New Episode of Shelf Care, Booklist's Podcast, Featuring Book Display Expert Lila Denning

The most recent episode of Shelf Care The Podcast hosted by my Booklist editor, Susan Maguire is now live. See the details below. 

But real quick, before I lose you to the episode (which is great) a quick reminder that Shelf Care is THE ONLY podcast out there with the mission of helping you, the library worker, serve your leisure readers.

I need you to sit with that for a moment. 

I know we all listen to many book podcasts, but no other podcast, besides Shelf Care from Booklist, is focused on you the library worker and all the ways we serve our readers-- of all ages. And it is from a trusted not for profit publication. 

Why are you not subscribed? Well, don't worry about excuses, just fix that by subscribing wherever you listen to your podcasts.

Also remember you can always click here to access the backlist of Shelf Care The Podcast. Every episode for free, with one click.

On this episode of Shelf Care: The Podcast, host Susan Maguire chats with librarian Lila Denning about the ins and outs of book displays; Audio Editor Heather Booth talks audiobooks to fall asleep to (really!); and Kelly Ferreira, Senior Editor, Books for Youth, shares a few books they’ve been reading and loving lately.

Chase’s Calendar of Events

“Unshelve with help from Booklist—Body Horror” blog post

RA for All: Horror

“Unshelving When Inclusive Displays Make People Uncomfortable” blog post

Bruja’s Nest, by Brenda LaTorre

The Mars Room, by Rachel Kushner

Passively Recommending Books (Lila’s blog)

The Count of Monte Cristo, by Alexandre Dumas

Game Changers, by Rachel Reid

Heated Rivalry, by Rachel Reid

Tough Guy, by Rachel Reid

The Legend of Korra: Turf Wars, by Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino, illustrated by Irene Koh and Killian Ng

The Legend of Korra: Ruins of the Empire, by Bryan Konietzko and Michael Dante DiMartino, illustrated by Michelle Wong and Killian Ng

Scream with Me: Confronting Social Injustice through Horror (webinar)

When Evil Lingers, by Melissa Blair

Off the Reservation, by Stephen Graham Jones

Yesteryear, by Caro Claire Burke, read by Rebecca Lowman

Click here to access any episode of Shelf Care The Podcast.

Using Awards Lists As a RA Tool: National Book Award Edition

This is part of my ongoing series on using Awards Lists as a RA tool. Click here for all posts in the series in reverse chronological order. Click here for the first post which outlines the details how to use awards lists as a RA tool.

  

All thought out this past week, the National Book Foundation released their long lists for the National Book Award, one list per day, ending with Fiction yesterday. Along with my usual reminder to use these lists and their backlists especially to help patrons in a variety of ways, I want to point out the breadth of categories for this award.

Because it has categories in Fiction, Nonfiction, Translated Literature, Poetry, and Young People's literature, the National Book Award can help an extremely wide range of readers by default. 

As a resource, these longlists are extremely useful because of the work put in by the (human) staff at the National Book Foundation. Each category has an entire page that summarizes all of the nominees, even drawing connections between titles. These pages not only give us the longlist titles but also put them in context. This is work that cannot be replaced by AI and I am so grateful for it each and every year.

They also cap off each article for each category with a statement about the number of books that were considered and who the judges for that category are. Here are the direct links to those pages for 2026:

• Fiction
• Nonfiction
• Translated Literature
• Poetry
• Young People's Literature

However, it is not just the range of categories, the nominees in these long lists are also among the most accesible of titles nominated for major awards. The fiction and nonfiction titles, as usual, are solid suggestions for a general audience, they are NOT overly literary or obtuse. And as usual the translated titles are excellent options, especially as interest in translated titles grow and our resources are not keeping up. 

From top to bottom, the books listed here (click honorees at the top of the page to reveal the lists and judges) should be owned by every public library and handed out frequently to general readers.

Backlist access of nominees and winners is very easily accessible and pleasant to browse, here as well. Of course, because of the breadth of titles always considered, this backlist access is extremely helpful for displays and suggestions all year long. 

Use the links above to explore the National Book Foundations' excellent web presence and make sure you have all of these titles in your collections.

And note, this is the big first award for 2026 titles. My annual attack of the bests lists is almost here. Start getting ready now.

