By Alex Marshall

A tale of erotic obsession that gradually becomes a story about the Holocaust. A novel set aboard a space station. A book set in a convent that experiences a plague of mice.

All three are among the six titles nominated for this year’s Booker Prize, the prestigious literary award, whose winner is set to be announced Tuesday (12) in London.

Past winners have included Yann Martel’s ‘Life of Pi’, Salman Rushdie’s ‘Midnight’s Children’, Michael Ondaatje’s ‘The English Patient’ and Margaret Atwood’s ‘The Blind Assassin’.

Which of these six contenders most deserves to be added to that illustrious list?

‘James’ by Percival Everett

The favourite for this year’s prize, according to British bookmakers, ‘James’ is a retelling of Mark Twain’s ‘Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ from the perspective of the Black man fleeing enslavement in Twain’s novel.

“What sets ‘James’ above Everett’s previous novels, as casually and caustically funny as many are, is that here the humanity is turned up — way up,” critic Dwight Garner wrote in a review in The New York Times. “This is Everett’s most thrilling novel, but also his most soulful.”

Everett has said in interviews that he came up with the idea while playing tennis, suddenly wondering whether anyone had ever rewritten ‘Huckleberry Finn’. “It was an interesting question,” Everett said in May, “but it also explained to me why I had hit the ball so poorly.”

‘Orbital’ by Samantha Harvey

The second favourite, according to the bookmakers, ‘Orbital’ is about six astronauts working on a space station racing around Earth.

Joshua Ferris, in a review for the Times, wrote that the novel was “nearly free of plot. No alien race invades. No sentient planet turns people mad”. But Ferris insisted that the lack of narrative was not detrimental. The book, which features riffs on ecology, time and religion, is “ravishingly beautiful”.

“Sometimes, wonder and beauty suffice,” Ferris said.

Harvey, in a recent BBC interview, said that while working on ‘Orbital’, she had watched “thousands and thousands of hours” of footage of Earth taken from space. Given that it was during the pandemic, Harvey said, it felt like a kind of “beautiful liberation to be able to do that every day, and at the same time I am writing about six people who are trapped in a tin can”.

‘Creation Lake’ by Rachel Kushner

Kushner’s novel is about a spy-for-hire who infiltrates a commune of environmental activists in France — apparently, though, she doesn’t know who has employed her, on behalf of agricultural conglomerates that want the commune’s members jailed.

In a recent interview with the Times, Kushner said that writing ‘Creation Lake’ was “the most fun I’ve ever had doing anything in my life,” and that she “preferred the world that I had made” in the book over the one we currently inhabit.

The book was lauded by many reviewers, including Garner, who wrote in the Times that it “consolidates Kushner’s status as one of the finest novelists working in the English language”.  But Mia Levitin, in The Financial Times, said the novel, filled with philosophical musings, was “disappointingly put-downable”.

‘The Safekeep’ by Yael van der Wouden 

In some literary quarters, ‘The Safekeep’ has garnered attention for one main reason: It includes a lot of sex. In fact, as one Times reviewer has noted, it features a whole “sex chapter”.

The Booker Prize’s judges have said they shortlisted the book, van der Wouden’s debut novel, for far more than its eroticism. ‘The Safekeep’,  they said in a news release, is “a compelling and atmospheric story of obsession and secrets”.

Set in the Netherlands of the 1960s, the novel details the unexpected romance between Isabel, a cold, obsessive woman who lives in her parent’s old home, and Eva, the girlfriend of one of Isabel’s brothers. Gradually, the novel reveals itself to also be a story about the Holocaust and its legacy.

Van der Wouden said in a recent interview that the book stemmed from a short story she wrote about an awkward family dinner to which a man brings along his girlfriend, whom no one there likes.

“What a quietly remarkable book,” wrote Lori Soderlind in the Times. “Nothing in this book is gratuitous.”

‘Stone Yard Devotional’ by Charlotte Wood

In Wood’s seventh novel, which Riverhead Books will publish in the United States on Feb. 11, a woman leaves her job at a wildlife nonprofit, apparently overcome with despair at her work’s lack of impact, and retreats to a convent where her solitude is interrupted by, among other things, a plague of mice.

Johanna Thomas-Corr, reviewing the novel for The Sunday Times in Britain, called it “a beautiful, mature work that does not flinch from life”.

Wood said in recent interviews that she had written ‘Stone Yard Devotional’ during COVID-19 lockdowns and after being diagnosed with cancer. Those “twin upheavals,” she said in a statement for the Booker’s website, gave her “an urgent instinct to shed anything inessential” in her work.

“I wanted nothing trivial, nothing insincere in this book,” she added. “And I wanted to try to master what Saul Bellow called ‘stillness in the midst of chaos,’ risking a tonal restraint and depth that at the same time, I hope, shimmers with energy.”

‘Held’ by Anne Michaels

Bookmakers’ long-shot for this year’s award is ‘Held’, a novel that starts with a soldier in the trenches of World War I and then jumps back and forward through time, to touch on four generations of the man’s descendants, including a war correspondent and a worker in a refugee camp.

Alida Becker, in the Times, wrote that because Michaels was once Toronto’s poet laureate, it was unsurprising that in ‘Held’ she “turns a multigenerational family saga into a lyrical jigsaw of images and observations”.

-New York Times