The International Booker Prize 2026

A bittersweet story of love between two women, nested in an artful exploration of language, history, and power. May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She's been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda....

A bittersweet story of love between two women, nested in an artful exploration of language, history, and power. May 1938. The young novelist Aoyama Chizuko has sailed from her home in Nagasaki, Japan, and arrived in Taiwan. She's been invited there by the Japanese government ruling the island, though she has no interest in their official banquets or imperialist agenda....

A powerful and essential tale of female freedom This internationally acclaimed masterpiece by one of Iran's most important and influential writers traces the interwoven destinies of five women - including a wealthy middle-aged housewife, a sex worker and a schoolteacher - as they arrive by different paths to live together in an abundant garden on the outskirts of Tehran. Drawing...

On land where enslaved people were once tortured and murdered, the state built a penal colony in the wilderness, where inmates could be rehabilitated, but never escape. Now, decades later, and having only succeeded in trapping men, not changing them for the better, its operations are winding down. But in the prison’s waning days, a new horror is unleashed: every...

The new novel from the International Booker-shortlisted author of The Adventures of China Iron—a sumptuous and surreal historical reimagining of one of South America's best-known trans men, Antonio de Erauso. From deep in the wilds of the New World, Antonio writes a letter to his aunt, the prioress of the same Basque convent he escaped as a young girl. Since...

An extraordinary love story and a captivating novel about the power of memory and imagination. Flanders 1922. After serving as a soldier in the Great War, Noon Merckem has lost his memory and lives in a psychiatric asylum. Countless women, responding to a newspaper ad, visit him there in the hope of finding their spouse who vanished in battle. One...

* * * LONGLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2026 * * *'You know, love is love, he says. But what about the revolution?'Intricately built and wickedly humorous, these five interconnected short stories are all about one thing: money.From an interview with a child-star-turned-thief to the mysterious death of an employee at a drug manufacturer - or the couple feigning...

Fleeing a nameless war, an unknown soldier emerges from deep within the Mediterranean scrubland, dirty and exhausted. A chance meeting forces him to rethink his journey, and the price he puts on a life. On 11 September 2001, aboard a small cruise ship on the River Havel near Berlin, a conference of scientists pays homage to the late East German...

In a small, sleepy town, a mediocre witch, in a mediocre marriage, tries to pass on her gifts to her twin daughters, who, it becomes immediately apparent, have skills far beyond her own. 'NDiaye at her most dazzling' Katie Kitamura 'This is NDiaye at her disquieting best' New York Magazine Lucie comes from a long line of witches, powers passed...

A captivating, polyphonic novel of one family's flight from and return to Iran. The Nights Are Quiet in Tehran begins in 1979. Behsad, a young communist revolutionary, fights with his friends for a new order after the Shah's expulsion. He tells of sparking hope, of clandestine political actions, and of how he finds the love of his life in the...

Outside Vallorgana, a tiny, isolated village high in the foothills of the Dolomites, the ‘Duke’ lives in the villa of his aristocratic ancestors. The last in the centuries’ old line of the Cimamontes, he spends his days on his land and absorbed in the family archive, tolerated, if gently ridiculed by the villagers who are his neighbours. When he finds...

High in the Accursed Mountains, in a village ruled by the ancient laws of the Kanun, Bekija escapes an arranged marriage by becoming a sworn virgin, renouncing her womanhood to live as a man. Her decision sets off a brutal chain of events, destroying her family and separating her from the one she loves the most. Years later, as Bekija...

Unlike anything you've read before, The Wax Child is an extraordinary tale of witchcraft from one of the most visionary writers at work today. It was a black night in the year 1620 when Christenze Krukow made the wax child, melting down beeswax and setting it in the image of a small human. For days, she carried it tucked beneath...

An artist's life, a pact with the devil, a novel about the dangerous illusions of the silver screen. G.W. Pabst, one of cinema's greatest, perhaps the greatest director of his era: when the Nazis seized power he was filming in France. To escape the horrors of the new Germany, he flees to Hollywood. But under the blinding California sun, the...