The 2015 Man Booker longlist – migrants, Bob Marley, but few major names

Sexual abuse and the lives of migrant workers are among the topics tackled on this year’s daring list

Hanya Yanagihara: A Little Life has left readers ‘transfixed’. Photograph: Sophia Evans for the Observer

Alex Clark

Sunday 2 August 2015 - The Guardian

Right: first things first. No Franzen, no Rushdie, no Atwood. No wolves (Sarah Hall) or aliens (Michel Faber) or, for that matter, dragons (Kazuo Ishiguro). Now let’s move on: absentees preoccupy those who watch prize lists far more than those who make them, who need to silence the noise of industry hype, review coverage or previous renown. This year, the second in which the Man Booker prize has been open to American writers, the judges have certainly done that; after all, Harper Lee wasn’t on Wednesday’s longlist and a few weeks ago you’d have been forgiven for thinking no other book had ever been published (except for Grey, a few weeks before that).

Hanya Yanagihara’s second novel A Little Life has established her as a major voice in US fiction. Here she talks about ‘fevered’ writing, drawing cadavers and waiting in motel rooms…

This is a diverse and daring list, rich in the unknown quantities that thrill compulsive readers on the lookout for a new fix. Among its 13 novels – the “Booker dozen” – are Hanya Yanagihara’s A Little Life, a 734-page exploration of the effects of childhood sexual abuse that has, according to American reviewers and last Sunday’s Observer New Review interview, left its readers simultaneously transfixed and devastated; Sunjeev Sahota’s The Year of the Runaways, which depicts the hidden lives of migrant workers in Sheffield; Satin Island by Tom McCarthy, a dizzyingly complex mash-up of anthropology and corporate culture; and Marlon James’s A Brief History of Seven Killings, the first book by a Jamaican writer to appear on the prize’s longlist, which takes as its starting point the attempted assassination of Bob Marley.

There are more established names, too – Anne Tyler, Marilynne Robinson, Andrew O’Hagan and Anne Enright – but none of these writers could count as “safe” choices.
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