Conversation Starter to Display Monthly Question: What Book Destroyed Your Productivity

This is part of a monthly series of conversation starters which can be made into evergreen displays that I first proposed here (with 12 examples that could last you full a year). You can expect a new conversation starter on the first week day of a new month. Use the newest one for the next month, or access the long backlist of these ideas anytime by using this link. 

Back in June, I wrote about how to use conversation starters to create evergreen displays (see link above), and in that post I promised to give you one conversation starter a month at the start of each month. I also make it clear in that post that these displays can be small. 3-5 books that you keep rotating. You can even use this link to make it into a scavenger hunt of small displays all over the library.

I was on vacation for the beginning of this month, so this a few days late but I absolutely LOVE this question and I found it through LJ's Book Pulse with a link to this article in Parade: What book destroyed your productively?

This is a question that people will love to answer because it is slightly askew from asking about a book they love. This is a book that you get so lost in that you ignore everything else to read it. It asks readers to engage with titles that engaged directly with them. When you ask this question, your patrons will do a slight double take. They will really listen to the questions. And, as a result, you will get some awesome, unexpected, and varied answers.

For example, I had so many answers to this question once I took a moment to think about it. Here are a few:

• The Thursday Murder Club books-- all of them. I literally go on extra walks and do more chores when I have one queued up
• Seveneves by Neal Stephenson
• Dr No by Percival Everett
• I Was a Teenaged Slasher by Stephen Graham Jones
• Mazywood by Tananarive Due
• The Vanishing Half by Brit Bennett
• Coup de Grâce by Sofia Ajram (and thank goodness it was short)

I also know that asking "What book destroyed your productively?" right after Labor Day is the perfect time. Many people spent yesterday thinking about paid labor while enjoying a paid day off from it. Asking about productivity right after Labor Day means people are primed to answer this question.

This is a question that everyone who is a reader can answer quickly once they stop and think about it; much more quickly than when you ask people to share a favorite book or the last goo book they read. This is a question that has an immediate and visceral response. It is also a question that changes. I you ask someone this question today, you wil get a few titles, but then ask them 6 months later and you will have a few more.

This makes the question-- and the answers-- evergreen by default. It is also a question that is not tied to any one section of the library-- any genre, format, fiction or nonfiction, kids books, adult books, it is all game with this open ended question.

Start by asking staff this question-- at the very least. Do it through an electronic form so that the answers get filed into a spreadsheet. And then do some searching.

If you use "What book destroyed your productively?" as a search in your resources, you will 100% get books about increasing productivity, which is NOT what you want. But if you search for books people wil get lost in, like at this link, That link will allow you to get the display up immediately, while you wait for staff to reply. 

The title of this display you make is the question itself: What book destroyed your productively?

Why? Because this is interactive. Your display is a conversation. It will draw patrons toward it, their interest piqued. You are asking them a question and presenting some answers, but they will have their own and they will want to tell you!!!

Now, you can follow my more elaborate suggestion on how to ask every patron to help answer this question and add titles to your spreadsheet of options, OR you can start smaller. Put up a white board or bulletin board near the display and allow people to add titles. You can pull them as needed or just leave them there, answers to your question, a way to SHOW your community that you care about their answers. You should be adding these to the spreadsheet overtime as well.

That spreadsheet is key here because it is a way for the library to KNOW what books matter to their patrons. Circulation statistics just show us what checks out. It doesn't tell us if they were enjoyed, let alone a book so treasured the patron recommends it to everyone they know. Asking this question makes an excellent, interactive, and, quite frankly, easy display, BUT it also gives us valuable collection development data.

First, if the books people are recommending to answer this question and their circ stats are not great, this lets us know that the book should stay in our collection. It alerts us that it is a patron fav and we now know to get it on display where another reader will almost certainly give it a try (with a title of a display like that, it is sure to circ now)

Second, this conversation starter allows us to see what books matter to our readers and we can pass that information on to those who buy the books for our collections so that they can look for similar titles. As someone who bought for the fiction collection, I would have loved to have this information. I knew my key patrons and bought books I knew they would like, but this question would have reach more people. Many who never stop to talk to use will answer. You will get a much wider view of the books your readers love and crave. That data is collection development gold!

You can search out readalikes that you have, and add more. All of that will lead to small displays, ones you can title, "So this book destroyed your productivity.....Now try this." Those can be online and in small spaces. 

You are asking a question, getting responses to fill a display, gathering valuable collection development data, and then creating more displays. All by asking one question: What book destroyed your productively?

You have nothing to lose here. You and your patrons win the second you ask the question.

