PRETEND YOU’RE DEAD AND I CARRY YOU – Julián Delgado Lopera

“It is a known fact that some people grow to be old, while others become birds or panthers or beasts. Some people even turn into rivers.”

“It is a known fact that the queens who refuse their destiny are haunted. Rejection turns itself inward, a bullet to the heart of said queen, and unleashes, per Travesti Lore, a river of curses.”

Julián Delgado Lopera’s Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You (Liveright Publishing Corp. 2026) is John of John set in Columbia. While it was not eligible for the Booker (it hasn’t been published in the UK yet), it has been longlisted for the National Book Award. I thought it was magical and devastatingly beautiful. I was not familiar with the meaning of travesti, but I have lived in Thailand and am familiar with the kathoey. While the kathoey and the travesti are similar in that they are individuals who were assigned male at birth who present in a feminine gender role, the origins and general acceptance is very different between Thailand and Columbia.

The novel is told from the POVs of Valentina and her father, Ignacio, dancing around a timeline with present day set in the 1990s. Valentina is 12 and obsessed with death, especially those who have died in the Magdalena River, which is a spiritual and literal graveyard, particularly in travesti lore. Her mother died in that river, and Valentina and her father are dealing with grief and depression and, in the case of Ignacio, guilt.  She is trying to understand and protect her father, as his grief threatens to drown them all.

But it isn’t just grief. Ignacio is a travesti, only he has never fully accepted the identity.  He has spent the majority of his life trying to suppress it, and that is where the curse comes in.  His sections reveal a tortured and tragic past, a childhood marked by trauma and abuse, and a love that he broke his own heart over when he made a particularly brutal choice. Mamadora Electrica and other queens enter into the pages, both in the past and present, to try and save both Ignacio and Valentina from the curse. 

The novel is gorgeous. Steeped in lore and the art of storytelling, the words sing from the pages, a blend of English and Spanish, inviting the reader in for arepas and a little kiki. It is, without a doubt, the kind of story I love most. Magic. Heart. Clinging to a tradition of oral storytelling that transcends pages, Pretend You’re Dead and I Carry You is an example of why I “really love reading.” (Take that, Mary Beard.)

THE BOOK OF CHUCK – Latoya Watkins

“And I try to record the scent of outdoors and flowers and dust and lavender and old tears so I can carry it with me.”

After reading Latoya Watkins’s Perish, I stated that it wasn’t for me, writing  “There are definite echoes of Morrison and Zora Neale Hurston, but it is much more ragged, raw and brutal and it never has the sun break free of the clouds.”  And while The Book of Chuck (Tiny Reparations 2026) is very similar to Perish,  there’s a more hopeful element to it.  I couldn’t put it down.

Set in Texas and spanning four generations, The Book of Chuck follows one family’s clairvoyant curse and the shattered family bonds left its wake.  In 1936, Nannie, a baby that shouldn’t have been able to speak yet, touches her father. “Pa, no go. Him burn,” she says. A family curse, passed down through her father, has made her able to see her father’s death before it happened.  Following her father’s death, her mother severs the maternal bond, though not as drastically as her mother in law had.  Nannie grows up and gives birth to several children, including Chuck.  Chuck carries the curse, and much like Nannie’s mother had forsaken her, Nannie pushes him away and he is raised by others.  As an adult, he returns to Nannie to seek answers and belonging. 

Flash forward to 1999 and Chuck’s youngest daughter, Baby.  Chuck is dead, her mother has remarried, and Baby has begun to see things when she touches someone. She has questions about the father she doesn’t remember, so she seeks out the family she doesn’t know.

It’s an excellent family saga.  You will love Chuck. Mostly.  And Lettie.  Mostly. People are neither all good nor all bad – we all live in the grey.

Read this book.

A TENDER AGE – A Tender Age

“You think you can die only once. What luck, if that’s true. I was eleven years old, and I thought I knew everything.”

Chang-Rae Lee’s A Tender Age (Riverhead 2026) should have captured my attention a bit more than it did.  I tend to love bildungsromans, and a novel about a Korean kid growing up in New York in the 1970s who gets sent to a church-run summer camp of Asian kids sounded amazing. Maybe it was me, it probably was, but this was a chore to read.  I realized early on I didn’t much care for it.  Eleven-year-old Jeon-Gi and the Lord of the Flies-esque playground and later summer camp never landed with this reader.  (To be fair, I also didn’t enjoy Lord of the Flies.)

