Booker Prize longlist 2019: The 1,000-page novel with only one sentence

If you’re looking for a long read, the Booker Prize has just the thing.

Lucy Ellmann’s Ducks, Newburyport, one of 13 novels in the running for the literary award, consists of a single sentence running over 1,000 pages.

It is the interior monologue of an Ohio housewife ruminating on everything from dinner party menus to the dark side of Trump’s America, a stream-of-consciousness written without paragraphs or full stops.

The 426,100-word sentence is broken only a handful of times, by a parallel story written from the perspective of a mountain lion.

Ellmann’s usual publisher, Bloomsbury, turned down the novel but it was picked up by the comparatively tiny Galley Beggar Press.

The Booker Prize judges called it “extraordinary” and “like nothing you’ve ever read before”.

Joanna MacGregor, the conductor, pianist and composer who is serving as one of this year’s judges, said readers should not be put off by Ellmann’s experimental style.

“The thing to know is that it’s extremely funny. So although it looks very dense and worrying on the page, actually every single page is full of puns and jokes. And there is a plot in there.

“You just have to read as much as you can of it and then put it down and come back to it,” she said.

Familiar names on the longlist include Margaret Atwood for The Testaments, Jeanette Winterston for Frankissstein and Salman Rushdie for Quichotte. The list includes one debut novelist, Oyinkan Braithwaite, with My Sister, The Serial Killer.

Atwood’s novel, The Testaments, is a soon-to-be-published sequel to The Handmaid’s Tale, with a plot so secret that the judges had to sign a “ferocious” non-disclosure agreement.

Eight of the 13 writers are women. There has been grumbling in previous years over the number of American writers on the list - the rules were changed in 2014 to make American novels eligible - but this year only Ellmann is US-born. She moved to the UK as a teenager and now lives in Edinburgh.

"There were so many great books this year, of such a high standard, that we simply didn't have to worry about having enough women writers, or whether writers from other countries were being represented properly. We were inundated with books by very gifted writers," MacGregor said.

The shortlist of six will be announced on September 3 and the winner on October 14.

Peter Florence, chair of the judges, said: “These writers offer joy and hope. They celebrate the rich complexity of English as a global language. They are exacting, enlightening and entertaining. Really - read all of them.”

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