barren hillsides of home, John is dismayed by his son's long hair and how he seems unwilling to be Saved. As the seasons pass, everything is poised to change as the threads holding together the fragile community become increasingly entangled. John of John is the heartbreaking story of a young man's return home and how the bonds of family life are torn by the weight of expectation. It confirms Douglas Stuart as one of the great British writers at work today. Ideal for readers who: Follow Douglas Stuart for tender, exact writing about class, family and longing. Like literary fiction rooted in place, memory and the pull of home. Want a character study shaped by art, faith, masculinity and island life. Appreciate slow-burn emotional tension between generations who cannot quite understand each other.

by Makenna Goodman

€14.99

Longlisted for the Booker Prize 2026. In the middle of the countryside, a realtor is showing a disgraced professor around an idyllic house. She speaks not only about the home's many wonderful qualities but about its previous owner, the mystifying Helen, whose presence still seems to suffuse every fixture. Through hearing stories of Helen's chosen way of living, the man begins to see that his story is not actually over - rather, he is being offered a chance to buy his way into the simple life, close to the land, that's always been out of reach to him. But as evening fades into black, he will learn that the asking price may be much higher, and stranger, than anticipated. Philosophically and formally adventurous, at once intimate and cosmic in scope, Helen of Nowhere asks: What must we give up in exchange for true happiness?

by Rebecca Perry

€16.99

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2026 WINNER OF THE WATERSTONES DEBUT FICTION PRIZE 2026 AN OBSERVER BEST DEBUT NOVELIST 2026 BOOKSELLERS ARE SAYING: "A unique debut executed with richness and perfection" Jack at Waterstones Victoria "Beautiful, artistic, philosophical, curious and soothing" Helen at Waterstones Leeds "A story of inspiration, love and finding yourself again" Oleksandra at Waterstones Bishop's Stortford She is a curator, who spends her time dressing the rooms of historic buildings to bring them to life. But in the lush private quarters of a medieval palace, she finds herself so transfixed by the reign of an almost-forgotten King that the edges of her life begin to blur. He is a reluctant ruler with no hunger for power, rushed to the throne after the untimely deaths of his older brothers. But it isn't long before whispers begin to fly around the court. And with the growing belief that the King is not fit for the throne comes the idea that another might rule in his stead. May We Feed the King dances between the lives of a historical subject who risks the future of his kingdom and a woman who turns to the past to hide from her present. Laced with desire and longing, it is a playful, stirring meditation on history and storytelling: on what makes a King 'Great', and a life meaningful.

by Gwendoline Riley

€20.39

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2026 From the Women's Prize-shortlisted author of First Love, The Palm House is a sharply observed, slyly funny novel of enduring friendships and small mercies. 'This goes straight onto my list of favourite modern novels' - The Times 'One of our finest novelists of constrained fury: nobody writes better' - The Observer 'Mesmerising . . . confirms Riley as one of Britain's best' - The Telegraph 'A slim, impeccably controlled story that contains multitudes' - The Guardian Laura and Putnam have been friends for a long time. Theirs is a happy meeting of minds, with long evenings spent huddled in an ancient pub by the Thames, where they share office gossip, reflect on their teenage passions, and lament the state of the world. Recently, though, Putnam has been harder to reach: he has lost his father, and the magazine to which he has dedicated his life has been hijacked by an insufferable new editor, Simon 'call me Shove' Halfpenny. Laura has her own problems: with a prickly mother and a tricky past, and in a beautiful and indifferent city, her day-to-day life is precarious. But as Putnam starts to sink into despondency, she must try to bring him back. The Palm House offers us Gwendoline Riley's trademark keen observation and wit, and leaves us - somehow - with a curious sense of possibility. It is a slender masterpiece from one of Britain's finest prose stylists. 'I love this book' - Sarah Perry, award-winning author of The Essex Serpent 'Outstandingly brilliant' - Claire-Louise Bennett, award-winning author of Big Kiss, Bye-Bye 'Riley's prose is so electric, so alive with humour and insight and passion, that by the end you will want to stand up and cheer' - Paul Murray, author of The Bee Sting Named a Most Anticipated Book for 2026 by: Financial Times, The Times, The Observer, The Guardian, The Telegraph, The Sunday Times, New Statesman, Good Housekeeping, Country & Town House, Shortlist, The New York Times, Irish Times, Vulture, LitHub and BBC Culture.

