The first box of submissions for the 2026 Booker prize arrived by courier a few days before Christmas. As I made my way through 19 books over the next six weeks (they start you off at a leisurely pace) I spotted a theme: God is back. In novels set from antiquity to our contemporary world, from romances to comedies to thrillers, characters reached for transcendence and absolution and found themselves mired in all manner of sin, or at least spiritual confusion. Priests were popping up everywhere; people sought comfort in the ancient texts; near-biblical bouts of extreme weather would prove either cleansing or calamitous.
The boxes continued to arrive month after month, making me feel as though I was part of a very generous but exacting book club. There was the excitement of – as was the chair of this year’s judging panel Mary Beard’s method of choice – reaching your hand into the box, playing lucky dip to choose your next adventure. There was the joy of spotting recurring themes. Publishers decide which of their books to submit for consideration, and I’ve heard that it can lead to agonising second-guessing about what the judges may like (the preponderance of priests may have been due to the poet Patricia Lockwood, who wrote the wonderful memoir Priestdaddy, being on the panel). I heard reports of one publisher declaring: “Mary Beard hates sex scenes.” “I don’t hate them,” she said when I told her this, “but they can’t be bad.” She was true to her word. In our first meeting, I made the case for a novel I enjoyed. She later emailed us a description of a penis in it that was admittedly clumsy.
