Rachel Cusk’s singular novel stands out on wide-ranging Booker longlist

Second Place is both timeless and up-to-the minute, with big names Richard Powers and Kazuo Ishiguro among strong international finalists

This is a longlist light on debuts and surprises, heavy on historical fiction, with an impressive geographical reach and an interest in the weight of the past. The biggest names look to the future, however: Kazuo Ishiguro’s Klara and the Sun shows us, through its narrator’s artificial eyes, a tired, fragile world in which inequality is ever-deepening and humans are at risk of becoming defunct. As ever, the Nobel laureate is exploring the messy mysteries of emotion, memory and what it is to be human: the book makes a fascinating companion piece to his 2005 novel Never Let Me Go. And it’s no surprise to see Richard Powers here, previously shortlisted for The Overstory; it’s not out until September, but Bewilderment, an investigation of climate grief and the prospect of life on other planets, told through the story of a father and his troubled son, will be a strong contender.

Elsewhere, recent political history and national trauma come to the fore. This is the third Booker listing for Damon Galgut; The Promise follows a white South African family in the decades before and after the end of apartheid, weighing broken promises on a national and individual level. Anuk Arudpragasam is a hugely promising young Sri Lankan author: in his second novel, A Passage North, a young man reflects on the horrors of the civil war. There’s a more fable-like treatment of political violence in one of the surprise inclusions, An Island; South African Karen Jennings’s small-press parable centres on an isolated lighthouse keeper who has suffered under colonialism and dictatorship in an unnamed African country. Debut novel The Sweetness of Water by Nathan Harris has been a smash in the US: a revisionist take on civil war history, with a sweeping treatment of forbidden gay love and the aftermath of slavery.

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