by Kenan Orhan

€20.39

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2026 Guardian Top 10 Debut Novels of 2026The Renovation is a playful and poignant portrait of one family caught in the tides of history, grappling with grief, exile, politics and the painful absurdity of love Dilara is renovating her apartment. She wants a brand-new waterfall shower with massage jets; she wants a marble bench and a double vanity unit. But when the renovation is done, she discovers a problem. Where the bathroom should be, the workmen have instead built a Turkish prison cell. At first she is outraged. Is this a prank? A mistake? A veiled threat? Dilara's family are exiles - they left Turkey many years ago and have never been back. The last thing she wants is a piece of her homeland appearing uninvited in her new home. But as the weeks pass, her indignation gives way to curiosity. Beyond the cell door, she glimpses Turkish prison guards going about their work. Through the cell walls, she hears Turkish prisoners pacing, rustling, talking in their sleep. And in the strange, impossible air of the cell itself, she smells the sesame scent of freshly baked simit bread, she tastes the fine dust of the Anatolian steppe on her tongue. Dilara has no shortage of responsibilities, worries, real problems. She has a dying father, a highly neurotic husband, a dwindling savings account and no job. And yet she finds herself drawn back again and again to the mysterious prison cell, and through it to a city that once belonged to her - to the salt wind off the Marmara, the sky full of gulls and domes and minarets - back to Istanbul. 'A highly inventive debut novel about exile, fear and the ways political trauma follows people across borders' The Times

by M. John Harrison

€18.99

* LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2026 * A TIMES BESTSELLER * 'A visionary and brilliant investigation of anxious times' CHINA MIÉVILLE 'Elucidates humanity's disintegrating existence with strange clarity' GUARDIAN 'Speaks with uncanny indirectness to our deepest fears about collective memory and big tech' TELEGRAPH 'Memorable, haunting ... a world that's all the more uncanny on account of its proximity to our own' IRISH TIMES 'Everything to do with the tenor of how we live now. It will get deep into your bones' CHRIS POWER Phillip Tennent makes his living at the tideline, collecting artefacts that wash up from the Channel. It's been years since the crisis changed everything, but its exact nature remains obscure. Government barely functions, the seas are full of new creatures, Europe has been mislaid. It feels like the end. Now Phillip has fished out of the water an object he can't keep. A creature that keeps changing. An artefact he must take inland, before it destroys everything he thinks he knows. The End of Everything is a slyly satirical and unsettling post-apocalyptic adventure into the limits of human understanding from the peerless master of contemporary fiction. 'A work of genius' NEW SCIENTIST 'At once surreal, seductive, shrewdly funny and wholly terrifying' JULIA ARMFIELD 'This is powerful stuff ... Thrilling and disturbing' MARK HADDON 'I loved this book so much' SARAH JESSICA PARKER

by Marlon James

€18.99

*LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2026* MARLON JAMES'S TRIUMPHANT RETURN TO THE BOOKER PRIZE-WINNING A BRIEF HISTORY OF SEVEN KILLINGS 'Darkness is a mood in Jamaica . . .' The Disappearers is Marlon James's triumphant return to the Jamaica of A Brief History of Seven Killings - a place of heat and chaos, and of danger for anyone outside the heteronormal. So when eight gay men meet for the first time, in Kingston in 1988, answering the casting call for an openly queer play, they are already taking a big risk. But that is nothing compared to what rains down on them when a mob descends on one of their rehearsals. By the end of this night, one man is dead, all are injured, and two subsequently disappear. As the survivors heal, each man finds he must confront the bigotry and homophobia that the attack laid bare. Some try to forget; some embrace their rage; and some simply vanish - but all are forever scarred. As one of the victims puts it, 'there's a difference between when something ends and when something stops'. And this story won't stop until both the disappearers and the perpetrators have been tracked, along trails both hot and cold, and an ending reached. Epic and intimate, violent and forgiving, The Disappearers is a tour de force which only Marlon James could have written - both an unflinching portrait of the hatred and shame faced by gay men in a society which refuses to accept them, and a deeply human story of acceptance and insight.

