Booker Prize nominees seek solace in a chaotic world

WITH all the turmoil that has unfolded in the last five years – a global pandemic followed by economic upheavals and escalating political tensions – it’s fitting that the novels shortlisted for the 2024 Booker Prize are about individuals navigating increasingly unstable worlds. The nominated titles offer powerful explorations of how people grapple with inner struggles amid external chaos, capturing the complex emotional terrain of our times.

In Charlotte Wood’s Stone Yard Devotional, the unnamed protagonist abandons her city life, job and marriage to seek refuge in an abbey – even though she’s not religious and doesn’t even believe in God. She doesn’t know how to address her existential despair, only that she “had a need, an animal need, to find a place (she) had never been”.

In Yael van der Wouden’s The Safekeep, a woman finds peace by taking meticulous care of a house she does not own, a house that eventually betrays her by revealing its dark and cruel past – challenging the notion of a safe and permanent home for any one of us.