Peter Florence's Reading List

"What we saw in it is that it is a completely standalone, independent novel. If you read The Handmaid’s Tale , it will satisfy some of your need for understanding what happened next. If you haven’t—and incredibly, there are people who haven’t read it—it just gives you an extremely savage and exhilarating look at contemporary life and its most alarming manifestations. Atwood manages to set her own bar very high and get over it. That’s a hell of a thing for a book of which a lot is expected. You’d think! Part of the challenge is reading it again in the context of the publication hype and expectation, the backlash, the whole nine-ring circus. I think we were very lucky to read it first before all that started. Atwood plays with thriller conventions and our expectations of drama to pull our focus, always, onto her subject matter. It’s phenomenal storytelling and inspiration."

"It’s the stream of consciousness of an Ohio housewife who muses on life, politics, society and nature, and it’s absolutely compelling. The voice she creates is fascinating. It’s a fantastic comic riff that feels a lot like an updated, wisecracking version of James Joyce’s Molly Bloom. You get the sense of a whole life and a real imagination at work. And although it’s a thousand pages, you read it with energy and pace and verve. It’s just a great ride. Everybody I have given it to has loved it. Oh hell no! In many ways, it’s the easiest to read of all the books on the shortlist because of the way the author handles the reader. She takes you on a wonderful dance and it’s a joy to play with that."

"It’s written in a very unusual way. It has, I suppose, a poetic structure; she uses blank verse a lot. She plays with the lives of 12 black women in Britain, and there are plot twists—which I don’t want to spoil—about their connections. Again, you get the sense in this book of real lives lived. They feel so vibrant, so vivid, and so full of energy and life that it’s like coming across a whole new bunch of friends who you care about deeply. You also realize that these are people who are not very familiar from contemporary literature. They haven’t had their stories told so brilliantly and so persuasively before now. I cannot imagine anyone not enjoying this novel. As an author she possesses a prolific voice; she’s got 12 voices, all of which are distinct and engaging and vulnerable in different ways and utterly compelling. It’s so tough. The move from longlist to shortlist has the bizarreness of being reductive, not expansive, and that feels strange for someone who spends their bulk of their professional life trying to celebrate more and more literature. The thing I would say about all these six novels is that I could easily and happily stand up and make the case for any of them as a winner, and I have no idea who’s going to win in the follow-up on the 14th. I hope that we will discover more about each of the books when we get to talk about them again, in this third reading of them."

"It’s the book that, to me in Britain, was in some ways the most foreign, in that it deals with a belief system and a central character beyond my immediate point of cultural reference. The wonder of it is that it takes this animating spirit guardian narrator and makes it seem completely natural. Support Five Books Five Books interviews are expensive to produce. If you're enjoying this interview, please support us by donating a small amount . Obioma inducts you into this culture of this story with this heart-rending, beautiful hero and his quest and makes it completely immersive. In that sense, it’s the one book on the list in which you travel more in stranger lands, but with such power and with such clever narrative technique. He tells a story in a paragraph that spills out completely onto the page. And he’s a wonder: he’s 33, this is his second novel, and both have been shortlisted for the Booker. That’s quite an exceptionally gifted talent. This is a great book and I think it’ll find big audiences around the world."

"This is a big book, and he’s doing his stuff, and he’s doing his stuff brilliantly. It’s a really full-on, absolutely uncompromising maximalist novel. It’s very entertaining, clever and politically acute. Once you read it, you look at this guy who’s trying to take on Cervantes and see that he gives him a good run. It’s a huge ambition, and he’s pulled it off on his own crazy terms. If you love storytelling and you love popular culture, this is just a dream book because it rips along. At the same time, it is an astonishingly careful and lucid engagement with Don Quixote , the greatest novel of the European tradition. There’s a pleasure just in the game as they play with each other. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter It’s both wildly unfamiliar and really pleasingly recognizably Rushdie at the top of his game. So yes, it’s a good, good book, but not unlike Atwood, the bar is set high for him. I don’t want to have something that wasn’t as good as Midnight’s Children on the list. I wanted something wonderful, and he’s delivered it."

"Like Evaristo’s book, in this novel, you get this sense of knowing a whole bunch of people who are this weirdly close-knit and beautiful group of friends. It’s about Istanbul in all its wealth and diversity, but it’s also about rape and trauma, exploitation and violence. And it’s about a life that resonates beautifully. I’m intrigued by the fact that this is a second or third language; she seems to have absolute control of the poetry, and at the same time the ability to conjure characters who, in a way, absolutely don’t feel at all like characters. They feel like people. It’s a great trick of fiction, and she does it beautifully. Absolutely. We have the great luxury of a book a week rather than a book a day! We’ll meet on October 14th and we’ll talk through until we’ve come up with the winner, at the very last minute. We decide on the day, and I have no idea who’s going to win. Literally no idea. It could go anywhere, any which way, under a variety of different circumstances. We’ll see!"

"India is reliably funny in everything she writes. There’s pleasure in her voice, and her love of these characters which you can share and revel in. The other special thing is her relationship with the original material; if you’ve got something predicated upon another book, you must look very carefully at what they are bringing, what’s innovative and new and dynamic between the new book and the classic. And India lands it completely. It reminds me in some ways of what Julian Barnes did with Flaubert’s Parrot . There’s such a sweet conversation between India and The Pursuit of Love , and the book is doubly pleasurable for that. It’s such a joy. India draws a careful line between homage and appreciation, and also creating something that’s absolutely new. Literature is full of rewrites, adaptations, and the re-spinning of old tales. If you’ve never read The Pursuit of Love , you can still really like Darling . It’s just another level of appreciation you could bring to it."

