Booker Prize

Normal People author’s title sold almost 12,000 copies in first five days on market

‘Literary recognition is often still reserved for men’ observes judge Sara Collins as record number of women make six-strong shortlist

The US author, whose new novel Creation Lake is longlisted for this year’s Booker Prize, on US politics, the war in Gaza and her love of Ireland

Paige Reynolds argues women tend to adopt apparently realist modes of fiction but that experimentalism still creeps in

She had asked me several times over the years to do a follow-up to The Spinning Heart

Prolific British-Turkish author on her latest novel, colonial archaeology, the plight of the Yazidis, her sense of belonging and the complexity of Turkish culture

The judges called Mayo writer’s Wild Houses ‘a propulsive, darkly comic account of misadventure in a small Irish town’

If anything will embitter you, it is researching and writing a history of Irish women’s writing

Prof Shovlin said, ‘Five years feels something like maturity for the prize and we were delighted to see, once again, a very strong field’

Fictional summer feasts set against cyber warfare and leaks, Greek island tragedy, a Dorset country retreat, Foxrock domestic noir, and the world of guns and Scotland’s shabby rich

Humourless narrator is difficult to root for in this novel set in Fife, Scotland

Irish author says he wonders what kind of writer he will be when his ‘feet touch the ground’

Maggie Nelson delves into the work and minds of other artists to create a deft and polyphonic book with multiple themes

Sunjeev Sahota’s tale of a trade union is politically charged but shifting narrative voice is a flaw

Paul McGinley pitches up in Ballsbridge; BBC Northern Ireland journalists get good gigs; Sharon Horgan enjoys literary success; and Fianna Fail decides to run new and not so new names

This novel is vintage Nicholls and shows that a journey of a thousand miles starts with a single step

Three socially conscious and moral storylines are interwoven with mixed results in Choice by Neel Mukherjee

There is humour and humanity in this recasting of Mark Twain’s flawed classic

Unusually varied list also includes Jonathan Escoffery’s debut, If I Survive You

Nominated books include Kairos by Jenny Erpenbeck, A Dictator Calls by Ismail Kadare and The House on Via Gemito by Domenico Starnone