Back next month with anther question, but as always, use the link at the top of this post for many more questions you can use today, tomorrow, or in a few months. Just start asking your patrons questions so you can see what really sticks with them. Your displays will be easier to build, more inviting, and you will have a better sense of what other titles need to be added to your collections.

Dolly's Patron's Imagination Library at Your Library

As we all know, Dolly Parton died. She was an amazing human in so many ways. I am legitimately sad that we lost her. And she died around the corner (literally) from where my son was sitting in his Vanderbilt dorm room. Steps from where I was standing on Monday morning as I was saying goodbye after move-in (when she was behind those walls). It gave me chills. 

There is so much to say but, for this blog I want to focus on her work with books, literacy, and libraries.

Before we get there though, I know you are all getting those displays up to honor her-- in every department-- so, I wanted to remind you how to make those displays stretch past the next few days and the limited explicitly "Dolly" books.

You should pull other books about the history of country music, Eastern TN, the Smokey Mountains (yes even guide books) and the memories and biographies of other popular musicians (living and dead) and not just country. 

It is not only that people are going to want to read about Dolly and Dolly adjacent things. It is more than that. When someone this ubiquitously popular dies, people who wouldn't normally visit the library come in to see what we have about that person. They know the library is the place to go for information. Make sure you are ready to receive new (to you) patrons by having up displays that anticipate their needs. Maybe the Dolly books are out, but they will be perusing what else you have and showcasing the breadth of your offerings in a variety of Dolly adjacent displays will showcase the breadth of your holdings and how you are there to help them anytime they visit. 

I have seen this happen in real time. Someone comes in for info or a book tied to a current event and they leave with something else (as well) because they forgot how much we have to offer. And if only a small percentage of these people come back, you have added new library users and supporters to your community.

Okay obligatory RA Service statement -- done. The other thing people re going to ask about is Dolly Patron's Imagination Library. While it began as a way to mail books to kids, it has expanded by working directly through local public libraries. This part of the program is less well known, even by librarians.

Since people are extremely interested in learning more (I cannot even get the page to find a program near you to load the traffic is so heavy) and chances are very high that your library is not an official partner, you are going to need to have information ready for your staff to talk to patrons. Some may even be asking you to join. 

But don't worry, Becky is here to help you. My friend is the Director of the Linden Free Public Library. The only partner with Dolly Parton's Imagination Library in the state of NJ is the Friends of Linden Library who fully fund and administer the program with donations from the public.

The ABC7 NY affiliate came to their library yesterday to report on the program. Click here to watch the video and read the written story here. The President of the Friends does an excellent job explaining the program for a general audience. However, you may have questions of a more specific nature.

If you have questions for this library and their Friends about how they became a location for Dolly's Imagination Library, email them at friends [at] lindenpl [dot] org. Or, reach out to them via their Facebook page here. They understand the entire process and can help you reach out and join team Dolly at your library.

Becky's Evergreen Advice-- Please Judge a Book By Its Cover and Now LitHub Enters the Chat

I have posted about how we absolutely need to judge books by their cover MANY times (going back over 10 years). Here is the most recent time with links to older posts. Also, here is the link to every time I have tagged a post "covers."

Please explore those links because I have written about this over and over, from how covers help us judge the appeal off the story behind said cover, how they can hinder, how it helps us connect with patrons, and how to use covers as a conversation starter to display option.

When I first began writing about this, it was a little shocking, however, in the decade plus since, not only have more people started considering covers, some of the biggest literary news outlets have regular reporting on covers, their trends, and what it all means. 

Literary Hub is one such example. They have tags for book covers, cover trends, and history of book covers. [Quick aside, LitHub needs a librarian on staff; they have too many tags and they are not consistently applied in general. An entire meta data review and consolidation of tags needs to happen there. All of this should just be cataloged as "covers.]

The other day they had this excellent essay on the history of book cover trends entitled, "It’s Ok to Judge a Book By Its Cover (It’s Impossible Not To)" by Ed Simon, the Public Humanities Special Faculty in the English Department of Carnegie Mellon University.

Here is the pull out quote from this excellent essay: "A history of literature could be written by analyzing book cover trends."

I want to note, he also addresses the role of covers in a digital space as well. Spoiler, they are still important.

