I’ve read the Booker 2026 shortlist. Two novels are brilliant on living through the mess of the 2020s
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Luke Kennard's Black Bag and Elizabeth Strout's The Things We Never Say are featured on the 2026 Booker shortlist. These two novels examine the experience of living through the 2020s. Both stories center on characters who realize their lives are controlled by others.
Black Bag, by Luke Kennard, and The Things We Never Say, by Elizabeth Strout, hinge on characters who confront the ways in which their lives are at the mercy of others