Booker Prize Shortlist Bundle £79 (RRP £92)

The Booker Prize is the world’s most significant award for the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the UK or Ireland. For the first time in the Booker Prize’s 55-year history, the shortlist includes five women – and just one man.

Books are hardback, apart from Held & Orbital which are paperback.

The Booker Prize says:

When it comes to setting, the six novels on this year’s shortlist are spread far and wide, from 220 miles above the earth to a cave network beneath the French countryside, from the battlefields of the First World War to a spiritual retreat in the Australian Outback, from America’s Deep South in the 19^th century to a remote Dutch house in the early 1960s. 

The books explore big and timely issues: the ways in which we hide our real selves from those around us, and the contested nature of truth; the way traumatic histories – personal and collective – shape and restrict us, and follow us however far we go.

Is there a single theme that unites all six books? In their own unique ways, they all explore the gravitational forces exerted on us by the place we call home. Many of the protagonists have been uprooted: they may be in exile (Stone Yard Devotional), in hiding (James) or on a mission (Creation Lake, Orbital) – and most are looking, not forward, but back to where they’ve come from. Those who do manage to ground themselves at home may feel they are on fragile territory, their sense of security under threat from outsiders (The Safekeep) or old wounds (Held). This may be a shortlist about our essential human need to belong – in a world that makes so many people feel lost and unwelcome.

(This can not be used with any other website discount offer)