Whale: SHORTLISTED FOR THE INTERNATIONAL BOOKER PRIZE 2023

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Equally, they could be from anywhere, small villages across the planet dreaming of crossing into the promised land of whale-sized aspirations. Kwan unleashes a tide of feral characters, many of them women with an almost primal hunger for survival that are plucked from the landscape of his imagination that ranges from a small village in a remote mountain valley to a fishing village in South Korea. Their lives are guided by fate, and their futures are entwined with those of an ugly old crone and her one-eyed daughter. Her debut novel features linked characters from 1459 to 1945, and includes maths genius Ada Lovelace having an affair with Charles Dickens, the Portuguese conquest of west Africa, and prostitution in Buchenwald, all narrated by a wandering spirit that occupies inanimate objects.

Brimming with surprises and wicked humour, Cheon Myeong-kwan's novel Whale is an adventure satire of epic proportions by one of international literature’s most original voices. They chose the longlist from 134 books published between 1 May 2022 and 30 April 2023 and submitted to the prize by publishers.Her stepfather urged the men to work harder and her mother smiled flirtatiously at them, her face caked in makeup. Cocooned by the morning fog, the town faintly revealed its shape, like a once-prosperous ancient city fallen into ruin.

She’s nicknamed, by her girlfriend, after “those large, solitary rocks in southern Patagonia, pieces of world left over after creation, isolated and exposed to every element”. This is a story full of magic and humour, but there is also profound darkness and struggle, terrible violence and prejudice. Standing Heavy delivers a powerful invitation to reflect upon the multiple meanings of “postcolonial France” and the Franco-African relationship, 60 years after the “end of Empire”. At one point the prospect of the death of a child is described as “so unacceptable that we have chosen not to name it”.I want to visit Korea even more now after reading this and had a strong desire to cook fish when reading! These are just a few of the events that set Myeong-kwan Cheon’s beautifully crafted, wild world in motion. The images that he conjures travel through several life-spans of, and trajectories of, the often cataclysmic changes that have rocked the Korean peninsula, bifurcated by the Communist North and the American flavoured South with its reliance on the capitalist model. The Gospel According to the New World starts with the birth of a boy in an “overseas department”, “surrounded by water on all sides”.

Boulder picks apart the piety of motherhood and delivers a heroine whose wildness leaves her always giddily yearning for escape. But below the antic exterior this is a serious book and a very strong contender, about “the innocent monster of the past” and how excessive devotion to it will lock us out of a more hopeful future. Guadalupe Nettel’s moving and unflinching Still Born balances empathy and cruelty; it is ‘honest, unsentimental and compassionate about the choices we think we’re making, and the choices that are foisted upon us’, said our judges. This was the first book I’ve ever translated where I didn’t reach out to the author during the process.

With a poetic intensity that oscillates between the fiercely carnal and a stark abstraction, Eva Baltasar immerses the reader in the consciousness of her protagonist, “Boulder”. Whale shines a light on the changes that Korea – and its women especially – has experienced in its rapid transition from pre-modern to post-modern society.