The 2024 Booker Prize longlist of 13 novels was announced on July 30. It features blackly comic page-turners, multigenerational epics, meditations on the pain of exile, a crime caper, a spy thriller, an unflinching account of girls’ boxing and a reimagining of a 19th-century classic.

This year’s jury is chaired by artist and author Edmund de Waal, and comprises novelist Sara Collins; Fiction Editor of the Guardian, Justine Jordan; writer and professor Yiyun Li; and musician, composer and producer Nitin Sawhney.

Eight female and six male writers have made the longlist, including three debut authors. This is the first time Dutch and Native American authors have been longlisted. There are also authors from Australia, Canada, the UK, Ireland and the US.

The shortlist of six books will be announced on September 16 in London. The shortlisted authors will each receive £2,500 and a specially bound edition of their book. The winner will be announced on November 12 and the winning author will receive £50,000.

Wandering Stars, Tommy Orange

Colorado, 1864. Star, a young survivor of the Sand Creek Massacre, is brought to the Fort Marion prison castle, where he is forced to learn English and practice Christianity by Richard Henry Pratt, an evangelical prison guard who will go on to found the Carlisle Indian Industrial School, an institution dedicated to the eradication of Native history, culture, and identity. A generation later, Star’s son, Charles, is sent to the school, where he is brutalised by the man who was once his father’s jailer. Under Pratt’s harsh treatment, Charles clings to moments he shares with a young fellow student, Opal Viola, as the two envision a future away from the institutional violence that follows their bloodlines.

Wild Houses, Colin Barrett

As Ballina prepares for its biggest weekend of the year, the simmering feud between small-time drug dealer, Cillian English, and County Mayo’s enforcers, Gabe and Sketch Ferdia, spills over into violence and an ugly ultimatum.

When the reclusive Dev answers his door on Friday night he finds Doll – Cillian's teenage brother – in the clutches of Gabe and Sketch. Jostled by his nefarious cousins and goaded by his dead mother’s dog, Dev is drawn headlong into the Ferdias’ revenge fantasy.

Meanwhile, seventeen-year-old Nicky can’t shake the feeling something bad has happened to her boyfriend Doll. Hungover, reeling from a fractious Friday night and plagued by ghosts of her own, Nicky sets out on a feverish mission to save Doll, even as she questions her future in Ballina.

Held, Anne Michaels

The year is 1917. On a battlefield near the River Escaut, John lies in the aftermath of a blast, unable to move or feel his legs. Struggling to focus his thoughts, he is lost to memory – a chance encounter in a pub by a railway, a hot bath with his lover on a winter night, his childhood on a faraway coast – as the snow falls.

The year is 1920. John has returned from war to North Yorkshire, near another river – alive, but not still whole. Reunited with Helena, an artist, he reopens his photography business and endeavours to keep on living. But the past erupts insistently into the present, as ghosts begin to surface in his pictures: ghosts whose messages he cannot understand.

So begins a narrative that spans four generations, moments of connection and consequence igniting and re-igniting as the century unfolds. In luminous moments of desire, comprehension, longing, and transcendence, the sparks fly upward, working their transformations decades later.

Creation Lake, Rachel Kushner

Sadie Smith – a thirty-four-year-old American undercover agent of ruthless tactics and bold opinions – is sent by her mysterious but powerful employers to a remote corner of France. Her mission: to infiltrate a commune of radical eco-activists influenced by the beliefs of an enigmatic elder, Bruno Lacombe, who has rejected civilisation, lives in a Neanderthal cave, and believes the path to enlightenment is a return to primitivism.

Sadie casts her cynical eye over this region of ancient farms and sleepy villages, and finds Bruno’s idealism laughable, but just as she is certain she’s the seductress and puppet master of those she surveils, Bruno Lacombe is seducing her with his ingenious counter-histories, his artful laments, his own tragic story.

This Strange Eventful History, Claire Messud

June 1940. As Paris falls to the Germans, Gaston Cassar – honorable servant of France, devoted husband and father, currently posted as naval attache in Salonica – bids farewell to his beloved wife, aunt and children, placing his faith in God that they will be reunited after the war. But escaping the violence of that cataclysm is not the same as emerging unscathed. The family will never again be whole.

A work of breathtaking historical sweep and vivid psychological intimacy, This Strange Eventful History charts the Cassars’ unfolding story as its members move between Salonica and Algeria, the US, Cuba, Canada, Argentina, Australia and France – their itinerary shaped as much by a search for an elusive wholeness, as by the imperatives of politics, faith, family, industry and desire.

Playground, Richard Powers

Rafi and Todd are two polar opposites at an elite high school where they bond over a three-thousand-year-old board game. It sets them up for life: Rafi will get lost in literature, while Todd’s work will lead to a startling AI breakthrough

Elsewhere, Evie Beaulieu sinks to the bottom of a swimming pool in Montreal strapped to one of the world’s first aqualungs; Ina Aroita grows up in naval bases across the Pacific with art as her only home.

All of these people meet on the history-scarred island of Makatea in French Polynesia, marked for humanity’s next great adventure: a plan to send floating, autonomous cities out into the open sea. As the seasteaders close in, how will Evie play the ever-unfolding oceanic game? Will Ina engage in acts of destruction? Todd and Rafi, now estranged, still find themselves in competition: Todd unravels while working on an idea to redraw the boundaries of human immortality, while Rafi and the residents must decide if they will greenlight the new project on their shores and change their home forever.