I highly suggest everyone read it and cross reference my posts on this same topic. And remember, let the covers work for you, both to help you quickly decipher the appeal of the books you are holding (publishers paid a lot for that cover to make sure readers do this) AND to remind you that face out book displays are ALWAYS the best option, even if it mean you put fewer books on display. The covers will sell the books for you and fewer titles will circulate faster face out that more titles filling a larger display spines out. 

And finally, a note about AI covers, even if they are on books that were 100% human written. I am judging your book as slop if you slap an AI cover on it. Cover artists are creatives too. They want to be paid for their original work. You want to be paid for your written word. Thus, you slap an AI cover on your book, I am judging you as someone who I cannot trust, someone who cuts corners, someone who supports AI. Your book is slop as well.

Using Awards Lists As a RA Tool: Cundill History Prize Edition

This is part of my ongoing series on using Awards Lists as a RA tool. Click here for all posts in the series in reverse chronological order. Click here for the first post which outlines the details how to use awards lists as a RA tool.  

Well, it has been a busy week, but I still have one more day of posts to give you, and this one has been in draft most of the week but it was bumped for the surprise World Fantasy Award nomination and the NYT Thrillers list.

It's the Cundill History Prize. From the announcement:

The world’s leading prize for a work of history written or translated into English, the Cundill History Prize, has announced its longlist of fifteen books for 2026, chosen from almost 400 submissions from across the world.

Following in the footsteps of recent Cundill History Prize winners, Lyndal Roper (2025) who was announced as 2026 Holberg Prize Laureate earlier this year, Pulitzer Prize winner Kathleen DuVal (2024) and Guardian journalist Tania Branigan (2023), the fifteen longlisted authors will now be in the running for the US$75,000 prize. The Cundill History Prize is awarded annually to a book that demonstrates excellence across the prize’s guiding criteria: craft, communication, and consequence.

The books on this year’s longlist introduce us to topics from across the globe, spanning continents and generations, from the history of the five partitions that shaped modern South Asia to the legacy of the Magdalene laundries in Ireland, from post-Second World War colonial Africa to the hidden story of Indigenous slavery in US history.

Chair of the Jury Emily Greenwood, James F. Rothenberg Professor of Classics at Harvard University, said: “We are always in history but not always conscious of it. The best analytical and interpretative historical works reveal the past to us in staggering, new ways. Not only do the fifteen works on this year’s longlist recover history through fresh archival research, but they also offer new lines of sight on matters that continue to weigh heavily on us in the present.

“Ranging from the late fourth century CE to the present day, these books address topics including the theft of Indigenous land and people, the geopolitical upheaval of partitions, Jewish history and the shifting nature of anti-Judaism and antisemitism, the history of racial laws and immigration in America, autocracy and leadership cults, the party machinery of communism, the delicate dynamics of international diplomacy, passive collusion on the part of entire societies, the amendment of constitutions, colonial looting and post-colonial restitution, and the complex agency of plants—in this case vanilla—in the modern history of human consumption. Some of these works revise seemingly settled histories: the Africanness of St. Augustine; how to tell the history of Mexico; and new understandings of past dreams of liberation, from lost artworks of the American revolution to visions of Pan-Africanism.”

You can see the full longlist of titles here. 

As you can see above, this is a history prize that values, "craft, communication, and consequence." This focus on those three pillars, especially the "communication" piece means that these 15 titles are excellent history reads for a library patron audience.

History is one of the nonfiction area where we see a lot of leisure reading circulation. It might not in the same high numbers as things like true crime, cookbooks, or biography and memoir, but it is popular enough that we can make displays and use prize lists to build out our collections and remind readers of these great books.

And because these are just "History" and not a specific branch or type of history, the titles themselves represent a broad swath of excellent, vetted history writing. You can coincidently add these titles across your dewey areas and suggest them with confidence.

The Cundill Prize also has easy backlist access going back to 2008 here. Since we are talking about history books, backlist titles are less time sensitive. Dig deep into the backlist for this one because history never gets old. (pun intended)

And that backlist will help you make a display of history books. You can even use the prize's mantra as your catchy sign/title-- "History books of craft, communication, and consequence"-- that will draw readers in to see what that means. You can even put the logo for the prize on the sign. And for the online version of your display, add a link to the prize itself.

Because this a a history prize and the jurors are all academics, they also have a great page explaining exactly how they pick their winners. I appreciate the transparency of this page.

