The recent roar around Heart Lamp has everyone itching to know more about the Booker Prizes, and the various books that end up on its precious radar. Given that the committee values diverse storytelling, especially the kind of stories that give us a lens into marginalised people’s everyday lives, here is a list of Pride month Booker nominated books that you should check out!
The Ministry of Utmost Happiness, Arundhati Roy
Although Roy’s God of Small Things won the Booker in 1997, her fans waited another 20 years for her new book, Ministry of Utmost Happiness, long-listed for the prize in 2017. In Delhi, a mother examines her newborn boy, Aftab, only to find the disturbing anatomical female parts. The lonely Aftab grows up to haunt the Hijras, at the transgender centre, convinced that it is more home than his parental home or the rest of society, where he cannot be himself. As this ravishing, deeply humane novel braids many unconnected lives together, it reinvents what a novel can do and can be. The Ministry of Utmost Happiness demonstrates on every page the miracle of Arundhati Roy’s storytelling gifts.
Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart
The famous winner of the Booker in 2020, this is a powerful, desperate, tragic and harrowing tale, taking its toll on the reader. There is, nevertheless, amongst the grim realities of life, slight slivers of light and hope that shine through the novel. Shuggie Bain is a young boy growing up in 80s Glasgow, in an environment where men were discouraged from showing any emotions. With an alcoholic mother, absent father, and a dawning sense that his queerness means he just doesn’t fit into the same mould as all the other kids. It is a stark, evocative novel that presents both its setting and its characters with deep empathy.
Love and Other Thought Experiments, Sophie Ward
Long-listed for the 2020 Booker, on one level Love and Other Thought Experiments is an understated, contemporary novel about love, loss, unconventional families and the consequences of choice. On another, it’s a sandbox of philosophical ideas ranging from free will and the nature of consciousness to the limits of human experience. This book cannot be shelved into a single genre. What’s special about it is that it traces the every lives of two queer parents — but documents the problems in their lives that have nothing to do with their queer identity, portraying them as ordinary individuals with normal, day-to-day lives.
Girl, Woman, Other by Bernardine Evaristo
Sharing is caring, and Bernardine Evaristo shares life experiences that stretch back a century in time and move towards our immediate, contemporary world. She cares for her characters, and that results in the reader caring too. Joint winner of the 2019 Booker, this book feels like a polyphonic choir of women, singing a song of life in dissonances and harmonies! In the face of feminism, Black consciousness and the queer rights movement, this book spreads the idea that there is no singular truth to any of these identities, breaking the stereotype of queer characters in mainstream novels bearing the burden of representing their entire community.
The Seven Moons of Maali Almeida by Shehan Karunatilaka
Set in Colombo, Sri Lanka, in 1989, the ghost of war photographer Maali Almeida finds himself in a liminal place called the In Between. He has seven days (“moons”) to figure out who killed him and why. The book is effectively structured as a thriller/murder mystery with Maali trying to reconstruct the events that led to his violent death. What’s interesting is that Maali himself is a closeted gay photojournalist in war-torn Sri Lanka. The magical realism of this novel really stands out — in that it uses mythical elements to tell haunting stories of real, queer people.
Words Neeraja Sreenivasan
25.06.2025