Here are the six novels on the 2026 Booker Prize shortlist

The top of the crop has been selected!

The Booker Prize, one of the world's most prestigious literary awards out of the U.K., just announced the shortlist of finalists, and there's a lot to love (and add to your TBR list).

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For over 55 years, the Booker Prize has shaped the canon of modern English literature and celebrates only works of fiction published in the U.K. and/or Ireland between October 1, 2025 and September 30, 2026. This year, its judges—classicist, writer and broadcaster Mary Beard,  award-winning poet, writer and educator Raymond Antrobus, musician, writer and broadcaster Jarvis Cocker, journalist, editor and critic  Rebecca Liu and Booker Prize-shortlisted novelist, poet and essayist Patricia Lockwood—picked 13 titles from 163 submissions.

The shortlist features dystopian fiction to contemporary realism and from campus satire to historical fiction, from authors representing England, Scotland, Jamaica and the USA. The list includes previous Booker Prize winners Marlon James and Douglas Stuart and three-time nominee Elizabeth Strout and half of the judges’ selection features writers making their inaugural appearance on a Booker Prize shortlist.

The winning author, who will receive £50,000 will be announced on Monday, November 9 in London. The shortlisted authors will each receive £2,500.

The Booker Prize 2026 Shortlist 

1. The End of Everything by M. John Harrison

What’s it about? Phillip Tennent collects artifacts that wash up from the Channel in this post-apocalyptic tale that pushes the limits of human understanding. Phillip fishes out an object he can't keep—a creature that keeps changing that he must take inland before it destroys everything he thinks he knows.

Why do the judges think you’ll love it? “The humour, which is subtle, surreal, and sly. The landscape may be bleak, the catastrophe may be immersive, yet there still were moments we found ourselves laughing aloud.”

2. The Disappearers by Marlon James

What’s it about? On the night they begin rehearsals for a play, eight gay men are attacked. One of them is killed while the others are beaten. As the victims heal, they have to face the hatred and contempt the violence opened up.

Why do the judges think you’ll love it? “Readers will love the shifting register of the dialogue and poetic phrasings often pierced through with sharp double-edged humour. Also, readers of classic literary fiction will find pleasure in the novel’s dense web of allusions while readers steeped in queer literary history will delight in characters who argue, in real time, over literary philosophy, politics, and the canon, summoning a litany of figures like Oscar Wilde, Edmund White, John Rechy, W.H. Auden, as well as grunge and rock musicians, not as decoration but as live ammunition in the characters’ own arguments about how to live and survive in a hellish homophobic world, seemingly bent on their destruction.    

3. Black Bag by Luke Kennard

What’s it about? A down-on-his-luck actor starts working for a university professor conducting a psychological experiment: how will his students react if someone zipped up inside a black bag sits in on his lectures? Can you love someone locked inside a black bag? In the end, only Black Bag will be able to say what it all means…

Why do the judges think you’ll love it? “The whole scenario is based on an actual 1960s experiment— designed to discover whether other students would eventually adjust to, even befriend, a man in a black bag sharing their classes. But the most memorable thing about the novel is the way it combines that absurd experiment with a moving story about human frailty, passion, confusion and identity.”

4. May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry

What’s it about? Told across two timelines, we follow a reluctant king, crowned after the deaths of his brothers, and a modern-day curator who is prepping some of his rooms (and tables at which he dined) for public display. As she studies the traces he left behind, the boundary between her own life and his begins to blur.

Why do the judges think you’ll love it? “It’s a book that holds so much within itself, but with an admirably light touch. Questions about the nature of power and the retelling of history are threaded with a magnetic story about the reluctant king. The curator wants to stage historic scenes that feel full of life, still imbued with the presence of these historical figures; Perry’s tale of the medieval court likewise brims with that brilliant sense of life. The characters are so richly realised, filled with recognisable insecurities and desires, that you find yourself getting swept up in the drama and emotions of the court, feeling deeply for the characters, and wondering, at the very end: what really was the truth—and can we ever know?”

5. The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout

What’s it about? On the outside, 11th grade teacher Artie Dam lives a pretty fulfilled life, but he’s plagued with feelings of isolation. One day, an accident that unveils a secret upends everything he thought he knew about his life and marriage. He’s forced to chart a new course amid his unraveling.

Why do the judges think you’ll love it? “It’s a short, simply written book, but that simplicity is an amazing achievement. It handles a complicated and divisive subject while remaining accessible, without being linguistically complicated. Through the story of a schoolteacher—an ordinary man living an ordinary life—it paints a picture of what’s happening in America and how that affects the community. Yet, for all its heavy subject matter, it is also entertaining. And that accessibility matters: anybody could read it, and everybody should.”

6. John of John by Douglas Stuart

What’s it about? Twenty-two-year-old John-Calum Macleod returns to his childhood home on the Scottish island, the Isle of Harris, to live with his sheep-farmer-preacher father, John, and his “ailing” grandmother Ella, a profanity-loving Glaswegian. Their worlds clash and their similarities are hidden. Both men are keeping secrets about their identities from one another.

Why do the judges think you’ll love it?:  “Douglas Stuart writes with such beautiful and sustained attention to detail: we come to appreciate the significance of the colour of a swollen foot, the winding ribbon shape of a main road, the scent of Imperial Leather radiating off a lover’s skin. The dynamics between the islanders feel immediately recognisable to anyone who has grown up in similarly cloistered environments (say one feminine-sounding thing as a boy and it’s over for you!) And while the novel does illuminate the many ways in which life can be disappointing, dishonest and brutal, it is also threaded with a sense of hope; the suggestion that things may still be capable of change, and that what was always thus does not have to be what will be.”

You can reach more about each book here.