"Oh, everything. I mean, the language is just spectacular. It’s clever, it’s beautiful, it makes you look at things through her eyes and hear her voice. You have to read it slowly and attentively because the poetry of the writing demands you pay attention to each phrase. A complete delight. And it’s profoundly, properly shocking in all the right ways—there’s very, very dark humour here. It’s a study of contemporary America and a revelation of all sorts of issues of identity and prejudice and what it means to struggle. I just loved it. Principally, it’s the voice. It’s very powerful. It’s a totally realised bit of writing, sensational. Get the weekly Five Books newsletter I don’t want to tell the story, because that’s part of the delight, the way he tells it. But it is one of those books where whoever you are, whatever your reading experience, this will feel dynamic and thrilling in many ways. The closest comparator I can think of is Percival Everett’s The Trees , which won last year. That had some of the same, socially vital, musculature about it. But I don’t want to reduce it to its subject matter, because it’s a really enjoyable read. Every page gives you a fresh turn of phrase, a fresh idea or a fresh line that makes you question language, or all your assumptions, your place—whatever your place might be. So it’s a really extraordinary book. Will everyone find it as funny as the jury did? I hope so. It’s dynamic, it has a real energy and it is whipcrack funny in the places where you are most shocked. So, yes, I love it."

"I think so. Again, this is laugh-out-loud funny. Just the level of intimacy and exposure… laughter is the only possible response to some of what happens and how it makes you feel. I think it’s really beautifully done. There are four or five beautiful set-pieces, and some great gags. It’s a very good-natured book. It’s the sort of book to take on holiday, or to give to someone in need of cheering up. So, a treat. “What we’ve learned over the years is that there is such a broad spectrum of funny” Yes, it’s different in tone and impact to the first books that we’ve talked about, and it’s hard to judge them against each other. And part of me wants to say, look, just read the whole shortlist. There will be a winner or winners, but all of them are so funny and complementary that the shortlist would keep you happy for quite a while."

"This verges into parody—taking very established, familiar archetypes, spinning them around, playing them around and both celebrating gags that you will recognise then doubling down and spinning them again in a new way. So, yes, if you’ve ever read or watched an Agatha Christie, or if you’ve ever read any Wodehouse.. well, I’m not saying he’s in Wodehouse’s league, because, frankly, nobody is. But he’s got some of that spirit and he plays with the idea of what’s funny, satirises both the literary form and the political subjects within the story. It’s very appealing. I read it straight after Carlotta , and they should almost be read as companion pieces because they are so different, but in their different ways so pleasurable. And a bit like India Knight, Fergus Craig takes period language and gives it a contemporary spin, which is in itself rather clever. Sometimes the jokes are even in the vocabulary. Sometimes people say that Casablanca is the greatest movie of all time, but also that it’s the greatest B movie. Well, this is like that—it’s a great popular fiction book that plays with the idea of popular fiction, plays with the idea of plot. Can a plot be funny? Yes, it can actually. There’s lots to love about this book: it’s a light read, and a very, very entertaining one."

"This was in Sindhu’s original section of the submissions. She said she was reading it on an aeroplane and snorting, while everyone else around was looking at her, like: what are you on? That’s when we all decided to read it. Even if you don’t pick up all the many, many subtleties of in-jokes that are clearly in there, it’s just hilarious line for line. There isn’t an unfunny line in the book! So I think the writer is a comic genius, actually. It’s funny about the conservatism of parents. It’s funny about what it is to be young. It’s funny about sex—and being funny about sex is quite hard. Very few people pull that off. So I’m thrilled it was submitted, as I loved reading it and it was a complete discovery. I’ve read India before—she’s been shortlisted before—and, obviously, Bob Mortimer is one of the country’s greatest living performers. But this came, to me, from nowhere and I just loved it. I think we all did. I can’t imagine anybody not finding this book laugh-out-loud funny. It’s also quite short. Quite a few of the shortlisted books are, this year. So I’ve read it two or three times and laughed with new delight each time at things that I missed the last time. It was also a wonderful reminder of what it is to be young again."

"He approaches the world with a wicked, mischievous smile. I guess this is what happens when you turn a brilliant, oblique comedic attention to life. He can really write. Obviously we know he knows how to tell a joke, but he also knows the difference between delivering comedy orally and writing something which will still hook and deliver. He can absolutely do it, and you find yourself complicit with him in the way the story turns into comedy. It’s a joy actually, because then you go out into the world with a bit more warmth in your soul. And you think the world is hilarious, that we are all completely ludicrous. Yes, there are very good jokes in it. But it’s also just a humorous way of approaching the world that feels like a beautiful infusion of sanity. It’s easy to be anxious, concerned, traumatised, disrupted… the world is really difficult. But a bit of Mortimer makes it bearable and amusing, and he reminds you of the joy of talking and telling stories. It’s quite difficult not to hear it in his voice. But it’s like having a new pair of orange-tinted glasses, which makes everything quite strange and glowy—and you realise that the world can look totally different, if you look at it with a squint and from the side. It can be enchanting and funny. So he makes you laugh, they all do. They all give delight, which is comedy’s greatest gift, and remind us that with good nature and generosity and by embracing human vulnerability and fallibility, you don’t have to see everything in that tragic, melodramatic way the news tells us—but that there is a way to read the world that will be good for you, good for your soul. I would say one more thing. These books are all brilliantly edited, which isn’t always the case, and beautifully published. And I love that there were so many others who, in another year, might have made the shortlist. Maybe comedy is the answer—No, that’s too cheap. Maybe comedy is an answer to some of the world’s greatest puzzles. The winner of the Bollinger Everyman Wodehouse Prize for Comic Fiction 2023 will be announced on Monday 20th November at The Goring Hotel in London."