I’ve read the Booker 2026 shortlist. Two novels are brilliant on living through the mess of the 2020s

In the mood for a wild card? It isn’t just technically true that the judges of this year’s Booker Prize could plump for any of the shortlisted novels when they make their announcement on Monday night. It also feels that way. The panel, chaired by Mary Beard, have already flagged that their conversations are filled with persuasive observations, evolving opinions and dissent.

Having read the six books, I can imagine a spirited case being made for each one (which is not the same as saying I would make it). The Disappearers, by Marlon James, is vivid, violent and epic. John of John, by Douglas Stuart, another previous winner, is evocative, intimate and heartbreaking. The End of Everything, by M John Harrison, who at 81 would become the oldest ever winner, is odd, grim and inventive. May We Feed the King, by Rebecca Perry, the only debut author, is playful, intricate and laconic.

But it’s the other two contenders I want to concentrate on: Black Bag, by Luke Kennard, and The Things We Never Say, by Elizabeth Strout.

Kennard’s book is funny situationally and at sentence level. It revolves around a bizarre “psychological inquiry”, based on a real social experiment, in which an out-of-work actor is paid to silently attend university lectures wearing only a leather suit bag.

A professor named Justine soon starts to treat him as a “sentient sex toy”, which would be fine if he didn’t fancy her, while Claudio, his daftly entrepreneurial friend, tries to monetise the gig as a “statement about being a man”.

In one scene, the unnamed narrator, having grown to love the comfort of anonymity and the smell of leather, copes with anxiety by upending a female friend’s handbag and pulling it over his head. “Once you overcome the initial feeling of transgression you can really do anything,” he says gamely, before excruciating shame kicks in.

He tells us he will represent his parents as “two pillars of rough-hewn stone” because narrators “damage everyone they touch”, but this quirk somehow only heightens the pathos when he expresses his wish to be able to help them financially in their old age.

His chosen career in the arts – “an act of hubris so self-destructive the gods don’t even bother to punish you for it” – instead means he is subsisting on a low, precarious income.

The British higher-education comedy of Black Bag seems a million miles away from the wealthy yet sombre world of Strout’s novel, set in a coastal Massachusetts town before and after the re-election of Donald Trump.

Artie Dam, Strout’s quiet protagonist, is a despairing high-school history teacher who finds his students have grown fearful. So, too, has the school principal, who knowingly engages in anticipatory obedience, or the well-documented phenomenon in which people comply with autocrats in advance of any direct orders or threats.

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Artie, feeling distanced from his wife and son, gains a sliver of comfort by confiding in Ken, a man who saves his life, only for Strout to expertly play the “what’s the worst that can happen to your main character now?” card. When he discovers his new friend is a Trump supporter, Artie’s pragmatic yet agonising resolution is that he will be “careful now with Ken”.

Strout once again writes about heavy emotion with a light touch, balancing the tragedy of a society poisoned from above with her trademark “moments of grace”. These instances of kindness, empathy and connection are deft enough to take readers by surprise but still feel unshowy and consistent with human behaviour. One in the final line of the novel floored me.

These are the only two shortlisted titles set wholly in contemporary times. Strout’s topical novel is excellent on the power of polarised politics to corrode our most important relationships. Kennard’s zeitgeisty book skilfully conveys the preposterous economic backdrop to millennial disarray.

They both hinge on lonely, frustrated men who must confront the unexpected ways in which material aspects of their, and our, lives are at the whims and mercy of others.

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They also both centre on occupations vulnerable to philistinism. The Things We Never Say links decency with the desire to understand history, while Black Bag slips in a line about there being a chance “the width of a crack in a martini glass” that we need the arts more than ever.

The judges’ final debate may not come down to Kennard, who they have already brought to wider attention, and Strout, a known quantity, but their presence on the same list tells its own story about the fundamental foolishness of weighing one piece of art against another.

That these two standout books depart from one another tonally and narratively shows there is no single way to write brilliantly and profoundly about the sad absurdities and absurd sadnesses of fumbling through life in the 2020s. Time to toss a coin?