Finally, and regular readers know exactly what is coming next, you can make this display interactive but using it as a conversation starter, but asking-- What is your favorite popular history book? This is an excellent way to engage your nonfiction readers in your RA efforts. 

Remember, you can click here for the post where I explain how to ask these conversation starter questions in the library and online to capture your patron's answers and make displays that include them in the RA Conversation. 

Back Monday with 5 reviews by me from the August 2026 issue of Booklist.

Conversation Starter To Display Monthly Question: What Is the Book You Recommend to Everyone You Know

This is part of a monthly series of conversation starters which can be made into evergreen displays that I first proposed here (with 12 examples that could last you full a year). You can expect a new conversation starter on the first week day of a new month. Use the newest one for the next month, or access the long backlist of these ideas anytime by using this link. 

Back in June, I wrote about how to use conversation starters to create evergreen displays (see link above), and in that post I promised to give you one conversation starter a month at the start of each month. I also make it clear in that post that these displays can be small. 3-5 books that you keep rotating. You can even use this link to make it into a scavenger hunt of small displays all over the library.

Here is the first of those first of the month displays themes, and it is one I use in every training program I offer: What is a book you recommend to everyone you know?

This is a question that everyone who is a reader can answer quickly; much more quickly than when you ask people to share a favorite book or the last goo book they read. This is a question that has an immediate and visceral response. It is also a question that changes. I you ask someone this question today, you wil get a few titles, but then ask them 6 months later and you will have a few more.

This makes the question-- and the answers-- evergreen by default. It is also a question that is not tied to any one section of the library-- any genre, format, fiction or nonfiction, kids books, adult books, it is all game with this open ended question.

Start by asking staff this question-- at the very least. Do it through an electronic form so that the answers get filed into a spreadsheet. You can also use resources like this one from Goodreads.

That link will allow you to get the display up immediately, while you wait for staff to reply. 

The title of this display is the question itself: What is a book you recommend to everyone you know?

Why? Because this is interactive. Your display is a conversation. It will draw patrons toward it, their interest piqued. You are asking them a question and presenting some answers, but they will have their own and they will want to tell you!!!

Now, you can follow my more elaborate suggestion on how to ask every patron to help answer this question and add titles to your spreadsheet of options, OR you can start smaller. Put up a white board or bulletin board near the display and allow people to add titles. You can pull them as needed or just leave them there, answers to your question, a way to SHOW your community that you care about their answers. You should be adding these to the spreadsheet overtime as well.

That spreadsheet is key here because it is a way for the library to KNOW what books matter to their patrons. Circulation statistics just show us what checks out. It doesn't tell us if they were enjoyed, let alone a book so treasured the patron recommends it to everyone they know. Asking this question makes an excellent, interactive, and, quite frankly, easy display, BUT it also gives us valuable collection development data.

First, if the books people are recommending to answer this question and their circ stats are not great, this lets us know that the book should stay in our collection. It alerts us that it is a patron fav and we now know to get it on display where another reader will almost certainly give it a try (with a title of a display like that, it is sure to circ now)

Second, this conversation starter allows us to see what books matter to our readers and we can pass that information on to those who buy the books for our collections so that they can look for similar titles. As someone who bought for the fiction collection, I would have loved to have this information. I knew my key patrons and bought books I knew they would like, but this question would have reach more people. Many who never stop to talk to use will answer. You will get a much wider view of the books your readers love and crave. That data is collection development gold!

You can search out readalikes that you have, and add more. All of that will lead to small displays, ones you can title, "So you recommend ..... to everyone you know? Now try this." Those can be online and in small spaces. 

You are asking a question, getting responses to fill a display, gathering valuable collection development data, and then creating more displays. All by asking one question: What is a book you recommend to everyone you know?

You have nothing to lose here. You and your patrons win the second you ask the question.

Back next month with anther question.

Using Awards Lists As a RA Tool: Booker Prize Longlist Edition

This is part of my ongoing series on using Awards Lists as a RA tool. Click here for all posts in the series in reverse chronological order. Click here for the first post which outlines the details how to use awards lists as a RA tool.  

The Booker Prize Longlist was recently announced. What is the Booker Prize? From their About Page:

The Booker Prize is the leading literary award in the English speaking world, and has brought recognition, reward and readership to outstanding fiction for over five decades

Each year, the prize is awarded to what is, in the opinion of the judges, the best sustained work of fiction written in English and published in the UK and Ireland. It is a prize that transforms the winner’s career. 