I enjoyed how the novel opened (though I was concerned for the dog), and I did enjoy the moments when adult Jeon-Gi interjected (even though it was inconsistent and nearly jarring when it happened), but ultimately this is a pass from me.

BEGINNING MIDDLE END – Valeria Luiselli

“This was a story with a mother and a daughter and a beginning. And the story, it turned out, was about everything that we reinvented after that.”

This year’s Booker list is extremely male-centric, which infuriates me because it’s not like the pool of eligible candidates was devoid of books that center women. I continue to scratch my head over the failure to include Beginning Middle End.  Valeria Luiselli is a former long-listed author and while that does not mean the new work was automatically submitted, I’d have thought her publisher would have included it in their quota.  (Especially since it’s beautiful and it fits nicely with the themes of loneliness, storytelling and how we remember.) It has been suggested that maybe Mary Beard took issue with how the Greeks were handled both in this and in Martel’s work, which was 100% submitted as Martel is a former winner.  I hate to think the chair has that much veto power, but we don’t really know how it works. Maybe all the judges get an automatic in and an automatic kill, maybe the chair had more, maybe they just didn’t like it– who knows. In my opinion, this list desperately needed a story of mothers and daughters.  (And no, The Vivisectors doesn’t count with its matricide and attempted filicide (at least that’s how I read the stairs).)

Beginning Middle End is the story of a mother and daughter on a trip to Sicily. The mother is an author who has just finished her international book tour. She is working on her new book about a woman writing a book and sending passages to her mother to translate because her mother is showing signs of dementia. It’s a book within a book within a book. I usually hate when things get meta, but I enjoyed this immensely.

It’s a novel of women. A young woman who pretends to be a man so she can join an archeological dig in the 1920s. The artifact she steals that is passed down to her daughter, who has passed it to her daughter, who has taken it with her and her daughter on their international travels. The young daughter who fears it is bad luck and wants to return it.

It’s a soft and intimate story of maternal lines, memory, and storytelling. The fragmented approach to blurring fiction with not fiction followed by the child’s letter and her photographs and postcards was an interesting approach.  I did, however, enjoy the beginning significantly more.

Read this book.

SWITZY – Emma Cline

“You’re the boss, applesauce – lights out.”

“Do no harm – hadn’t he done only a little?”

Emma Cline’s Switzy  is the last of the Booker longlist for me, and much like the rest of the longlist, it deals with loneliness, memory, and a rewriting of the past.  David Hastings has Alzheimer’s disease, and he has made preparations for  an assisted death in Switzerland. (Hence the “Switzy” title.)  The novel opens with Hastings on a plane flying to London to see his daughter before proceeding to Zurich. (Dementia pops up in numerous books from the longlist, from major plot points to minor details.) His life and all its transgressions flash before his eyes, fragmented memories snagged by the passage of time and lost to the amyloids.

For me, a large part of the focus was his childhood friendship with Tom.  And that’s a slow burn without much resolution, but there’s no other way to really handle it; you wouldn’t want Tom to embrace him. The awkwardness of the painful encounter goes unnoticed by David, thanks to the disease that continues to eat away at him, but I’m not sure the payoff was there for the reader.

David isn’t likeable, but the writing is. I enjoyed the fragmented approach, the flashes of memory, and the snippets of self-realization that he hadn’t been the best friend, husband, father, or coworker. Snippets.  He is, until the very end, David Hastings. The writing is sharp even when his memories aren’t. The repetition, the stream of consciousness, the quick brown fox… it all works extremely well.

It’s not my favorite from the list, and I’m unlikely to read anymore Cline, but it’s a solid entry on the longlist.

#booker101 #bookerprizelonglist #switzy

THE DISAPPEARERS – Marlon James

“Yes, there will be violence. Yes, there will be tenderness. Yes, there will be rape.”

“Me tired of this. Me tired of running. Me tired of fighting, too.”

“We covering our tracks so good that even we can’t find the way back home.”

“So him just abracadabra and vanish or somebody disappear him?”

“This is how you do it. This is how you disappear completely. It’s not that you vanish, it’s that you make yourself into the kind of person nobody wants to see.”

