Who is popular today?

Reworked classics, multi-perspective novels and the ruminations of an Ohio housewife… who will win the Booker prize this year?
It’s perhaps testimony to the golden moment that the novel in English is currently enjoying that the cull from Booker longlist to shortlist has felt so painful over the past few years. Three of my favourite books of 2019 missed the cut – Max Porter’s Lanny, Deborah Levy’s The Man Who Saw Everything and John Lanchester’s The Wall – but once I’d stopped my indignant spluttering, I recognised that it was still a shortlist worth celebrating. And, perhaps, also worth putting a tenner on, given that the prize is notoriously just “posh bingo”. I got last year badly wrong (my money was on Everything Under by Daisy Johnson), but I have a half-decent record otherwise, with bets on Marlon James, Richard Flanagan and George Saunders covering at least the cost of a new dinner jacket to wear to this year’s ceremony at London’s Guildhall.
Clear favourite with the bookies is Margaret Atwood’s The Testaments, at 2/1. Atwood makes a stunning return to the world of her classic The Handmaid’s Tale, which was shortlisted for the 1986 prize but lost out to Kingsley Amis’s The Old Devils. You’d have to have been living in Gilead to have missed the fanfare surrounding The Testaments, a subtle, moral novel that is both a clear response to the urgency of the political moment and an attempt to reach beyond the headlines. Here we’re presented with the second generation of handmaids, with the narrative split among three women, each of whom provides a different perspective on the patriarchal totalitarianism of Gilead. Continue reading...