Go to this page, helpfully titled, "Everything you need to know about the Booker Prize 2026 longlist." The page itself is a gold mine of a resource to help readers. It had details about every book, information about the judges. And on the prize's main page, there are even more articles about this year's longlist. I will link to some of the article below.

But even with the regular. display, backlist, and collection development advice I give for every award (access above), The Book Prize is an award you need to know about for a variety of reasons, reasons which give you even more options to serve your patrons.

First, these books are always among the top books written in English every year, which means this year and past year's lists make for reliable suggestions to your curious readers. The backlist is also very easy to access in two different ways. The first is a page here where you can use drop down menus to do so deep dive searching and/or scroll under those drop downs to see the announcements for each year in reverse chronological order. The second is a page here with a list of each year (reverse chronological order) of every title beginning with the winner and then listing all of the longlist titles and the titles are linked to get even more information about them.

Second, these titles (2026 or any year in the recent past) tend to be on the "readable side." What do I mean with that? What I mean is that they tend to pick excellent titles of high literary merit that are readable for a general adult audience. These are critically acclaimed, literary fiction titles that you can give out to a wide swath of readers with confidence. 

Third, the Booker Prize has a history of identifying authors worth you time early in their careers, sometimes earlier than they get singled out for other major awards. These are authors worth having on yourself and suggesting, but you (and your readers) may not have them on their radar yet. 

Fourth, this award list serves as a readalike for itself. Not all awards can do this, but I have used this award list as a suggestion engine for readers who have enjoyed any book that has appeared on the longlists. In fact, back in the early days of the 2000s, I offered a "Holds Without Hassle" program at my library, and not only did we allow them to pick authors for that list, but we also had a few awards they could select. This award (called the Man Booked back in the day) was one of the most popular choices. People wanted the winner put on automatic hold and then after reading it, we helped them find the other nominated titles. I have seen this work in action, even with the books being about widely different topics and from a range of authors.  

Fifth, and this is how my readers first found out about this award in the first place, these titles make excellent book discussion choices. There is a very helpful Booker Library, where you can find books by author, title, or even pick a prize year. And to make it even easier for you, they have Reading Guides designed specifically for libraries. Using the backlist from 2-5 years ago is a great resource for winning discussion titles.

And finally, the judges. I have talked about this before, but look at that list of judges from this year or past years. (Click on the post for each year on that page and scroll down to read about the judges.) Take this year for example. The judges themselves are excellent options for displays, suggestions, and purchase if you don't own their books. You can also use the judges list as one of my 5 Resources You Cannot Live Without-- Author Recs of Other Authors. A couple years ago year, I wrote about how that works in relation to the NYT Best Books of the Century discussion.

I am sure there are even more reasons why this award is a great resource for you to help your readers. Click through for all of the details and information and decide how you can best use this list for your library. The site is really a treasure trove of resources, suggestions, and lists all year long. 

I will end this post with  the most basic info-- the titles on the long list and the summary by the jurors about the list as a whole. All from this page:

The Booker Prize 2026 longlist has now been announced – a selection of 13 superb works of long-form fiction, chosen from 163 titles written in English and published in the UK and/or Ireland between 1 October 2025 and 30 September 2026.   

As Mary Beard, Chair of this year’s judges, says: ‘Great books have never been written to a single formula. We are confident that our longlist of books has something for everyone. There’s the funny and the unsettling (and in some cases the funny and unsettling); there’s dystopian fantasy and domestic drama; there’s the gritty and the magically mysterious; there are some that will please and some that may shock.’

The 13 nominated books, and their UK publishers, are:  

• The Shadow of the Object by Chloe Aridjis (Chatto & Windus) 

• Switzy by Emma Cline (Chatto & Windus) 

• Helen of Nowhere by Makenna Goodman (Fitzcarraldo Editions) 

• The End of Everything by M. John Harrison (Serpent’s Tail) 

• The Disappearers by Marlon James (Hamish Hamilton) 

• Black Bag by Luke Kennard (John Murray) 

• The Renovation by Kenan Orhan (Hamish Hamilton) 

• May We Feed the King by Rebecca Perry (Granta) 

• The Palm House by Gwendoline Riley (Picador)   

• The Things We Never Say by Elizabeth Strout (Viking)  

• John of John by Douglas Stuart (Picador) 

• All Them Dogs by Djamel White (John Murray) 

• The Vivisectors by Missouri Williams (4th Estate)