Ha! @ÚlldemoShúl I called How to Say Babylon a misery memoir in my review 😁A genre I studiously avoid, to be fair, and I was book-chuckingly-outraged by the final section.
Love the diversity of views here. Going for The Dark Half as my first King - after 3 other people in my library system, which is impressive for a novel as old as me!
Thanks @bibliomania and @FortunaMajor for your Alicia Albinia thoughts. Going to pause The Britannias, may return to it in a more patient mood. Still into the concept, and my issue was the writing style and unnecessary level of detail about what she had for dinner rather than the myriad <gestures wildly> of Eve, for example.
Just going to add reviews of latest 3 WP reads for now:
Enter Ghost - Isabella Hammad
Superbly crafted, thoughtful and nuanced and occasionally brilliant. My favourite parts centred around the Hamlet production - one rehearsal scene in particular (with lots of blank space). Admirably ambitious even if it didn't fully succeed. I think I likely would have bolded this if I had read it a year ago, or before/without reading Minor Detail by Adania Shibli (admittedly a v. different kind of book - Intl. Booker shortlisted - but with a deal of overlap).
In the context of the WP (not to mention Hamlet, and indeed the setting) I found the novel's slightly anodyne handling of misogyny and violence against women a real weakness. I also just really dislike this type of humourless, self-absorbed, vaguely disaffected protagonist. To be fair, it wasn't nearly as ruinous here as in e.g. Katie Kitamura's Intimacies, and I could even admit its virtues, elegantly allowing for the copious exposition to accumulate as a series of realisations/revelations that ended up being much more interesting than the advertised 'political awakening'. Still had to grit my teeth through a lot of clichéd bad relationship / arts undergrad wank, and I think the other characters also suffered for being presented through such a limited POV.
I've focused on the negative here mainly to avoid rehashing eloquent praises of other 50 Bookers but I do agree with the consensus that it's a Tier 1 WP book and would make a worthy winner.
However, I preferred:
Ordinary Human Failings - Megan Nolan
Ostensibly about the death of a young child in 1990, the culpability or otherwise of an Irish immigrant family on the same London estate, and the tabloid journalist trying to make a story out of it. Actually, much more interestingly - beautifully observed, politically resonant, unsentimental but very moving - about people, and families, and the ‘perverse ongoingness’ of life. Nolan writes like a dream and this was full of striking, often sharply funny, turns of phrase.
Unusually, I thought this could have been longer - the last act felt a little rushed, and a certain character got off far too lightly.
Soldier Sailor - Claire Kilroy
Like a few others, I wasn't sure I would get this, not having children. Well, I adored it. Read in one besotted binge. I laughed, I cried, I highlighted probably every third sentence. Can't really fault it. Possibly could have been improved by a bit of murder. Just one.
A bold and my choice for winner.