Booker Prize-Nominated Mystery Novels

Novelists often describe harnessing the power of mystery: it can act as an ‘engine’ that drives the book forward. Stuart Turton, the author of The Seven Deaths of Evelyn Hardcastle, once told me that you can “stick a mystery into anything”—romance, science fiction, historical fiction, whatever you like—and “as long as you have somebody investigating, trying to work out what happened” it can serve as “the string on which you thread any number of pearls.”

These five books, all of which either won or were shortlisted for the Booker Prize, demonstrate how a mystery might serve the basis of an artistically ambitious book—perfect for readers who like their literary fiction to move with purpose and plot.

The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka

Set in during the Sri Lankan Civil War, The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida—which won the Booker Prize in 2022—follows a war photographer as he pieces back together the story of his life and death. As Neil MacGregor, the art historian and chair of the 2022 judging panel, told me: “It’s a fantasy of a dead figure coming back, revisiting and understanding what happened, and also watching what the significance of their own life was. So at one level, it’s an enormous subject, almost a theological issue—what did this person do with their life? what does it add up to?—but it’s done with enormous humour.”

There are moments, MacGregor explained, “of real horror”, when the brutality of the conflict are laid bare. But also “wild humour”. “It’s an attempt to draw up a balance sheet to write an account of a life, but in this wonderfully fantastical, hilarious, spine-chilling way.”

The Trees by Percival Everett

That same year, Percival Everett was shortlisted for The Trees, a buddy-cop pageturner that opens in the aftermath of a series of awful murders in Money, Mississippi. “Part police procedural, part black comedy, the novel is both irreverently silly and deadly serious,” declared Houman Barekat in Literary Review. “The killings appear to be delayed revenge for historical wrongs.” Money, MI, “is MAGA country, a town of gun-loving hillbillies” where the two black FBI detectives brought in to investigate the killings face prejudice at every turn. And, overall, the novel’s “brisk narration and unusual register – an arrestingly perverse blend of playfulness and earnest moral purpose – make for a refreshing antidote to the po-faced didacticism that lets down so many contemporary novels of the politically conscientious sort.”

After a brief diversion into a possible supernatural explanation, the solution transpires to be highly off-this-world. But don’t let me spoil it for you. It was one of my best books of 2022.

The Luminaries by Eleanor Catton

Eleanor Catton won the Booker Prize back in 2013 with this vast historical novel set in 1860s New Zealand, in which a gold prospector seeking his fortune stumbles into a web of murder and deceit in a frontier town. The novel itself is structured around the astrological calendar—each plot point reflecting some movement in the real-life sky during the period in which the story unfolds.

The Luminaries features fortune tellers, prostitutes, merchants, magnates and a Maori gemstone hunter, and it is, as New York Times reviewer Bill Roorbach declared, “a lot of fun, like doing a Charlotte Brontë-themed crossword puzzle while playing chess and Dance Dance Revolution on a Bongo Board.” If that sounds like a lot, that’s because it is. “Some readers will delight in the challenge, others may despair.” This is not a book that’s easily picked up and put down again, in other words—but a project, perhaps to be read over a long journey or a period of gardening leave.

The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time by Mark Haddon

In The Curious Incident, a fifteen-year-old boy who struggles with social cues but excels at mathematics decides to turn his attention to solving the murder of a local dog—and in doing so also stumbles upon the truth about the disappearance of his own mother, two years previously. Protagonist Christopher is usually interpreted to be autistic, and this fictional representation has drawn praise from many directions, including Professor Simon Baron-Cohen, the Cambridge researcher, who recommended it to us as one of the best books on autism, describing it as “very original”: “as a work of fiction, it does a good job of engaging the reader through a character who is clearly different.”

Haddon’s high concept mystery, which is enjoyed by adults and young adults alike, is one of our most regularly-recommended books on Five Books; it was also recommended to us by bestselling children’s author Robert Muchamore as a good book for a reluctant 12-year-old reader. It was longlisted for what was then the Man Booker Prize in 2013.

The Keepers of Truth by Michael Collins

In this noirish mystery, which was shortlisted for the Booker Prize in 2000, a frustrated news reporter—trapped in a dead-end job writing about local fundraisers—finds his postindustrial town oddly reinvigorated by a high-profile murder investigation, and can’t help but insert himself into proceedings.

The Independent called it a “a complex and literary book”, that is also “fast-paced and cinematic”: a “fabulous fusion of hard-boiled mystery and American social history.” The Keepers of Truth was also shortlisted for the €100,000 Dublin Literary Award in 2002.