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Booker Prize 2023: the shortlisted titles reviewed

Our critics’ verdicts on the contenders for this year’s award, the winner of which is due to be announced on November 26

Prophet Song — Paul Lynch’s Dublin dystopia
The depiction of tyranny and the traumatic fallout for its opponents in this Booker-longlisted novel is utterly believable
Study for Obedience by Sarah Bernstein — an outcast turns the tables
The new work from the Granta Young British Novelist compels with its macabre story and free narrative style
The Bee Sting by Paul Murray — a dazzling, devastating tragicomedy
The ‘Skippy Dies’ author returns to gripping form with a funny, sad story of Irish family life
If I Survive You — race and precarity in contemporary America
In inventive prose, Jonathan Escoffery delivers a fine tragicomic novel about two warring brothers
This Other Eden — a tragedy of American racism and eugenics
Paul Harding, author of the Pulitzer-winning ‘Tinkers’, brings a creeping menace to this saga of islanders whose rural idyll is shattered by exploitation
Western Lane — a haunting debut about loss and playing squash
Chetna Maroo’s novella is set in a West London community where three sisters grapple with the void left by an absent mother