These past two weeks have been very eventful for the book world, awards-wise! On the 15th, the Booker Prize (formally the Man Booker Prize) released their shortlist, narrowing the 162 submitted titles down to 13 for the longlist and then down again to the six titles on the shortlist. 

Probably the two biggest talking points around the shortlist were that 1) Hilary Mantel had not made the cut -- making the final book in her Cromwell Trilogy (The Mirror & The Light) the only one out of the three not to win the award-- but also 2) just how American centric the list was. Brandon Taylor, Diane Cook, and Avni Doshi are all from the States, with Douglas Stuart moving to New York City from Glasgow after college and Maaza Mengiste now living in New York after being born in Ethiopia. It’s usually a more UK-focused bunch, but this year proves to be different. It’s also a diverse group, with four women and only two white authors. 

This could possibly be in response to the changing cultural climate as well as the backlash the Booker Prize received when they awarded the 2019 prize to both Bernardine Evaristo for Girl ,Woman, Other and Margaret Atwood for The Testaments. Despite being told they couldn’t split the award, the committee reportedly declared they couldn’t decide between the two and simply awarded the two women anyway. Although this did make Evaristo the first Black recipient and Atwood the oldest , critics pointed out that it would have been more monumental for Evaristo to win in her own right, especially considering Atwood previously won the award in 2000 for The Blind Assassin. 

As for Old Town Books’ opinion, we are shamelessly placing our bets with Brandon Taylor’s The Real Life. Not only was it our April Fiction Book Club pick, it’s also a stunning #ownvoices debut. Described as a campus novel and a coming-of-age novel, the partly autobiographical book tells of the experiences of a gay, Black doctoral student in a predominantly White, Midwestern PhD program. 

Angie, our social media coordinator and book club maven (as she always picks the best books) writes, “a story that is both tender and callous, Real Life is about blackness and queerness and science and ultimately survival, as Wallace tries to distance himself from past traumas he can’t escape. With perfect pacing and piercing dialogue, this one's my bet for the Booker 2020 prize!”

The winner of the 2020 prize will be announced November 17th, and five of the six books can be purchased through Old Town Books. Unfortunately, Avni Doshi’s novel Burnt Sugar will not be published in the States until March but we are accepting pre-orders so make sure not to leave that one out! 

As if this wasn’t all consuming enough, the National Book Award released their longlists the same week, as they have annual awards for Fiction, Nonfiction, Poetry, Translated Literature, and Young People’s Literature. 

A lot of our favorites made their respective lists, from Karla Cornejo Villavicencio’s Undocumented Americans and Isabel Wilkerson’s Caste in Nonfiction, Hurricane Season by Fernanda Melchor in Translated Literature, Cemetery Boys by Aiden Thomas for Young People’s Literature, and The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett and A Burning by Megha Majumdar for Fiction. 

Personally, I’ve been looking for an excuse to pick up Interior Chinatown by Charles Yu since it came out, and it’s addition to the Fiction Longlist was the push I needed! I’m also glad A Children’s Bible by Lydia Millet is also getting some love, as it came out right in the midst of the first wave of COVID and got kind of lost in the shuffle. It’s the perfect mix of biblical allusion, family drama, and absolute insanity that is so appropriate in our world right now. 

Finalists for each longlist will be announced October 6th and winners on November 18th. Order your titles from Old Town Books!

Blog contribution by Abby Bennsky. Photos by Shannon McCarthy and Angie Sanchez. Edited by Shannon McCarthy.