Phew. The Booker longlist has been announced for 2021 and, after years of technical trickery and an over-willingness to engage in identity politics, we have a longlist of 13 novels that is so sensible it feels almost radical.

There are no graphic novels, no 200-page poems, no brain-scrambling first-person narratives. Instead, here is a longlist featuring several big hitters – Kazuo Ishiguro, Damon Galgut, Richard Powers, Rachel Cusk – that combines meaty contemporary issues with novels that are, whisper it, by and large a pleasure to read. Perhaps emboldened by the relief and approval that met last year’s winner, the achingly sad, invigoratingly beautiful Shuggie Bain by Douglas Stuart, this year’s longlist appears to have the reader firmly back in mind.

The Telegraph London