Love Forms by Claire Adam

Love Forms is the heart-aching search of a mother for the daughter she left behind a lifetime ago.

Trinidad, 1980: Dawn Bishop, aged sixteen, leaves her home and journeys across the sea to Venezuela. There, she gives birth to a baby girl, and leaves her with nuns to be given up for adoption.

Dawn tries to carry on with her life – a move to England, a marriage, a career, two sons, a divorce – but through it all, she still thinks of the child she had in Venezuela, and of what might have been.

Then, forty years later, a woman from an internet forum gets in touch. She says that she might be Dawn’s long-lost daughter, stirring up a complicated mix of feelings: could this be the person to give form to all the love and care a mother has left to offer?

Universality by Natasha Brown

Universality is a twisty, slippery story of media, class, power and truth.

On an abandoned Yorkshire farm, a group of hippie-anarchists have taken up residence to build a new society. When their leader is brutally bludgeoned with a solid gold bar, an ambitious young journalist sets out to uncover the truth behind the attack. The long-read exposé she writes goes viral – but is there more to the story than meets the eye?

Universality unravels the messy aftermath of that exposé through the perspective of each of the mystery’s key players: a self-pitying banker, a columnist with secrets, a cult leader with dreams, and a fugitive with nothing left to lose.

The Rest of Our Lives by Benjamin Markovits

What’s left when your kids grow up and leave home?

The Rest of Our Lives is an unforgettable road-trip novel, which beautifully explores the nuance and complications of a long-term marriage.

When Tom Layward’s wife had an affair, he resolved to leave her as soon as their youngest daughter turned eighteen. Twelve years later, while taking her to Pittsburgh to start university, he remembers his pact and keeps driving west.

The book’s editor, publishing director Angus Cargill, writes:

I first met Ben Markovits nearly twenty-five years ago, at a TLS party somewhere in London. We were both pretty young and didn’t know many people, but he was very tall and American, so he stood out in the crowd that night. Soon after, my then colleague Lee Brackstone signed up his first novel, which he’d been telling us about that night. All these years later, Ben has published a dozen novels with us at Faber. In 2013, he was named one of Granta’s Best of Young British Novelists (having married an English woman and lived in London ever since) and he won the James Tait Black Memorial Prize in 2015.

The Rest of Our Lives instantly felt special when we received the manuscript, attracting impassioned reads in house, and then from fellow writers ahead of publication. Understated but profound and resonant, it is a novel about the journey of getting older, the challenges and rewards of a long-term marriage and the unwanted spectre of serious illness. Reading it for the first time put me in the same emotional and intellectual space as John Williams’ Stoner and the best of Alexander Payne’s films. It’s been so heartening to see the strength and feeling of critics and readers’ reviews to date, and now to see it on the Booker longlist. As John Self wrote in The Times on the announcement of the longlist, ‘The Rest of Our Lives is the very best of traditional literary fiction: story, dialogue, characters all directed toward the reader’s pleasure and understanding of a man who drives away from his life and tries to work out what the hell is going on. We loved it. You: read it.’