The short list is out for this year's Booker Prize, considered to be "the leading literary award in the English speaking world" which "has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for over five decades" (per their website).
How do you win? Judges are looking for best work of long-form fiction, written in English, selected from entries published in the UK and Ireland between October 1, 2022 and September 30, 2023.
What does the winner get? Bragging rights, a zillion interviews with the press, increased sales, and oh, £50,000 (around $61,300).
Markel Tumlin, our librarian for English literature, has been buying Booker Prize winning books for the library's collection for many years. Thanks, Markel! If you're curious, there's a full list of winners and short lists. Most of this year's short list titles are on order, but you can request them from another library.
Paul Murray
The Bee Sting
A patch of ice on the road, a casual favour to a charming stranger, a bee caught beneath a bridal veil – can a single moment of bad luck change the direction of a life? (On order, request from another library) Chetna Maroo
Western Lane
Chetna Maroo's tender and moving debut novel about grief, sisterhood, a teenage girl's struggle to transcend herself – and squash. (On order, request from another library) Paul Lynch
Prophet Song
A mother faces a terrible choice, in Paul Lynch’s exhilarating, propulsive and confrontational portrait of a society on the brink. (On order, request from another library) Paul Harding
Full of lyricism and power, Paul Harding's spellbinding novel celebrates the hopes, dreams and resilience of those deemed not to fit in a world brutally intolerant of difference.
Jonathan Escoffery
An exhilarating novel-in-stories that pulses with style, heart and barbed humour, while unravelling what it means to carve out an existence between cultures, homes and pay cheques.
Sarah Bernstein
Study for Obedience
In her accomplished and unsettling second novel, Sarah Bernstein explores themes of prejudice, abuse and guilt through the eyes of a singularly unreliable narrator. (On order, request from another library) 
