2024 Booker Prize: Read the opening lines of the six shortlisted novels, 5 of them by women authors

The 2024 shortlist for the Booker Prize was announced on September 16. The shortlist includes the largest number of women in the Booker’s 55-year history, with five women and one man represented. Authors from five countries appear on the list, including the first Dutch writer to be shortlisted, the first Australian in ten years, as well as British, Canadian and American authors. Two of the authors have been shortlisted previously. The final ceremony will take place on November 12 in London. The winner will receive £50,000, a trophy named Iris. Each of the shortlisted authors receives £2,500 and a bespoke bound edition of their book.

This year’s jury is chaired by artist and author Edmund de Waal, who is joined by novelist Sara Collins; Fiction Editor of the Guardian, Justine Jordan; writer and professor Yiyun Li; and musician, composer and producer Nitin Sawhney.

The list features stories which transport readers around the world and beyond Earth’s atmosphere: from the battlefields of the First World War to a spiritual retreat in rural Australia; from America’s Deep South in the 19th century to a remote Dutch house in the 1960s; from the International Space Station to a cave network beneath the French countryside.

The six shortlisted novels are:

• Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner (Jonathan Cape)

• Held, Anne Michaels (Bloomsbury)

• James, Percival Everett (Pan Macmillan)

• Orbital, Samantha Harvey (Vintage)

• Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood (Sceptre)

• The Safekeep, Yael van der Wouden (Viking)

Here are the opening lines of each of the novels:

Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner

Because Bruno Lacombe had been positioned in the briefings I was given as a teacher and mentor to Pascal Balmy and Le Moulin, I was looking for references in his emails to what Pascal and his group had done, and what they were planning.

Six months ago, earth-moving equipment was sabotaged at the site of a massive industrial reservoir being built near the village of Tayssac, not far from Le Moulin. Five huge excavators, costing hundreds of thousands of euros each, were set on fire under cover of night. Pascal and his group were suspected, but so far there was no proof.

Bruno’s emails to Pascal covered a lot of ground but I had encountered nothing incriminating beyond Bruno’s assertion that water belongs in the water table, and not in industrial holding bays. Bruno lamented that the state had decided it would be a good idea to siphon ground-water from subterranean caverns and lakes and rivers, and to capture this water in huge plastic-lined “megabasins, where it would absorb leached toxins and be evaporated by the sun. This was a tragic idea, he said, with a destructive power that perhaps only someone who had spent considerable time underground might understand. Water, Bruno said, was already captured, in nature's own ingenious filtration and storage

Held, Anne Michaels

We know life is finite. Why should we believe death lasts forever?

The shadow of a bird moved across the hill; he could not see the bird.

Certain thoughts comforted him:

Desire permeates everything; nothing human can be cleansed of it.
We can only think about the unknown in terms of the known.
The speed of light cannot reference time.
The past exists as a present moment.
Perhaps the most important things we know cannot be proven.

He did not believe that the mystery at the heart of things was amorphous or vague or a discrepancy, but a place in us for something absolutely precise. He did not believe in filling that space with religion or science, but in leaving it intact; like silence, or speechlessness, or duration.

Perhaps death was Lagrangian, perhaps it could be defined by the principle of stationary action.

Asymptotic.

Mist smouldered like cremation fires in the rain.

It was possible that the blast had taken his hearing. There were no trees to identify the winds, no wind, he thought, at all. Was it raining? John could see the air glistening, but he couldn’t feel it on his face.

The mist erased all it touched.

James, Percival Everett

Those little bastards were hiding out there in the tall grass.