by Missouri Williams

€16.99

LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2026'A novel to marvel at' SOPHIE MACKINTOSH'Astonishing' MICHAEL MAGEE'Like Karl Ove Knausgaard at the end of the world' SUNDAY TIMESThe acclaimed author of The Doloriad returns with a darkly beautiful novel following a reclusive graduate in a campus love story like no other.In a famed but crumbling university city overrun by vegetation, where power is held in a fragile balance between the academics and a contingent of rogue gardeners, Agathe spends her days listlessly propping up the career of her fraudulent professor boss. One day, a campus scandal erupts: Adam, a contrarian and the pet student of her boss, comes into heated conflict with a rising young professor, with both men claiming discrimination.As the crisis consumes the university, Agathe's boss instructs her to gather information by befriending Adam. Agathe soon finds herself both caught up in the events tearing the city apart and increasingly drawn towards the alluring student at the heart of it all. But can anyone be taken at their word in a struggle over the truth?Coursing with icy suspense and rendered with violent precision, The Vivisectors is a new kind of love story for a broken era and a novel of blazing spiritual reckoning.One of the most talked about books of 2026, as seen in the Sunday Times, Guardian, Times, Observer, BBC, New York Times, New Yorker and many more.'Genuinely experimental, relentlessly and rollickingly told' BOOKER PRIZE JUDGES 2026'Left me awestruck by its terrifying beauty' HANNAH MURRAY, author of The Make-Believe'While there are echoes of Ottessa Moshfegh, Williams has a vision and energy all her own' GUARDIAN'Part love story, part ecological fable … a bleakly funny study of ideological certainty' THE TIMES'Williams writes with a gothic angularity that puts her in a category of one. She swims in deep waters and surfaces now as a major writer for our age' PAUL LYNCH, author of Prophet Song'The anti-feel good hit of the year' FERNANDO A. FLORES, author of Brother Brontë'Wicked and beguiling' AMY TWIGG, author of Spoilt Creatures

by Luke Kennard

€18.99

In Luke Kennard's audacious new novel, a penniless and out-of-work actor picks up a job working for Dr Blend, a university professor who is conducting a psychological experiment. How will Dr Blend's students react to someone zipped into on oversized bag, sitting at the back of the lecture hall over a series of autumn term lectures? The role, eagerly accepted, soon has unexpected consequences. A professor of post-humanism develops research questions of her own, in particular can you love someone secreted away inside a black bag? Meanwhile, the actor's childhood friend and flatmate forms a vision for monetising this new situation . . . A warped campus novel, an investigation into the crisis of masculinity and an off-kilter love story, Black Bag is a firework of a novel: blazingly funny and profoundly humane.

by Chloe Aridjis

€18.99

***LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2026***'We were charmed by the novel's meditation on friendship and grief, and its suggestion that the most meaningful truths can be found in the shadows.' - Booker Prize Judges 2026 'One of our boldest writers' Deborah Levy A magnificent work of shadow-play and a meditation on desire, metamorphosis and mortality. Flora is visiting home in Mexico when the family dog leaps up and bites her hand. She winds up in hospital where she undergoes several surgeries under anaesthesia and meets Wilhelmina, an elderly German woman with pneumonia, who collects pre-cinema toys and instruments. The two of them embark on a series of dream-like conversations in the hospital corridors. Wilhelmina puts on a magic lantern show for Flora, leaving her spellbound. When things take an unexpected turn, Flora finds herself entrusted with an important mission. She returns to London, where she resumes her job polishing silver at a jewellery shop, and strikes up a strange friendship with Wilhelmina's son, Max. As Flora dips in and out of her imagination, she is increasingly aware it's not only the magic lantern that projects, and her perception of reality is subtly altered. 'One of the most brilliant novelists working in English today' Garth Greenwell 'The politics of her prose is existential rather than anecdotal, as it was with Kafka's' Zadie Smith 'A subtle and courageous writer' Ali Smith 'Chloe Aridjis is crafting a poetics of the strange' TLS

by Emma Cline

€17.99

***LONGLISTED FOR THE BOOKER PRIZE 2026***'Immersive, elegiac, and very real' BOOKER PRIZE 2026 JUDGES 'Brilliant, exceptional... it broke my heart. A miracle of a novel' SAMANTHA HARVEY 'Sublime... completely gripping... a wonder' MARK HADDON 'Her best book yet. Completely extraordinary' DAISY JOHNSON 'Poignant but unsentimental, it is her best novel yet' JEM CALDER *A MOST ANTICIPATED BOOK 2026: BBC, Publishers Weekly, Lit Hub, Bookstr, Glossary, Paper Trails* A mesmerising portrait of an ageing man's last pilgrimage, from the bestselling author of The Girls and The Guest A private plane cuts through the winter night, somewhere over Greenland. David, a retired executive, sits back in his leather seat, playing solitaire on his phone. Click. Click. Drag. Click. In his pocket is a notebook filled with urgent reminders - but he can no longer read his own handwriting. He's travelling with his assistant. There will be a stopover in London, dinner with his adult daughter, a meeting in France with an old friend. His final destination: a clinic in Zurich. As David glides through hotel rooms, airports and foreign cities, his grasp on the present slips away and the past rushes in. With David's arrival in Zurich looming, an exquisitely rendered portrait of an unravelling mind emerges. Hypnotic and moving, Switzy probes the depths of human consciousness, revealing what a man is left with when the accomplishments and compromises that have defined him, and the illusions he's relied on, vanish.