The longest book of the 2026 Booker longlist is also the hardest to read. Marlon James’s The Disappearers is extremely graphic in its violence and sex, quite often those two are overlapping. It is a teeth barred, LOOK AT ME approach that says “I am here. You will see me.” And man, is it effective. It’s not “fun” to read, I can’t imagine people enjoy reading about brutal attacks on young men, but how James writes, his craft in framing the story, is enjoyable for someone who loves literature.

And loving literature is at the heart of this novel and not just because it’s about a group of men who join together to put on a play – I lost count of the literary references. Eddy’s favorite book is Bret Easton Ellis’s Less than Zero (as someone who does not like the literary brat pack, I won’t hold it against him), but we also have Toni Morrison show up (both Beloved and Song of Solomon), Stephen King, Dickens (the A Christmas Carol reference ticks my Christmas nod.  All but 2 from the longlist have a Christmas reference.) Wide Sargasso Sea (one of my favorite books ever), the Bronte sisters, Shakespeare, James Joyce, Joyce Carol Oates, The Count of Monte Cristo, and the Wilfred Owen poem “Dulce et Decorum Est.” A man dying from AIDS recites from “The Rime of the Ancient Mariner,”  These are just a handful. This book loves literature. (And music.)

The novel opens with a 19-year-old boy’s journal. And then goes into brief, bold snippets of hate from those who attacked those who had gathered for the play. What follows are interviews with two of the actors. The next section is epistolary, featuring letters from the director of the play. The last section is divided into two parts. The first is in first person and the second is in second. It features two victims and how the trauma continues to impact them – both of them falling into madness. The novel spans 1988 – 2005.

There is much to be said about this novel that won’t fit in a caption, but I’ll simply close by saying I loved this novel.  Read it.  And then read it again.

For more of my thoughts, you can check out the other two posts about The Disappearers.

THE SECRET LIVES OF MURDERERS’s WIVES – Elizabeth Arnott

“Don’t feel bad. A housewife can’t solve a murder,” he says gently. “Not even one like you.”

I really expected to like Elizabeth Arnott’s The Secret Lives of Murderers’ Wives (Berkley 2026). The premise is fantastic: three former wives of serial killers work together to catch a killer that is terrorizing California in 1966. Despite this fantastic setup, the novel falls flat. Somehow the women never seem fully fleshed, and the ending is, dare I say, disrespectful to not only the wives but the readers. Everyone deserved a bit more.

Beverley, Elsie, and Margot all had the potential to be well formed and complicated characters, but they all read as caricatures with brief glimpses of substance.  There’s beautiful Beverley who has spent her entire life seeking approval of men.  The studious Elsie who has also spent her life seeking approval of men and silencing her own goals – both under the thumb of her professor husband and under the eyes of the men in the newspaper room that she serves coffee.  And then there’s Margot, the glitz and glam girl.  Her role pretty seems solely to create tension between the women and to embrace a Hollywood angle.

There was significant potential with Beverley with the media interviews, the plea to women, and the concern her son is going to be a killer like his father.  There is also potential with the secretary dreaming of being a journalist.  The Hollywood mogul section is honestly a waste of words. Arnott never lets her leading ladies truly excel, and the ending is just a neat and tidy little wrap up.

Also, the sections with the woman currently being held by the serial killer are interesting, but head-scratching once this person is identified.

It’s not a bad novel.  It’s a quick read that will hold your attention. I guess it’s okay for what it is.

SAID THE DEAD – Doireann Ní Ghríofa

Doireann Ní Ghríofa’s Said the Dead (Farrar, Straus and Giroux 9/22/026 – a huge thanks to the publisher for the galley copy)  is one of my top reads of the year. I have to assume it wasn’t submitted for Booker consideration, likely due to the genre-blurring elements that lean heavily into nonfiction, because I can’t imagine a panel that would intentionally pass on this novel. I personally think Said the Dead, Son of Nobody, Transcription, and May We Feed the King should all be studied together (and I really would have appreciated them all on the longlist, but we only got one).

Said the Dead is genre-defying, but it is very heavy on the nonfiction.  The novel follows someone called the “Reader” who is finally named at the end of the book at Doireann as she dives into the archives of a derelict Victorian mental hospital in Cork, Ireland.  She spends years pouring over the casebooks, following mostly the notes and life of Dr. Lucia Strangman. Breathing life into the patients, the Reader takes us, the second reader, along on a ghost story, with the women in the asylum and their stories taking center stage. They will not be forgotten. The Reader, obsessed with the asylum, Lucia, and the women, teeters on madness herself.