The moon was not quite full, but bright, and it was behind them, so I could see them as plain as day, though it was deep night. Lightning bugs flashed against the black canvas. I waited at Miss Watson’s kitchen door, rocked a loose step board with my foot, knew she was going to tell me to fix it tomorrow. I was waiting there for her to give me a pan of corn bread that she had made with my Sadie’s recipe. Waiting is a big part of a slave’s life, waiting and waiting to wait some more. Waiting for demands. Waiting for food. Waiting for the ends of days. Waiting for the just and deserved Christian reward at the end of it all. Those white boys, Huck and Tom, watched me. They were always playing some kind of pretending game where I was either a villain or prey, but certainly their toy. They hopped about out there with the chiggers, mosquitoes and other biting bugs, but never made any progress toward me. It always pays to give white folks what they want, so I stepped into the yard and called out into the night,

“Who dat dere in da dark lak dat?”

They rustled clumsily about, giggled. Those boys couldn’t sneak up on a blind and deaf man while a band was playing. I would rather have been wasting time counting lightning bugs than bothering with them.

“I guess I jest gwyne set dese old bones down on dis heah porch and watch out for dat noise ‘gin. Maybe dere be sum ol’ demon or witch out dere. I’m gwyne stay right heah where it be safe.” I sat on the top step and leaned back against the post. I was tired, so I closed my eyes.

The boys whispered excitedly to each other, and I could hear them, clear as a church bell.

“Is he ‘sleep already?” Huck asked.

“I reckon so. I heard niggers can fall asleep jest like that,” Tom said and snapped his fingers.

“Shhhh,” Huck said.

“I say we ties him up, “Tom said. "Tie him up to dat porch post what he's leaning ‘ginst.”

“No,” said Huck. “What if’n he wakes up and makes a ruckus? Then I gets found out for being outside and not in bed like I’m supposed to be.”

Orbital, Samantha Harvey

Rotating about the earth in their spacecraft they are so together, and so alone, that even their thoughts, their internal mythologies, at times convene. Sometimes they dream the same dreams – of fractals and blue spheres and familiar faces engulfed in dark, and of the bright energetic black of space that slams their senses. Raw space is a panther, feral and primal; they dream it stalking through their quarters.

They hang in their sleeping bags. A hand-span away beyond a skin of metal the universe unfolds in simple eternities. Their sleep begins to thin and some distant earthly morning dawns and their laptops flash the first silent messages of a new day; the wide-awake, always-awake station vibrates with fans and filters. In the galley are the remnants of last night’s dinner – dirty forks secured to the table by magnets and chopsticks wedged in a pouch on the wall. Four blue balloons are buoyed on the circulating air, some foil bunting says Happy Birthday, it was nobody’s birthday but it was a celebration and it was all they had. There’s a smear of chocolate on a pair of scissors and a small felt moon on a piece of string, tied to the handles of the foldable table.

Outside the earth reels away in a mass of moonglow, peeling backward as they forge towards its edgeless edge; the tufts of cloud across the Pacific brighten the nocturnal ocean to cobalt. Now there’s Santiago on South America's approaching coast in a cloud-hazed burn of gold. Unseen through the closed shutters the trade winds blowing across the warm waters of the Western Pacific have worked up a storm, an engine of heat. The winds take the warmth out of the ocean where it gathers as clouds which thicken and curdle and begin to spin in vertical stacks that have formed a typhoon. As the typhoon moves west towards southern Asia, their craft tracks east, eastward and down towards Patagonia where the lurch of a far-off aurora domes the horizon in neon. The Milky Way is a smoking trail of gunpowder shot through a satin sky.

Onboard the craft it’s Tuesday morning, four fifteen, the beginning of October. Out there it’s Argentina it’s the South Atlantic it’s Cape Town it’s Zimbabwe. Over its right shoulder, the planet whispers morning – a slender molten breach of light. They slip through time zones in silence.

Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood

Arrive finally at about three. The place has the feel of a 1970s health resort or eco-commune, but is not welcoming. Signs on fences, or stuck on little posts by driveways: no entry. no parking. A place of industry, not recreation.

I park in a nondescript spot near a fence, and sit in the quiet car.

