When she goes too far, however, leading to an act that proves traumatic for all, it’s almost understandable but, it must be said, the consequences do ultimately seem a little disproportionate to the crime. This book is set in rural Toronto in 1972, and the landscape and weather affect the mood of the story. Geographical range’ … 2021 Booker prize longlistees (from left clockwise: Kazuo Ishiguro, Rachel Cusk, Richard Powers, Patricia Lockwood, Sunjeev Sahota and Nadifa Mohamed. She brilliantly breathes life into Clara, Elizabeth and Liam as they experience losses, which they meet with resilience, making the most of their situations even as they struggle to understand how they've arrived at this point in their lives. The author, who has been shortlisted three times, was praised by judges for his “haunting narrative voice – a genuinely innocent, ego-less perspective on the strange behaviour of humans obsessed and wounded by power, status and fear”.

The Heathens (Little, Brown) by Ace Atkins is pure, uncut, US southern noir with a modern social media twist.

Her first novel, Crow Lake (2002), is a tense and heart-breaking drama of family love and buried resentment set in rural Ontario, which won the 2003 McKitterick Prize. F. Rigelhof of The Globe and Mail stated: "Within days you'll see people reading Crow Lake in odd places as they take quick breaks from the business of their lives.

As ever, the Nobel laureate is exploring the messy mysteries of emotion, memory and what it is to be human: the book makes a fascinating companion piece to his 2005 novel Never Let Me Go. Liam, now an accountant, in the aftermath of a failed marriage, arrives at Solace determined to stay only long enough to sort out Mrs Orchard’s estate. These interwoven stories of three people at different stages of life, and yet each struggling with their own form of loss and grief, will stay with me the way good friendships stay with you.

Galgut is joined on the longlist by fellow South African author Karen Jennings, whose novel An Island, following an old lighthouse keeper who finds the unconscious body of a refugee on his beach, is published by small independent press Holland House Books. So ordinary that it’s easy to overlook, the magic of turning words into clauses, sentences, paragraphs and entire books ought to be celebrated. In nonfiction, I was impressed by Helen Joyce’s Trans: When Ideology Meets Reality(Oneworld), a scholarly, compassionate and courageous examination of a subject that’s sparked an unhelpful civil war within the LGBTQ community. This year, I loved Transcendent Kingdom (Viking) by Yaa Gyasi, the story of a family of four who travel from Ghana to Alabama to make a new life for themselves. Babygirl' is the new type of man that everyone loves - from Barry Keoghan to Jacob Elordi (although nobody can quite agree what it means!