The God of Little Things to Shuggie Bain: The Queen’s Jubilee Book List | Books

The Handmaid’s Tale, The God of Small Things and A Clockwork Orange are among 70 books from across the Commonwealth chosen to mark the Queen’s platinum jubilee.

Ten books for each of the seven decades of the Queen’s reign were selected by a panel of librarians, booksellers and literary experts based on recommendations from readers in 31 countries.

The Big Jubilee Read includes “brilliant, beautiful and exciting writing” in novels, anthologies of short stories and poetry published since 1952, organizers said. They were “shared stories that define our social and cultural heritage.”

But there was controversy over some omissions, including JK Rowling’s Harry Potter series and JRR Tolkien’s Lord of the Rings.

Susheila Nasta, emeritus professor of modern and contemporary literature at Queen Mary University of London, said there was a “big discussion” about JK Rowling when the panel narrowed 152 recommendations to a final list of 70.

“Many fantastic books were suggested for the list, but in the end the feeling was that… [Harry Potter and the Philosopher’s Stone] it was primarily a children’s book,” he told BBC Radio 4’s Today programme.

“In terms of the space during that decade, which was the ’90s when more and more books were coming out in the Commonwealth, it was decided to make room for a book that was good and equally well received.”

In the past two years, Rowling has faced criticism for her rejection of the phrase “menstruating people” instead of the word “women”, with some accusing her of transphobia.

A number of high-profile books, such as Doris Lessing’s 1962 novel The Golden Notebook, also failed to make the final list, Nasta said. “The Golden Notebook was a huge influence on me, but we had to drop some. There were two books for each place.”

The Big Jubilee Read, created by BBC Arts and The Reading Agency, encompasses award-winning books such as Wolf Hall by Hilary Mantel, Girl, Woman, Other by Bernadine Evaristo and the 1966 Nobel Prize-winning poetry collection Death of a Naturalist by Seamus Heaney. .

The Booker Prize winners of the past two years, Douglas Stuart’s Shuggie Bain and Damon Galgut’s The Promise, are included in the final decade.

Yann Martel’s Life of Pi, whose stage and screen adaptations won Olivier Awards and Oscars, is on the 1992-2001 list.

Previous titles include VS Naipaul’s A House for Mr Biswas, Muriel Spark’s The Girls of Slender Means, John Le Carré’s Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy, Douglas Adams’s The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy, Salman Rushdie’s Midnight’s Children and the epic poem by Derek Walcott. Omers.

The Big Jubilee Read campaign will include events and activities at libraries and bookstores, with resources available to reading groups across the country.

Suzy Klein, the BBC’s head of arts and classical music television, said the list was “a real opportunity to discover stories from every continent and take us through the decades, books we might never otherwise have read, and read authors whose work deserves a spotlight to be illuminated”.

The Great Jubilee Reading List

1952-61

• The Palm Wine Drinker – Amos Tutuola (1952, Nigeria)

• The Hills Were Happy Together – Roger Mais (1953, Jamaica)

• In the castle of my skin – George Lamming (1953, Barbados)

• My Bones and My Flute – Edgar Mittelholzer (1955, Guyana)

• The Lonely Londoners – Sam Selvon (1956, Trinidad and Tobago/England)

• The Guide – R. K. Narayan (1958, India)

• To the Lord, With Love – E. R. Braithwaite (1959, Guiana)

• A Moonlit Night – Caradog Prichard (1961, Wales)

• A House for Mr Biswas – VS Naipaul (1961, Trinidad and Tobago/England

• Sunlight on a Broken Column – Attia Hosain (1961, India)

1962-71

• A Clockwork Orange – Anthony Burgess (1962, England)

• The Interrogation – JMG Le Clézio (1963, France/Mauritius)

• The Meager Girls – Muriel Spark (1963, Scotland)

• Arrow of God – Chinua Achebe (1964, Nigeria)

• Death of a Naturalist – Seamus Heaney (1966, Northern Ireland)