As the Reader recreates the past, she slips into it. Her trespass into the past is often noticed by the patients and on occasion, a doctor. She once exposed the hiding place of a thief.  (How this works in the text is a bit like how Perry does it in May We Feed the King.)

I gravitated to the women who had babies in the asylum or who were admitted not long after birth. This is likely due to the current interest in postpartum psychosis in the States as the jury continues to deliberate in the Clancy trial.  But all the bits are marvelous. From Ernest’s injury and a fleeting fear that history will repeat itself in another hunting accident to memories of grandchildren of a woman they loved – it’s a remarkable novel.

Read this book.

MAY WE FEED THE KING – Rebecca Perry

“In this way, my work has sustained me when people could not.”

“My house had been holding its breath for a long time.”

“No, he will not come when called. He is no dog.”

Rebecca Perry’s May We Feed the King won the Waterstones Debut Fiction Prize before being longlisted for the Booker; there is understandably a lot of hype around the novel.  Is it worth the hype? I wrote before that this novel may be at least part of the reason why Martel’s Son of Nobody wasn’t listed as they are simply too similar. (Martel has a scholar translating ancient text and blurring the lines between history and present. Perry has a curator setting a historical scene and blurring the lines between history and present.) For me, I liked how Martel did it more. That said, May We Feed the King is a remarkable debut. It may possibly be slightly overhyped, but I don’t hate it on the longlist.

In this novel of dual timelines, we have a curator commissioned to set 6 scenes for the 750th anniversary of a former palace turned historic site. (The fact no one knows what the anniversary is actually for is a fantastic detail.) The unnamed narrator purchases numerous replicas, particularly food, to incorporate into the scenes. She wants to be alone in the palace, to “see” the scenes. A wee bit of a romance, one of longing looks and dreams, emerges with the archivist. The narrator is dealing with a loss. Her partner has left, the house is empty, she is unmoored. This loss combined with the longing for the archivist makes its way into her scenes.

The second timeline deals with the king who does not wish to be the king. (One review says it’s a novel of two people who are horrible at their jobs. Three if you count the author. Ha) He’s soft, more content to be with his cats or learning how to make a cinnamon cake than ordering executions and forcing his will on his subjects.  There’s no heir forthcoming. The Queen is sleeping with the physician’s assistant, and the King prefers the company of his young male attendant. As his story unfolds, the reader gets glimpses of the curator. The King feels like he is being watched from windows, closed trunks, and keyholes. This is the curator. Much like Martel uses animals that are not historically accurate in his time and place, Perry references the “guava flesh” that the King “has no knowledge of;” the curator openly admits she’s not that concerned with accuracy.

It’s a novel of how the present reworks history, how the replica is never as good as the experience, how the teller inserts themselves in every story. And it’s about escape.

THE SHADOW OF THE OBJECT – Chloe Aridjis

“No more tricks, no more abracadabra, no more misdirection or uncertainty, no more seeing things one way when most people saw them another.”

“My mother didn’t mention him, I didn’t mention him, but there he sat in the room with us.”

“…she didn’t believe in blank pages…”

Right now, Chloe Aridjis’s The Shadow of the Object sits at the very top of my Booker rankings; it’s absolutely fantastic. The novel itself is a bit of shadow puppetry, and the light play and storytelling Aridjis employs in this novel of grief and distance, and change is absolute magic.

The novel opens with Flora visiting her mom and stepdad after three long years. She is bitten badly by the family dog and spends much of her time in Mexico in the hospital. There, she meets Wilhemina, a German collector of magical things and toys. Each night, she sits with Wilhemina.  They share stories. They share magic.

Wilhemina talks about how her adult son, still in England, is still waiting for his “swerve.” This approach to life is one that grabs Flora and holds fast.  She becomes obsessed with Wilhemina, the story telling, and the magic lantern show holds.

What unfolds is a story of loss, grief, and growing up.  One of being unmoored and set adrift.  One of a father who goes out to play chess and never comes home, and the family that pretends to be over it.  One of a mother who cares more for her objects than her child. One of animals that bite.  The story is told in the shadows of magic and the polish of silver.

If you’re keeping track of my Christmas bits, this novel features a slide for the lantern of a Christmas pudding that turns into a monster.

Read this novel.