The full list of all 13 books in contention for the Booker Prize 2021 - including Klara and the Sun

The 2021 Booker Prize longlist has been officially announced, with 13 novels in the running to claim the iconic title and its £50,000 prize money.

The 13 books on their year’s longlist have been selected from 158 novels published by writers of all nationalities in the UK or Ireland.

Japanese-born British writer Sir Kazuo Ishiguro could be up for his second Booker Prize for fiction with his eighth novel Klara and the Sun.

Sir Kazuo previously won the award in 1989 with The Remains of the Day, and has also been shortlisted an additional three times, for Never Let Me Go in 2005, When We Were Orphans in 2000 and An Artist of the Floating World in 1986.

The Booker Prize 2021 longlist in full

These are the 13 books included on the Booker Prize 2021 longlist competing for the prestigious literary award, and their blurbs.

A Passage North by Anuk Arudpragasam

“It begins with a message: a telephone call informing Krishan that his grandmother's former care-giver, Rani, has died in unexpected circumstances, at the bottom of a well in her village in the north, her neck broken by the fall.

“The news arrives on the heels of an email from Anjum, an activist he fell in love with four years earlier while living in Delhi, bringing with it the stirring of distant memories and desires. As Krishan makes the long journey by train from Colombo into the war-torn Northern Province for the funeral, so begins a passage into the soul of an island devastated by violence.”

Second Place by Rachel Cusk

“A woman invites a famed artist to visit the remote coastal region where she lives, in the belief that his vision will penetrate the mystery of her life and landscape.

“Over the course of one hot summer, his provocative presence provides the frame for a study of female fate and male privilege, of the geometries of human relationships, and of the struggle to live morally between our internal and external worlds.”

The Promise by Damon Galgut

“The Promise charts the crash and burn of a white South African family, living on a farm outside Pretoria. The Swarts are gathering for Ma's funeral. The younger generation, Anton and Amor, detest everything the family stand for -- not least the failed promise to the Black woman who has worked for them her whole life. After years of service, Salome was promised her own house, her own land... yet somehow, as each decade passes, that promise remains unfulfilled.