On the way here I stopped in the town and visited my parents’ graves for the first time in thirty years. It took some time for me to find them in what is called the “lawn cemetery”, the newer part fenced off – why? – from the original town graveyard with its crooked rows of tilting white headstones and crosses. That old part is overlooked by enormous black pine trees; ravens and cockatoos scream from their high branches. The lawn cemetery, by contrast, is a dull, flat expanse filled with gently curved rows of low, ugly headstones of identical dimensions. Neater, I suppose (but why should a cemetery be neat?).

There is no lawn, just dusty dead grass.

To find my parents I had to recall the cold, unsheltered feeling I had – physically, I mean at each of their funerals. There had been the sensation of too much space around me there, at the place where my father, then later my mother, were sent into their adjacent shafts of opened earth. (It seemed callous to me back then, to lower a person into a hole in the ground using ropes and cords instead of arms.) But walking around the cemetery now, remembering that sensation helped me find the spot again. I stood before my mother’s and father’s gravestones, two machine-cut and polished pieces of stone. The colour and design of the stones and the words on them seemed to bear no trace of either of my parents, though I must have decided on, approved of, them.

I stood on the grass and looked at the ugly flowers, then at my parents’ names carved into each slab in front of me. And I realised: Your bones are here, beneath my feet. I squatted then, those few feet of earth between their bodies and mine, and I kissed my fingers and pressed them to the crackly grass.

Someone had pushed some ugly plastic flowers into the small metal grate beside the headstones. Perhaps there are volunteers who go around leaving fake flowers at unvisited graves. Who else would want to mark my parents’ burial place after all this time? The plastic of the flowers had turned grey, every part of them, though they must have once been luridly coloured like those I could see sticking up from the little metal vases at other headstones: ragged synthetic petals in puce and maroon and white with dark green stems, angled here and there with artificial nodules and leaves.

Walking back to the car I remembered something else: a phone call, many months after my mother’s death. A man’s voice quietly telling me her headstone was ready. I recall standing by the laundry door with the phone in my hand, my outsides unaltered but everything within me plummeting. Like a sandbank collapsing inside me.

The Safekeep, Yael van der Wouden

Isabel found a broken piece of ceramic at the roots of a dead gourd.

Spring had brought a shock of frost, a week of wet snow, and now – at the lip of summer – the vegetable garden was shrinking into itself. The beans, the radishes, the cauliflower: browned and rotting. Isabel was on her knees, gloved hands and a stringed hat, removing the dying things. The shard nicked through her glove, pierced a little hole.

It wasn't a wound and it didn't bleed. Isabel took off her glove and stretched the skin of her palm tight, looking for a puncture. There was none, only a sting of pain that left quickly.

Back at the house she washed the piece and held it in watery hands. Blue flowers along the inch of a rim, the suggestion of a hare’s leg where the crockery had broken. It had once been a plate, which was part of a set – her mother’s favourite: the good chinaware, for holidays, for guests. When Mother was alive the set was kept in a glass vitrine in the dining room and no one was allowed to handle it. It had been years since her passing and the plates were still kept behind the closed doors, unused. On the rare occasion when Isabel’s brothers visited, Isabel would set the table using everyday plates and Hendrik would try to pry open the vitrine and say, “Isa, Isa, come now, what’s the point of having good things if you can’t touch them?” And Isabel would answer: “They are not for touching. They are for keeping.”

There was no explanation for the broken piece, for where it had come from and why it had been buried. None of Mother’s plates had ever gone missing.

Isabel knew this and still she checked now. The set was as it had been left: a deck of plates, bowls, a little milk jug. In the middle of each one – three hares, chasing one another in a circle.

She took the piece with her on the train to Den Haag the next day, wrapped in brown paper. Hendrik’s car was parked outside the restaurant when she arrived, and he was at the wheel: windows down, smoking. Rubbing a thumb into his eye, looking like he was having a conversation with himself over something, a disagreement. His hair was longer than she liked it. She bent down and said, “Hello,” and he startled and knocked his elbow and said, “Jesus Christ, Isa.”

She got in the car next to him and kept her purse in her lap. He sighed out smoke and leaned over, kissed her three times – once on each cheek, and one more for good measure.