Enlightenment, Sarah Perry

Thomas and Grace are fellow worshippers at the Baptist chapel in the small Essex town of Aldleigh. Though separated in age by three decades, the pair are kindred spirits – torn between their commitment to religion and their desire for more. But their friendship is threatened by the arrival of love.

Thomas falls for James Bower, who runs the local museum. Together they develop an obsession with the vanished 19th-century female astronomer Maria Veduva, said to haunt a nearby manor. Inspired by Maria, and the dawning realisation James may not reciprocate his feelings, Thomas finds solace in studying the night skies. Could astronomy offer as much wonder as divine or earthly love?

Meanwhile, Grace meets Nathan, a fellow sixth former who represents a different, wilder kind of life. They are drawn passionately together, but quickly pulled apart, casting Grace into the wider world and far away from Thomas.

In time, the mysteries of Aldleigh are revealed, bringing Thomas and Grace back to each other and to a richer understanding of love, of the nature of the world, and the sheer miracle of being alive.

Orbital, Samantha Harvey

A team of astronauts in the International Space Station collect meteorological data, conduct scientific experiments and test the limits of the human body. But mostly they observe. Together they watch their silent blue planet, circling it sixteen times, spinning past continents and cycling through seasons, taking in glaciers and deserts, the peaks of mountains and the swells of oceans. Endless shows of spectacular beauty witnessed in a single day.

Yet although separated from the world they cannot escape its constant pull. News reaches them of the death of a mother, and with it comes thoughts of returning home. They look on as a typhoon gathers over an island and people they love, in awe of its magnificence and fearful of its destruction.

The fragility of human life fills their conversations, their fears, their dreams. So far from earth, they have never felt more part – or protective – of it. They begin to ask, what is life without earth? What is Earth without humanity?

James, Percival Everett

The Mississippi River, 1861. When the enslaved Jim overhears that he is about to be sold to a new owner in New Orleans and separated from his wife and daughter forever, he decides to hide on nearby Jackson’s Island until he can formulate a plan.

Meanwhile, Huck Finn has faked his own death to escape his violent father who recently returned to town. Thus begins a dangerous and transcendent journey by raft along the Mississippi River, towards the elusive promise of the free states and beyond. As James and Huck navigate the treacherous waters, each bend in the river holds the promise of both salvation and demise.

With rumours of a brewing war, James must face the burden he carries: the family he is desperate to protect and the constant lie he must live. And together, the unlikely pair embark on the most dangerous, and life-changing, odyssey of them all.

The Safekeep, Yael Van Der Wouden

It’s 1961 and the rural Dutch province of Overijssel is quiet. Bomb craters have been filled, buildings reconstructed, and the war is well and truly over. Living alone in her late mother’s country home, Isabel’s life is as it should be: led by routine and discipline. But all is upended when her brother Louis delivers his graceless new girlfriend, Eva, at Isabel's doorstep – as a guest, there to stay for the season…

Eva is Isabel’s antithesis: sleeps late, wakes late, walks loudly through the house and touches things she shouldn’t. In response, Isabel develops a fury-fuelled obsession, and when things start disappearing around the house – a spoon, a knife, a bowl – Isabel’s suspicions spiral out of control. In the sweltering peak of summer, Isabel’s paranoia gives way to desire – leading to a discovery that unravels all Isabel has ever known. The war might not be well and truly over after all, and neither Eva – nor the house in which they live – are what they seem.

My Friends, Hisham Matar

Khaled and Mustafa meet at university in Edinburgh: two Libyan 18-year-olds expecting to return home after their studies. In a moment of recklessness and courage, they travel to London to join a demonstration in front of the Libyan embassy. When government officials open fire on protestors in broad daylight, both friends are wounded, and their lives are forever changed.

Over the years that follow, Khaled, Mustafa and their friend Hosam, a writer, are bound together by their shared history. If friendship is a space to inhabit, theirs becomes small and inhospitable when a revolution in Libya forces them to choose between the lives they have created in London and the lives they left behind.

Stone Yard Devotional, Charlotte Wood

Burnt out and in need of retreat, a middle-aged woman leaves Sydney to return to the place she grew up, taking refuge in a small religious community hidden away on the stark plains of the Australian outback. She doesn’t believe in God, or know what prayer is, and finds herself living this strange, reclusive existence almost by accident.

But disquiet interrupts this secluded life with three visitations. First comes a terrible mouse plague, each day signalling a new battle against the rising infestation. Second is the return of the skeletal remains of a sister who disappeared decades before, presumed murdered. And finally, a troubling visitor plunges the narrator further back into her past.

Headshot, Rita Bullwinkel

Headshot is the story of the eight best teenage girl boxers in the United States, told over the two days of a championship tournament and structured as a series of face-offs. As the girls’ pasts and futures collide, the specific joy and violence of the sport comes to life with electric energy, and a portrait emerges of the desire, envy, perfectionism, madness and sheer physical pleasure that motivates each of these young women to fight.

This is a novel about the radicalness and strangeness of being physically intimate with another human when you are measuring your own body, through competition, against theirs. What does the intimacy of a physical competition feel like? What does it mean to walk through life in the bodies we’ve been given, and what does it mean to use those bodies with abandon?