Each year, members of the Woodbridge Book Group agree to read one of the Booker Prize Longlisted titles and report back with a review. As a group we then make our own prediction of what should be included on the subsequent Shortlist and ultimately which novel should be the winner of the prize overall.
For this year's Booker Book Group Challenge we had more people than ever before participate and there was some excitement in exploring this year's Longlist.
The thirteen titles in contention for the 2026 Booker Prize were selected by judges Mary Beard, Jarvis Cocker, Patricia Lockwood, Raymond Antrobus and Rebecca Liu. They were said to be 'surprising', 'mischievous', 'original' and 'risk-taking'. And certainly there were few novels that we had anticipated being on the list.
We had at least two readers for each of the titles, with some people sending in their reviews by email if they couldn't attend our meeting in person.
Only 'The Disappearers' by Marlon James wasn't included in our reviews due to it not being published until a couple of days before our meeting (and at 600+ pages we couldn't attempt a 'quick read' to include it in our discussion).
Very brief summaries of the comments on each title are included below, with our predicted and preferred Shortlist being almost the same, with just a couple of titles under dispute.
The six titles we thought should go through were: John of John (winner), May We Feed the KIng, Renovation, The Things We Never Say (our favourite), The Vivisectors, The Disappearers. We also thought Switzy and Helen of Nowhere could be included in the shortlist. We'll see!