• Great Sargasso Sea – Jean Rhys (1966, Dominica/Wales)

• A Grain of Wheat – Ngũgĩ wa Thiong’o (1967, Kenya)

• Picnic at Hanging Rock – Joan Lindsay (1967, Australia)

• The Beauties Are Not Yet Born – Ayi Kwei Armah (1968, Ghana)

• When Rain Clouds Gather – Bessie Head (1968, Botswana/South Africa)

1972-81

• The Man from Nowhere – Kamala Markandaya (1972, India)

• Tinker Tailor Soldier Spy – John Le Carré (1974, England)

• The Thorny Birds – Colleen McCullough (1977, Australia)

• The Raven Eaters – Bapsi Sidhwa (1978, Pakistan)

• The Sea, The Sea – Iris Murdoch (1978, England)

• Who do you think you are? – Alice Munro (1978, Canada)

• Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy – Douglas Adams (1979, England)

• Tsotsi – Athol Fugard (1980, South Africa)

• Clear Daylight – Anita Desai (1980, India)

• Midnight’s Children – Salman Rushdie (1981, England/India)

1982-91

• Schindler’s Ark – Thomas Keneally (1982, Australia)

• Beka Lamb – Zee Edgell (1982, Belize)

• The Bone People – Keri Hulme (1984, New Zealand)

• The Handmaid’s Tale – Margaret Atwood (1985, Canada)

• Summer Lightning – Olive Senior (1986, Jamaica)

• The Whale Rider – Witi Ihimaera (1987, New Zealand)

• The Remains of the Day – Kazuo Ishiguro (1989, England)

• Omeros – Derek Walcott (1990, Saint Lucia)

• The Adoption Papers – Jackie Kay (1991, Scotland)

• Cloudstreet – Tim Winton (1991, Australia)

1992-2001

• The English Patient – Michael Ondaatje (1992, Canada/Sri Lanka)

• The Stone Diaries – Carol Shields (1993, Canada)

• Paradise – Abdulrazak Gurnah (1994, Tanzania/England)

• A Fine Balance – Rohinton Mistry (1995, India/Canada)

• Salt – Earl Lovelace (1996, Trinidad and Tobago)

• The God of Small Things – Arundhati Roy (1997, India)

• The Blue Quilt – Raj Kamal Jha (1999, India)

• Misfortune – J.M. Coetzee (1999, South Africa/Australia)

• White Teeth – Zadie Smith (2000, England)

• Life of Pi – Yann Martel (2001, Canada)

2002-11

• Little Island – Andrea Levy (2004, England)

• The Secret River – Kate Grenville (2005, Australia)

• The Book Thief – Markus Zusak (2005, Australia)

• Half a Yellow Sun – Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (2006, Nigeria)

• A Golden Age – Tahmima Anam (2007, Bangladesh)

• The Boat – Nam Le (2008, Australia)

• Wolf Hall – Hilary Mantel (2009, England)

• The Book of Women of the Night – Marlon James (2009, Jamaica)

• The Memory of Love – Aminatta Forna (2010, Sierra Leone/Scotland)

• Chinese – Shehan Karunatilaka (2010, Sri Lanka)

2012-21

• Our Lady of the Nile – Scholastique Mukasonga (2012, Rwanda)

• The Luminaries – Eleanor Catton (2013, New Zealand)

• Behold the dreamers – Imbolo Mbue (2016, Cameroon)

• The Bone Readers – Jacob Ross (2016, Granada)

• How We Disappeared – Jing-Jing Lee (2019, Singapore)

• Girl, Woman, Other – Bernardine Evaristo (2019, England)

• The Night Tiger – Yangsze Choo (2019, Malaysia)

• Shuggie Bain – Douglas Stuart (2020, Scotland)

• A Passage to the North – Anuk Arudpragasam (2021, Sri Lanka)

• The Promise – Damon Galgut (2021, South Africa)