Hello Friend We Missed You by 38-year-old Welsh author Richard Owain Roberts wins Not the Booker Prize 2020 with 97 eligible votes. This debut novel is a deeply poignant and bleakly comic book about loneliness, solipsism, rural gentrification, and learning to exist in the least excruciating way possible.
The shortlisted novels include Bangladeshi born Shahnaz Ahsan’s Hashim & Family. An award-winning writer of short stories, Shahnaz Ahsan was born and raised in West Yorkshire. She comes from a British-Bangladeshi family originally from Moulvibazar.
The Not the Booker prize is an annual experiment initiated by The Guardian since 2009, to find the best novel of the year. What makes this award stand out is that it uses a public nomination and voting system open to all readers of the Guardian book blog. The winner of the award, which has the same criteria as the Booker Prize, receives a Guardian coffee mug.
Readers are asked to nominate a book fitting these criteria and a longlist is then announced. This longlist is then whittled down to six books.
The Shortlisted novels:
Hello Friend We Missed You by Richard Owain Roberts (Parthian Books)
Its story of depression and death on the small Welsh island of Môn, of people armed with every social media completely failing to communicate, is far, far funnier than it has any right to be. It’s also, ultimately, extremely moving.
Hashim & Family by Shahnaz Ahsan (John Murray)
It is New Year's Eve, 1960. Hashim has left behind his homeland and his bride, Munira, to seek his fortune in England. His cousin and only friend, Rofikul, introduces Hashim to life in Manchester. When Munira arrives, the group must learn what it is to be a family. But when war breaks out in East Pakistan, the struggle for liberation and the emergence of Bangladesh raises questions about identity, belonging and loyalty. Hashim & Family is a story of family ties, of migration and of a connection to home, and is the debut of an extraordinary new talent.
Underdogs: Tooth and Nail by Chris Bonnello (Unbound)
Three weeks have passed since the events of Underdogs. The British population continues its imprisonment in Nicholas Grant's giant walled Citadels, under the watchful eye of innumerable cloned soldiers. The heroes of Oakenfold Special School remain their last chance of freedom.
The Girl With the Louding Voice by Abi Daré (Sceptre)
The unforgettable, inspiring story of a teenage girl growing up in a rural Nigerian village who longs to get an education so that she can find her “louding voice” and speak up for herself. It is a simultaneously heartbreaking and triumphant tale about the power of fighting for your dreams.
Akin by Emma Donoghue (New York: Little Brown; Toronto: HarperCollins Canada; London: Picador)
Akin is a funny, heart-wrenching tale of an old man and a boy, born two generations apart, who unpick their painful stories and start to write a new one together.
Hamnet by Maggie O’Farrell (Knopf Publishing Group)
A luminous portrait of a marriage, a shattering evocation of a family ravaged by grief and loss, and a tender and unforgettable re-imagining of a boy whose life has been all but forgotten, and whose name was given to one of the most celebrated plays of all time, Hamnet is mesmerizing, seductive, impossible to put down—a magnificent leap forward from one of our most gifted novelist
