Booker Prize Shortlist Bundle £92 (RRP £103.96)

The Booker Prize is the world’s most significant award for a work of fiction written in English and published in the UK or Ireland. This years shortlist is:

• Susan Choi – Flashlight

• Kiran Desai – The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny

• Katie Kitamura – Audition

• Ben Markovits – The Rest of Our Lives

• Andrew Miller – The Land in Winter

• David Szalay – Flesh

We're selling the bundle at £92.00. Most books are hardback, apart from The Land In Winter and The Rest of Our Lives which are paperback. Due to a surge in sales some titles may go to reprint and there may be a slight delay)

The Booker Prize says:

What are the shortlisted books about?

Encapsulating a range of international experiences, the six shortlisted books transport readers from Hungary to Japan, from Venice to New York, from India to England’s West Country, and feature often rootless characters far from the places they once called home.  

Kiran Desai’s The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny is a globetrotting epic featuring a pair of young Indians whose paths cross and uncross over several years before they eventually fall in love. Flesh by David Szalay – who was born in Canada and has lived in Lebanon, Belgium, Hungary and the UK – follows the course of one man’s rags-to-riches life, as he drifts passively from a housing estate in Central Europe to the mansions of London’s super-rich. 

The Rest of Our Lives by Ben Markovits – who grew up in Texas, London and Berlin – features a midlife crisis in the form of a meandering road trip from Cape Cod to California. Susan Choi’s Flashlight, which began life as a short story in the New Yorker, features a man, having been raised in Japan by Korean parents, seeking a better life in America, and chronicles his wife and daughter’s pain in the aftermath of his mysterious disappearance.  

In Audition by Katie Kitamura, the life of a successful New York-based actress is cleaved in two by the appearance of a young man who may or may not be who he says he is. In Andrew Miller’s The Land in Winter, love turns cold for two married couples in post-War rural England. 

Through classical storytelling (The Land in Winter, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny) and jaw-dropping, head-scratching experimentation (Audition), these are books that delve deep into human behaviour and the scars that we all bear. Some books take place over the course of a few days or weeks (The Rest of Our Lives, The Land in Winter, Audition); others over several decades (Flashlight, Flesh).  

In unexpected and memorable ways, all feature characters navigating – and sometimes trapped in – familiar domestic situations. We find the power dynamic shifting between parents and their children (Audition, The Rest of Our Lives), couples whose marriages have come adrift (The Land in Winter, Flashlight), men incapable of expressing emotion or processing past trauma (Flesh, The Rest of Our Lives), families collapsing under the weight of their own history (Flashlight, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny), and individuals burdened by the roles others expect them to play (Audition, The Land in Winter, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny). Several books also explore the challenges of immigrant life (Flashlight, Flesh, The Loneliness of Sonia and Sunny), with protagonists often caught between nations, finding it hard to fit in, and struggling with loneliness or isolation.