Recommendations from our site
“This bold and challenging novel confronts homophobia in 1980s Jamaica by following a group of gay men who decide to stage a play about queer life in Kingston. It’s formally wide-ranging, with sections composed of letters, reported speech, and diary entries, and the story itself contains so much heart and so much violence. There are sentences in that book that made me belly-laugh; other times a scene would be so confronting in its brutality that I had to put the book down, go into a dark room and stare into the void for twenty minutes. At 640 pages, it’s the longest book on the shortlist, and that kind of maximalist attitude seeps into everything about the book: from its language, its experimentalism, its prose, its swagger and fury.” Read more...
The Best Novels of 2026: The Booker Prize Shortlist
Rebecca Liu, Journalist
“Well, there has already been a huge amount of critical acclaim heaped upon Marlon James’s brand new novel, The Disappearers. James, who became the first Jamaican to win the Booker Prize in 2015 with A Brief History of Seven Killings, has described his new book—set in the 20th-century Jamaican gay community—as his most personal work yet: ‘not autofiction,’ but ‘the first novel where I’m drawing so much from my life.’ It has already been longlisted for the Booker and I suspect we will hear a lot more about The Disappearers during the upcoming awards season.” Read more...
Cal Flyn, Five Books Editor
